grief

"There's a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality - there's mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin."

-Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job

i'm not going through grief, but ran across this quote in a hilarious book and thought i'd throw it up just to remember it...hmmmmmm.

youth ministry: where's it going?

i just read some thoughts over at internetmonk.com on youth ministry and thought i'd share them. i'm particularly struck by number 2 on his list:

2. It all rolls on how you view the church and how you see the overall church carrying out the mission of Jesus. Young people are not a subset of the church’s mission that just happen to be handed over to twenty year olds and people with guitars. Whatever the church is doing needs to be relevant to young people: worship, pastoral care, teaching, mission, evangelism, stewardship. The scary thing for a lot of youth workers is the possibility that they might have to give up their cool outreaches and trips in order to be more like the church/follower Jesus wants. We’ve been told that we can use any tool to make church interesting, so youth workers like myself were allowed to run a program of fun, trips, food, sports, recreation, etc. in order to keep young people hanging around for whatever the church was doing. We now know that those young people simply insisted that the church become like their youth group and, ta da- there is today’s evangelicalism. Oh…and there’s a bunch of our kids, never coming back to church again because they eqaute it with juvenile, shallow entertainment.

what do you think? where is youth ministry going? it seems like this is a never-ending quest for the "right" way to raise up kids in the church and bring new kids to Christ. will we ever figure it out? probably not, but we keep trying!

again. what do you think? where is youth ministry going?

the better question may be:

where should youth ministry go? what should we leave behind? what should we keep?