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Essential Traits of Transformational Youth Ministry 12
Barefoot Training - Thursday, January 06, 2011
Participation in God's Mission
God’s mission: A phrase that gets thrown around a lot in the contemporary church. It gets tagged to church campaigns for fundraisers. It gets slapped on promotional items for a missionary support service. It gets thrown out in conversations on evangelism, discipleship, worship, and social justice. God’s mission is identified with so many things that it seems meaningless to most youth workers. All of this begs the question, What is God’s mission?
Before we answer that question, let’s lay out what God’s mission is not.
God’s mission is not...
● A missionary in a foreign country.
● A Super Bowl party outreach event.
● A small group ministry.
● A homeless shelter.
● Evangelism.
● The Great Commission.
What is God’s Mission?
First, God’s mission begins with God. The Triune God was, is, and will be a sending God. The confession that the Father sent the Son and the Father and Son sent the Spirit is the confession that God is a sending God.
The church is reawakening to the realization that we serve a sending God. The church is learning that the missionary orientation of the church does not have its origin in the church (i.e., Great Commission). No, the church is a missionary church because it serves a missionary God who has commissioned the church to go.
Second, God’s mission is revealed to humanity in God’s participation in the world. The ultimate revelation of this participation is in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God’s Messiah. God’s mission in Jesus to proclaim freedom to the prisoner, recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, and to preach good news to the poor reveals the way of God in the world. The ends that Jesus went to to accomplish the will of God reveal that the scope of God’s reconciling and redemptive work is to restore the world to its intended purpose or wholeness.
So What?
When we get to this point in our training, some people ask, “So what?” Well, the revelation and foundation of God’s story and our theological reflection implicate us in God’s mission. We are called to become participants in God’s mission through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God’s Messiah. The implication is that we are identified as Christ followers, or Christians. The implication is also that the church is to be a missionary church. The youth are to be missionary youth. The youth ministry is to be focused on a missionary God.
Transformational youth ministry is oriented toward guiding youth into participation in God’s mission. That guiding could include practices like serving at a homeless shelter, evangelism, small group participation, or hosting a Super Bowl party for friends. As students practice these means of grace, they begin to lean into God’s mission and are transformed as they encounter the Triune God, who is working to restore the world to its intended wholeness.
By Paul Sheneman
Essential Traits of Transformational Youth Ministry 11
Barefoot Training - Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Engaging the Whole Family 4:
A Way Forward
In this series we have used the works of David Elkind, Diana Garland, and Marjorie Thompson to guide our reflections on discerning the family. We continue this reflection by turning to the challenges facing the family and their proposals for a way forward for the church to minister to families.
The Challenges
Elkind, a child psychologist, is concerned with the health of children in North America. He describes three major shifts in the roles of parents, children, adolescents that correspond to the modern to postmodern shift. Parenting in modernity was focused on intuition and technique in postmodernity. The view of the child changed from innocence in modernity to competence in postmodernity. The view of adolescents changed from immature in modernity to sophisticated in postmodernity. Elkind concludes that these shifts led to an imbalance of stress upon children and adolescents which he calls the “new morbidity” of youth (98-152).
Garland, a Christian social worker, is primarily concerned about the faith of families. She is informed by Craig Dykstra’s work in faith practices when she engages the particular stories of families. She finds that the challenges facing the faith practices of families are busy schedules, lack of training of parents, lack of knowledge of Scripture, competing values within a family, and different levels of personal faith in the family (127-198).
Thompson suggests one of the main obstacles to the faith development of families is the church. She writes, “What I am suggesting is the communal church and the domestic church need to recapture a vision of the Christian family as a sacred community. This will require an awareness of the ‘sacred’ in the ‘secular,’ of God in the flesh of human life (20-21).”
A Modest Proposal
Elkind, Garland, and Thompson all suggest a way forward for the family and I believe that youth and family pastors can find a generous and faithful way forward in their collective proposals. In bullet points here are some suggested movements forward....
- Elkind suggests a concept called the “vital family.” The vital family values include emotional ties of committed love (a movement beyond intimate love and mutual engagement), authentic parenting (blend of parenting out of intuition and technique), interdependence (blend of autonomy and togetherness) and a balance of unilateral and mutual authority.
- Elkind suggests a reinvention of adulthood. This reinvention includes parents appropriately exercising authority and sharing space with children and adolescents. This space sharing includes the development of safe environments for children to grow in competence and teens to grow in sophistication.
- Garland and Thompson suggest that the local church is integral in teaching families the practice of faith. They call for the church to see their role as learning community for families of faith.
- Garland suggests the informal teaching moments for faith in families are found in the dark moments of death and conflict.
I find hope in these suggestions. I believe that God can choose the local church in these days to lead families forward into God’s mission. By God’s grace, the church can practice space sharing with youth in our corporate worship. In humility, the church has the opportunity to publicly seek Christian ways of resolving the conflict as a way to train families. We can learn together what it means to seek God in the dark moments of life. We can practice the values of the vital family through Christian faith practices. We can provide space for families to learn and serve together. We can extend the call to all families to enter into God’s saving embrace in Christ as a way forward for their family.
More Resources:
http://www.baylor.edu/social_work/cfcm/
http://practicingourfaith.org/
http://ekklesiaproject.org/
By: Paul Sheneman
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