Mentoring is a powerful tool in youth ministry. The intensive, personal guidance of one of more students can have a lasting impact on their lives and the lives of those around them.

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This resource is great on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to start with the review. Every Picture tells a story (created by the ever brilliant Mark Oestreicher) is a resource that provides beautiful black-and-white pictures you can use in your youth ministry. There are pictures of people, of teens specifically, but also of situations and ‘moments’. In the leader’s guide, there are dozens of ideas what to do with the pictures.

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So you managed to get a new youth ministry position, congrats! That is no small victory in this economic climate. I can imagine you’re all fired up, filled to the brim with thousands of ideas on how to make this new youth ministry you just got hired for better and bigger. But can I just make one small suggestion? It’s just one thing really that will help you avoid making the biggest mistake you can make in a new youth ministry.

Don’t start with change, start with listening.

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Tony Campolo kicked off the early day of the Youth Work Summit with a general introduction. He quoted Pew research that has discovered three things that young people look for in religion, but usually don’t find:

1. Spirituality
2. Authenticity
3. Hopeful eschatology

If we want to reach young people with the gospel, if we want our youth ministries to be effective, this is what we need to offer.

1. Spirituality

Young people are becoming more and more spiritual, but less and less religious claimed Tony Campolo. Spirituality is a term that’s used in all kinds of context these days however, so it’s important to define what we mean by this. Tony Campolo didn’t (or of he did, I missed it), but usually spirituality refers to the search for the ‘sacred’, as opposed to the normal, everyday life. Another way of defining it is the focus on what is unseen and intangible, rather than on the physical. In the broadest way, spirituality has to do with searching and finding the meaning of life.

For Christians, spirituality has everything to do with the Holy Spirit and this is how Tony Campolo described the need in young people: young people are looking for the evidence of a true Spirit-filled spirituality. There’s an interesting contradiction in this: spirituality by its definition refers to the unseen, yet young people are looking for evidence. They want to see the result of the unseen in our lives, meaning our actions, words and attitude.

 

2. Authenticity

This of course is closely related to the previous aspect. As Tony Campolo stated: young people think Jesus is terrific, but the church sucks. The church doesn’t feel real to them and neither do Christians. But we can change that. When we live out the radical lifestyle that Jesus taught us (for instance in the Sermon on the Mount), we will be different, we will be radically authentic.

I came across this tweet this morning about the Oklahoma tornado that caused so much damage and cost so many lives. Apparently this is what a reporter said about how churches are responding to this disaster:

“Wait for government aid and you’ll be here forever. The Baptist men will get it done tomorrow.”

Now that is a reputation that will attract people to Christianity, to Jesus. That is being radical and authentic.

3. Hopeful Eschatology

This part really resonated with me, but that may also be because like Tony Campolo, I grew up in a Baptist church that seemed to delight in the world taking a turn for the worst, because it meant Jesus was coming back soon. In many churches, all young people hear is how bad the world is, how rotten our culture is and how the whole creation groans and labors…but they don’t hear about hope.

Young people need hope, now more than ever. Our eschatology (which is a fancy word for what we think will happen in the end times, what the future of the world looks like) should radiate hope because we have every reason to be hopeful. The enemy has been defeated already! The world may be getting worse, but the Kingdom of God is getting better. God is at work, carrying out His master plan for the world and that is every reason to rejoice and hope. The circumstances may be tough, but our God is greater!

Take a critical look at your church, your youth ministry. How are you ‘scoring’ on spirituality, authenticity and an eschatology of hope? What can you do to grow in these areas and thus offer young people what they are searching for?

I’ve just returned from the UK where I attended the Youth Work Summit for the third time. And it was absolutely brilliant. I’ll be blogging about it this week to share some of my experiences, but today I want to start by writing a bit about the theme of the conference: Greater.

Tough circumstances

Youth ministry isn’t easy under any circumstances, but at the moment for many it’s harder than ever. Especially in the UK, where the recession has hit so hard, it’s tough to be in youth ministry. There’s little or no budget for youth work and jobs are being cut left and right leaving many youth workers unemployed or on a salary that’s to low to support themselves.

Young people and their parents are struggling as well with unemployment, cuts in benefits and few opportunities. During the YWS, they showed a short video from a BBC documentary about the staggering amount of kids in the UK that go to school hungry or that have to skip a meal because their parents can’t afford it.

A short drive through West Bromwich, the location of the YWS, showed just how the recession is affecting communities. Closed shops, vandalism, a general feeling of hopelessness. To me, it provided a sharp contrast to the relative affluent part of Germany where I live (Bavaria – it’s called the motor behind the German economy. There’s no recession here, we still experience moderate economic growth).

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Can a 20-year old lead a small group of 17-year olds? How big an age difference should there be between youth leader and the students? It’s an interesting question I got this week from a youth pastor.

Here’s what he wrote: “We have stated that a leader needs to be at least 5 years older, but we are currently having trouble finding older leaders after our main leader stepped down. There have been leaders in training (16-18 year olds) in the group who help to plan events, etc. The question was asked, “Now that these younger leaders have gotten a taste of working with youth as leaders in training, do they really have wait until they are 23 to be an actual leader? What are they supposed to do in the meantime?”

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Apologetics, also known as the ability to ‘defend’ your faith, has gotten a bit of a bad rep over the last years. Many have argued that this generation of young people doesn’t care about facts anymore, that it’s not logic that will convince them of God, but experiences.

At the Youth Work Summit, Ruth McGarahan offered a different and more balanced view. She stated that the fact that we ask young people to leave their brains at the door when they enter into the church is one of the reasons why they are leaving the church in such staggering numbers. Way too often, they cannot give a reason for the hope that’s in them (1 Peter 3:15). As Ruth put it:

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When I decided to review all books in the top 100 of best Teen Fiction, most of the books were new to me. But obviously there are also a few on this list that I have read and the Harry Potter series is one of them. It’s kind of weird to review this series after everyone who wants to read them has done so already and everyone who hasn’t, has no intention of ever doing so. But The Harry Potter series is actually number 1 on that list, making it the best teen fiction ever, and that is not without reason.

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Unlike many other books in the Top 100 of Best Young Adult Fiction, I actually read 13 Little Blue Envelopes a while ago. It was a free Kindle deal once and I took advantage of that. I’d never heard of Maureen Johnston, who is a reasonably well-known young adult author by the way and the book didn’t leave much of an impression on me.

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