TGC #5 The Second Reality

It’s time to explore the second reality I shared in the workshop.  (The first was “what we win people with, we win them to”) For this second one I am deeply indebted to Rob Rienow who brilliantly teaches these ideas and more in his seminars.  Ready for it?  Wait…  Your reaction here may be one of two things.  Either you will think “duh, no brainer” or you will tense up wondering if I am going to go to some radical extreme.  Don’t panic.  It’s not as black and white as it sounds. 

The reality is that scripture is sufficient.  Not only does the Bible give us the truth of God to communicate to the next generation, it gives us so much more.  For years when I was proclaiming the gospel and admonishing students to live an obedient life in response to God’s love, I thought I could do that in any way I thought effective (within reason). I did not grasp that God had already revealed methodology for ministry nor did I see his intentions for who was to do the sort of ministry we were engaged in.  What I now understand is that scripture contains:

The Truth of God (gospel)
The Will of God (righteousness)
The means of God (methodology)
The call of God (jurisdiction)

The first two are no brainers.  We all know the gospel comes from the Bible and God has revealed how he wants his people to live in a new life.  However, I never heard anyone who taught me youth ministry suggest that God had methodology in scripture.  Okay, that is probably very overstated.  In college I was trained as a Young Life leader.  They quoted scripture when they spoke of how YL does ministry. It struck me as more proof texting though than following a biblical pattern.  I did hear a little about folks who were teaching youth ministry strategy that they found in the Bible but I rejected it as outside the mainstream.  I guess the truth really is that I wanted to do things my own way.  Early on though, God convicted me of a few truths from scripture that impacted the way I did ministry.  One was that the church’s first responsibility in youth ministry is towards it’s own.  This I saw as consistent with God’s pattern of first for the Jew and then for the Gentile.  Next I was convicted that God wanted Christians to experience true community (Acts 2) and really live as the body of Christ.  Those two began to shape my approach to youth ministry.  God has a methodology in scripture and while it’s not a blue print for how to run a youth group, it should guide our ministry models.   Since youth ministry as we know it is not found in the Bible, we need to look to passages that show us how the faith has been passed from one generation to the next.  We need to look at how discipleship was done in the early church.

I have also come to see that God has assigned the task of making disciples of the next generation to a specific group of people.  The idea of jurisdiction is that the task belongs to someone. Where parents are unable to disciple their kids, the task falls on the church.  Here we might see two different directions emerge.  One might argue that since the family is the place for discipleship, then students whose parents are not believers should be discipled by the parents of their christian friends.  As a parent, I have the potential for ministering to my kids friends as well as my own kids. Others would argue that discipling the kids of unbelievers is the right role for youth ministry, along with supplementing the work of parents.  Honestly, I am not interested in constructing rigid boundaries and arguing over who should do what. What I think is important is that the family is God’s plan for passing the faith to the next generation. The family extends from parents to grandparents and even to the church family. I am not sure I would fully gasp the concept of church family had I not had a powerful experience of it when my kids were very young and we lived 4000 miles from any other relatives.