Youth Directors, we need to talk seriously about Christianity & Islam. We need to model respect, honest inquiry, and most importantly, an informed understanding of the basic beliefs of God’s many children. In all this mess, we need to give them a foundation to stand on.
You are their faith leader, and it’s your job to talk to them about faith–especially, now, other faiths.
Last weekend, I designed a lock-in retreat for the 14 7th and 8th graders in my Confirmation group. They are a group of stupendously intelligent young people, each with amazing gifts for thinking, theologizing and creating things. Here are some ideas from that retreat that are worth sharing.
Often times, churches get confused about the purpose of their youth ministry. Kids have sports, schools, and after school programs to be involved in that’s all about them and their space. But in the congregation, I’d say it’s a different thing.
In the church, the congregation as a whole is called to raise children from infancy to adulthood in a wide, extended family. (more…)
A lot of people are very invested in the Hunger Games, many of them young women. Here are 10 things that youth ministers ought to know about the novels and how they affect their kids.
Despite all the grief that this story gets for being violent, strange, and over dramatic, it also teaches young people how to preserve a self in great danger, and how to resist oppression through genuine acts of kindness. Even the evil empire that the revolution resists is a thinly veiled Roman Empire. (more…)
One of my earliest memories of church as a child was of Advent candles. I don’t really have an image in my head, but rather the calm cadence of my mother’s voice, and the smell of sulfur after a match struck. It’s a very sense-based memory, but it is a memory of watching a candle being lit, and the ritual and purpose for that candle.
Mark DeVries in “Family Based Youth Ministry” says theres a crisis in the relationship between adults and teenagers–that teenagers are isolated and left to fend for themselves, and that is a crisis solely of our generation. Is that reflected in the popular literature for young people?