3. Youth Ministry that is effective revolves around content and context. (part 2)
If the content is Jesus… the gospel… scripture, then the context is community. By that I mean authentic community that is akin to what we see in Acts 2:42-47
They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
We see the community of believers, the koinonia (greek word used here for fellowship which can be translated community) centering around scripture (the apostles teaching), each other, prayer, and breaking bread. The results we read include a genuine sharing of everything, signs and wonders, devotion to the body, joy, and worship. God blessed this community by adding to it. This is a ripe environment for evangelism and spiritual growth. It is creating the fertile soil that Jesus speaks about in the parable of the seeds. This is what youth groups should look like because it is here that students will grow, love one another, experience the body of Christ and reach out to others.
We get a mandate for this level of loving one another and being unified from Jesus in His prayer that we read in John 17. The apostle Paul urges believers to pursue this unity in his letter to the Ephesians (chapter 4). Following this mandate in youth groups is a real challenge. Adolescents are naturally inclined to form cliques, to create division, to choose who they want to love or not. Wait, that also applies to all human beings! Nowhere in society can people experience the level of belonging, caring, unity of purpose and spirit, etc than they can when we are all focused on Jesus and willing to submit to his authority in our lives.
Now the real challenge is how we get there! We cannot afford to be lazy on this and expect results. We must think strategically about where our group is at in this regard (to what extent are they experiencing authentic community?) and work from there to move to the next level. Generally speaking, in youth groups this means a multifaceted approach. We must use mixers that actually get kids mixing and knowing one another better. We must build into our programs time for students to share and open up (and make it safe to do so). We need to create group challenges to help students work together. Shared experiences need to be created, time away as a group invests enormously into the sense of belonging and caring, retreats, trips, etc all add to this. On top of that, we must teach about community allowing students to see the Biblical mandate for the quality of the group and we must model it in our leadership teams.
Do we devote time to building community in our groups and are we willing to evaluate all that we do to honestly assess whether or not it actually builds community? Are we willing to confront division and promote unity by dealing with conflict and calling out the consumer mentality of many youth group participants? Are we challenging them to become the group that God intends for them? This is the context for real transformation. Without both the content and the context, I believe that we end up with unbalanced Christian teens. One is not fully transformative without the other.
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