I’m really interested in what the emerging church is doing with youth work/ministry young people, youth church…if anything, even if it’s a negative outcome/experience?
I know that this is really open-ended but I am really interested in how we in the EC will ‘do’ youth work and do teenagers have a place in the EC or is it just for coffee drinking white middle class book worms!
Thanks loads
Paul Tilley
Youth
There is some kind of artifical boundary the modern church has constructed based on age-appropriateness which really annoys me (personally). The over emphasis of creating different ministries for different age groups has become rather burdensome because it implies that children and teens somehow need to have the Bible sugarcoated for them so they will not stray.
This is, to me (again my opinion) a failure of the church to use the family/household as the basis of its ministry as well as an acceptance of the myth of individualism to the point that we assume that the “church” ministries are responsible for keeping people “interested” in church - a Western/European break from the Biblical word ekklesia which emphasizes those gathered as opposed to ochlos which represents the people en-masse.
Moreover, there is a failure to appreciate the movement/conversion of households to the Christian faith, which is illustrated vividly in both Acts and the Pauline salutations.
I strongly believe in building a family-church (not a church-family, which implies that everyone knows everyone and limits the size of the church to that of an extended family, along with all its complicated and annoying petty issues). A family-church is one in which the family is the central unit of ministry. Families minister together and are ministered together. Young adults are given a voice and a valid contribution to the body as a whole. Children are not shuffled off into the “junior church” where they are told flannel-graph stories, but rather they actively participate in church-life as a whole. Husbands and wives work together as fathers and mothers, leading their homes in a WHOLE-FAMILY, REAL LIFE devotion to God in Christ rather than just observing ritual on Sundays or being a part of adult-only ministries.