Youth Ministry

A funny and clever analogy.

[YouTube Link]

HT: John Fletcher

Youth Ministry: The Essentials

Beth Quick asks:

I’m teaching a workshop about youth ministry for the district this weekend. My personal experience with youth ministry is mostly at the conference and jurisdictional level (I'm the conference youth coordinator for NCNY) – I have, actually, comparatively less experience with the youth ministry of the local church.

If you could make sure people knew one thing about youth ministry, what would it be? What are the most important things to know about youth ministry?

Youth Ministry and the Dumbing Down of the Church

Katherine Coble:

When I was growing up, most of the youth ministers I encountered were guys who had some sort of arrested development thing going on. They got into youth ministry because they loved the feeling of someone looking up to them, thinking they were cool.

[snip]

I’ll never forget one of my youth ministers coming to chapel at my Christian School. This was a school where we had in-depth theology classes and deep discussions about things like transubstantiation, abortion, euthanasia and other faith/ethics topics. My youth minister’s idea of addressing “kids” was to sing “Little Bunny Foo Foo”.

As I’ve grown older (and even more curmudgeonly) it seems like this problem was not solely at my home church. The dumbing down of church for the young is causing the modern institutional church to lose 20-somethings at a hemorragic rate.

[snip]

The church needs to expect more from people between the ages of 14 and 30. The church needs to realise that this is when serious life choices are being made. Where shall we go to college? Can we go to college? Whom shall we marry? What will we do for the rest of our life? Instead of wooing “youth” with pizza party fun, the church ought to prepare growing people for the challenges of life.

Hat tip: Gavin Richardson

Altar Calls

For a class assignment, I went last night to a Baptist church to worship and observe how welcome the church is to visitors. At the end of the worship service, there was an altar call. The pastor called it that twice. The strange thing was -- there was no altar in the sanctuary. In fact, I can't remember ever being a Baptist church that had an altar. Which makes the Baptist practice of weekly altar calls a trifle odd. Not that there's anything wrong with inviting people to come forward in prayer. But maybe they should be called something else.

We have weekly altar calls at my church. People can come to the kneeling rail (a.k.a. "communion rail" in front of the chancel, which contains an altar.

MySpace and Youth Ministry

I started a Myspace page a few months back, and updated it about once a month. My only Friends were my pastor and a couple of seminarians. But when I got my student appointment, I found three youth affiliated with the church who wanted to know if I had one. We Friended each other, and they seem delighted to relate with me in this medium. So now I'm going to start listing my Myspace URL with the rest of my contact information on the back of the Sunday bulletin and start using it as a regular point of contact with the handful of youth who are affiliated with my church.

What have been your experiences using MySpace in youth ministry?

Further thoughts from Gavin Richardson.