April 27, 2007
Youth Ministries
OK, so here we are … posting to the blog on a Friday evening. It’s just been a busy week. However, I wanted to share a few thoughts about youth ministries. I returned this past Sunday from the 2007 International Conference for Youth Ministries (http://www.icym.org/) which was hosted excellently by the Boston Church of Christ. It was entitled, The House on the Rock…
There was a little bit of everything … great times of worship … speeches and classes by some of our best youth ministry builders and workers … round table discussion groups … workshops … ample free time for fellowship and one-on-one talks … good news sharing… I was very glad that Alex and Magally Hernandez came from Guatemala City. They have full time jobs and she goes to school, however they gladly oversee the 70 teens and 40 pre-teens of that congregation!
Since last year I’ve been having several conversations about how to properly configure our churches’ youth ministries. The churches associated with the MCA Missions group were planted with a strategy of reaching out to young people, mainly single adults and college students. The idea was to bring people who could be trained more rapidly to continue the work should the original missionaries have to return home for any reason.
Our first “teen” ministries were basically a younger version of the rest of the church: teens converted out of street evangelism. Some of them brought their parents to church, but the majority would come to church by themselves. In Latin America many teenagers have to work full time to help support their families; many go the high school in the evenings or do something similar to the GED in the United States. They tend to be fairly inependent.
Because of the relatively young age of our membership, we have very few teenagers in our churches who have actually grown up in the church (“Kingdom Kids”) However, many members who were converted during the early years of our mission work are now married and raising great families in the Lord. As a consequence, in a few years we will experience a “rush” or “wave” of boys and girls raised in the church, who are now 7-10 years old but will soon enter their adolescence.
What a wonderful opportunity! Having raised four children through their teen years (and still working on the last one!) I am fully aware of the challenges of parenting during those years. But I am also very grateful for the experience, and I can honestly say that I’ve enjoyed every moment, both good and bad.
To build the youth ministries of the future, we will need the combined efforts of parents, ministers and other disciples of Jesus who are willing to volunteer to serve in this beautiful minsitry. Are we ready to make it a priority? Are we going to put it at or near the top of our prayer lists? Are we willing to begin seeking the economic resources to build it?
I certainly hope so, because we cannot afford to lose the “next” generation.
J De Anda