This is website about how the gospel affects youth ministry. You can read about its full reason to exist. If you're trying to find something in particular or just want to read more content then you can look in the archives. It's written by Mark Walley, contact him.
The Guardian released a beautiful mortality graph for the UK a few weeks ago, it's a smart way of showing the data, but it's highly inaccurate. Their map fails to mention the 189,100 deaths carried out through abortion. This is a revised version.
This data is gleaned from the Department of Health 2009 Abortion Statistics Statistical Bulletin, all the data is online for everyone to view. 189,100 abortions were carried out on behalf of residents of England and Wales. A further 6,643 were carried out on behalf on non-residents in England and Wales. Of these abortions, only 56 were carried out because there was a serious risk the mother would die. That's not 56%, that's fifty-six abortions, that's 0.03%.
The overwhelming majority (97% this year, and similar for the previous 10 years) were for statutory ground C as defined in the Abortion Act of 1967:
the pregnancy has not exceeded its twenty-fourth week and that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman (section 1(1)(a))
The term "injury to the physical or mental health" becomes a catch-all phrase, covering pretty much any reason. After all, what birth doesn't come with some physical injury to the mother? What child doesn't risk the mental health of the mother?
This is horrific. 27.03% of all deaths of residents of England and Wales are of unborn children, carried out where there is no serious risk to the health of the mother. More people are killed in the womb than die of heart disease or are killed by cancer.
Are you hanging out with young people, or are you seeing it as a chore? (It's a Resurgence article, so you're only allowed to link to it if you use a challenging statement or a provocative question mark. That question mark is definitely provocative.)
These are my notes from Mel Lacy seminar on "Models of Youth Ministry" from the Bible Centred Youth Worker Conference 2011. This is rarely a word for word transcript, and as much my reflection on what she had to say as what she had to say.
There are Four models that are prominent in youth ministry in the UK. They can be categorised differently, but this is a helpful way of doing so. Most of these models are pragmatic, they have done because they think they might work, then been retrospectively theologised (someone has come back and justified them through a theological basis at some point).
Incarnational Youth Ministry Model
Originated in american, put into practice over here in about 1995, mostly by Pete Ward of Oxford Youth Works and beyond.
5 stages
Contact - Through that gradually build up trust, learn about them.
Extended Contact - Something they've planned and organised, going to their friends gig, their skateboard.
Proclamation - (not what we think by it) He says we tell stories about Jesus, don't put any meaning or weight of your own on the story. They should hear them without anyone trying to explain them
Nurture - Once there is some response in one way, you can disciple them in this. Don't become the teacher, this is a big no no. You need to discover what they believe the Bible is saying and let them work it out for themselves. You cannot tell them what the Bible is saying.
Church - Generally a formation of some sort of youth church, as this model makes it hard to integrate with an existing one.
Realistically this is very idealistic and you never really have to worry about step four or five, because it rarely happens. Caveat: Pete Ward is lovely, great desire for young people to meet Jesus (Mel is clear on this at this point)
PROS: Relationships are important. It affirms people should hear about Jesus. Good to engage on their terms.
CONS: All the flaws of using the word incarnation in the sense Pete Ward means (that's not what the word incarnation means, nor a good justification for this model.) Sin often ends up poorly defined, sin becomes solely societal. Damages intergenerational church life. Often leads to universalism, or proclamation by osmosis (which isn't proclamation and doesn't work).
While a flawed model, let's not throw out baby and bath water, relationships are very good, as is being part of their lives, reaching them on their terms. Pendulum not swing too far.
Social Action Youth Ministry
Steve Griffiths - A Christlike ministry is the best articulation of this model [I've read this book, and Steve used to be my lecturer and I didn't pick up loads of the social action stuff in it, but I know what Mel means when she describes this model].
Very corporate, less personal, very much about redeeming the world as it stands.
A crucified christology is about dignity
A crucified christology is about social transformation. No longer oppressing the individuals.
A crucified christology provides a social dimension to our salvation.
Biblical basis is pretty weak, designed to suit what he wants to say. The cross is inadequately reference. Proclamation is down-played. In the final analysis the fruits of repentance are confused with repentance itself.
Worship
Predominately pioneered by Soul Survivor and Mike Pilavachi. Very clear to set out that worship is all of life, but jumps very quickly into the corporate experience in a church.
During worship God is their to heal, to be a time of spiritual warfare.
Role of worship leader is pastor and prophet.
Different from the speaker. Speaker imparts information, worship leader is the minister before God. The role of the worship leader is to act in the same way as the old testament priest.
Worship is about God speaking through the songs
Worship is seen as an evangelistic tool, (people have become christians having seen, experienced, worship).
Pros: Focuses on the relationship with Jesus. Very much about worshipping Jesus. There is an emphasis on the Bible.
Cons: Far too much ascribed to the act of corporate worship. The danger of mis-using the emotions, through the use of mood, music, lightening, etc...
Aside:
Why have these models developed? Why these reactionary theologies? Reacting to these things:
Over intellectualisation of faith. Conservatives as guilty of this if not more.
Middle class christianity.
Clash of culture. Always will be a culture divide between our youth and the older people in the church. Faults on all sides here.
Lack of love. Are these young people just gospel fodder?
Funnel Model
Duffy Robbins, most recent, best expression of this.
Regular, easy invite meeting is run, invite event, non-christians can come to, get to know Christian youth. Then another meeting that involves more bible, then that brings them in a bit further.
Cons: The gospel is something to be hidden. Hides the Christian community, young people might be put off by the church. Puts the weight off the christian kid, and puts it on to the youth worker. All we have to do is bring this young person along, then youth worker does the rest. Where do your Christian young people get to know each other? False distinction between fun and teaching. The bible comes across as boring! It's really hard to keep teenagers after about 16, because fun is no longer attractive, or at least the fun you can legally offer them. Statistically, it doesn't work. No really. It doesn't. Various research has been done, and effectively proved it. Fun doesn't make a lasting group.
Martin Saunders is the editor of Youthwork Magazine, has been involved in youth work for ages now, and regularly updates Twitter despite the fact that unlike the rest of us, he actually has an outlet where people will read what he has to say.
Top Five Favourite French People:
1) Eric Cantona. 2) Can I have Kristin Scott Thomas? She's not French, but she does French language films. I think it's amazing that she's done all these movies where she actually sounds French - at least to me. And then, 3) Vanessa Paradis, I think she's French Canadian. 4) I love Arcade fire, there we go, that's loads of them. 5) Marie-Claude Bertillon from French For Today. French For Today was the book we learned from in GCSE French; I always had a bit of a soft spot for... I think it was Marie-Claude, as long as she wasn't the very small child. So to recap, I liked the older teenage girl - who was a line drawing, I should point out - WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER. At this point Martin is very clear that he liked the teenager when he was a teenager, and at no other point.
Book That As A Christian Minister Influenced You The Most:
Can I be cheesy? Absolutely, my own daily devotional is the source of the best stuff that I do, and I think that there are a load of people out there who are doing really good Christian ministry that's impacting lots of people, but actually you'll find they're not actually finding time themselves to sit down with a Bible, to sit down and pray. I make that rather sweeping comment because a) I have been that person, and b) I have had very senior 'Christian leaders' confess the exact same thing to me. And I think it's really easy to fall into the trap of being so busy that you end up pretending to be doing that sort of stuff. So I know that sounds a bit of a cop out, but you can read all the books you want, listen to all the sermons you like, but actually nothing equips you for having something to say, like doing the hard work yourself and sitting down and reading the bible.
Who Would Win In A Fight, Match Of The Day 1 Or Match Of The Day 2:
I think Match Of The Day 1 because the Match Of The Day 2 team tend to be a bit pudgier and aren't always professional sportsmen, they have a couple of comedians and people like that on there. I think Hansen would be lethal in a fight. I think Alan Hansen looks like a man who could do serious damage in a fight, whereas Lee Dixon looks like a man who could be very good at running away. Don't even get me started on Colin Murray.
What's The Worst Thing In Christian Youth Ministry In The UK Today:
The worst thing is that there are a bunch of denominations and streams (and the youth workers follow suit) , and the leadership of those denominations and streams believe they're on a personal mission from God which is somehow different and more special than the Matthew 28 commission and therefore excludes you from working in unity, working together, doing stuff, dreaming dreams together. Instead we end up with this fragmented approach. When we could have people working together and we could have a small army, we have loads of little streams of people and they're all facing a slightly different way, and so it's fractured.
What's The Best Thing In Christian Youth Ministry In The UK Today?
I could play the other side of the coin [to the above question] which is when stuff happens in partnership and unity, but I think that's probably a bit of a cop out. The best thing about youth ministry in the UK is that we have this awesome field of potential right now where society as a whole is realising that the world isn't as quite as safe and secure as they thought it was and young people aren't growing up in a nice sort of comfortable reality any more and so the best thing is the field is a little bit more ripe for harvest. People are asking questions they didn't need to ask before and there's two sides to that. Because you don't wish these economic conditions on anyone, especially when it really hurts people, I don't wish that on anyone. At the same time, with Cameron saying what he's saying, and with budgets being cut all over the place, there is a huge opportunity for Christian youth work to step in in a couple of different vacuums. A vacuum of provision and a sort of vacuum in people'e hearts, where they are suddenly realising that this society they are part of, this culture they are a part of, doesn't really have the answers they thought that it had.
Or to give it it's full title, the Good Book Company Bible Centred Youth and Children's Worker Conference 2011 (#GBCBCYACWC2011 as I'm trying vainly to get trending on Twitter). Anyway, I'm there tomorrow, as will possibly you. If you are there, say hi, and I'll buy you a beer (other drinks are available). I may try and interview you for the on and off-going series Five Questions With A Youth Worker. I may even write about it.
Because Gift-Aid is linked to how much tax you pay, and because the former government changed tax nearly three years ago, the amount charities claim back by Gift-Aid is going to be reduced from April. Confused? Stewardship explain how it works. If you're giving to charities, you might want to think about increasing it from April to cover the reduction (an increase of 11% is the figure I've heard will cover it if you're not in the higher tax-bands, in which case you're probably not a youth worker, and you can probably get an accountant to sort it out for you).
Wherein God provides in abundance for a missionary society on the last day of the year (video). (Hudson Taylor operated his mission on a similar basis, never asking people directly for funds, but trusting God would lay it on people's hearts as he explained the work to them.) It's also a great example of how to tell an amazing missionary story without appearing to be an amazing super holy Christian who is unlike the rest of us.
If you, or your youth watched the Channel 4 show The Joy of Teen Sex yesterday, the Romance Academy has a good response to it. One of the big truths that the shows claim was that the average 16 year old has slept with at least 3 people, which is according to Romance Academy (and a few other people who should know, a lie). From working with young people I agree, it seems to be a lie, though I'd love to see some actual research data on it.
(I've seen some stuff positing that the a third of young people have had sex by their 17th birthday, but even that seems slightly high. Also, it's worth pointing out that the first statistic could be quite misleading. It only takes a few (proportionally) under 17 year olds to have loads of sexual partners to bring the average up much higher. A bit like the average person having less than 2 legs, If four 16 year olds have had no sex, and another has had 5 partners, then the average teenager has had sex with one other person.)
Over the last three days Wikileaks has released a series of confidential documents that discuss some of the most important issues in youth work. Tens of documents have been put online for anyone to access revealing previous hidden truths about the state of youth work across the country. Here are some of the key highlights of the document:
June 2009: Youth Minister in Cambridgeshire to her Mother, posted letter. Describes the young people as "brats who don't know how to say please, thank you, or receive anything with any gratitude" and one in particular as someone who "would complain about receiving a million pounds because it wasn't enough".
April 2007: Youth Minister in Scarborough to his Minister and Boss, e-mail (multiple). In a series of exchanges states that while the young people voted to spend some of their budget on a new pool table they will have to "deal with the current one as a new one can't be justified" because the church had just upgraded it's PA system and the youth worker wanted to take them away to Soul Survivor.
March 2010: Youth Minister in Redbridge, to his wife, e-mail. In this message the youth minister states that it's okay for work to pick up the bill for their lunch in Starbucks as they "were planning the Easter weekend away over it".
Jan 2009: Youth Minister in Llanfair, to his Boss, e-mail. Explaining how he's borrowing the XBOX for the weekend. "I'm just letting you know so you don't worry, I'll pay for it if I break it."
May 2008: Youth Minister to his colleague in a nationwide parachurch organisation, facebook. "I can't believe I actually farted in the assembly hall. I don't think anyone herd [sic] it, and only the few kids in the front row seemed to notice the smell. It was deadly though."
The full effect of these leaks has yet to be felt, however the united youth work federation has issued a preliminary response stating "whoever has leaked these documents will definitely been banned from youth club for the next month, including the trip to Alton Towers. Or if it's a young person who's leaked the information, we'll tell their parents."
January: On the way home from your January residential weekend, you wait until all the young people fall asleep in the minibus and then update their phones to 2012, and stick on a false beard. Then you wake them up with a loud scream and tell them that they all fell into a magical sleep and have been unconscious for the entire year. You show them your beard to prove it. A panic ensues, such that you have to shout to communicate that the point of all this was to illustrate how you should be ever watchful for the return of Jesus. You're sure they heard that it was an illustration though. Sure.
February: You organise a Superbowl Youth Group Evening after church, because while it kicks off late, it's a match of four 15 minute quarters, so it can't go on that long right?
March: The first 3D projectors are rolled out to trial churches across the country. It turns out that putting the Words of God into floating 3D text do not make them any more awe-filled, though it does mean that the former church horrors of words being put up back to front, upside down, and a verse too soon are now joined with words being put up to far backwards, to far forwards, and with too much exploding out of the screen and into your faces.
April: You finally finish your six year series on Ezekiel. It should have been six weeks, but what with the special one-off on dating, the special one-off on giving, the special one-off on "why what you did on the residential weekend was completely in-appropriate", it took a bit longer.
May: Due to budget cuts, the recession, government spending plans, and all that palaver, Youth For Christ, the Young Men's Christian Association, the Centre For Youth Ministry, and Frontier Youth Trust all merge into one organisation. The new name is alright but the new acronym is awesome.
June: The YFCYMCACYMFYT split back up, after they realise it's costing them more money to print their new name than it saved them merging into one charity. You keep the fold-out annual report as a souvenir.
July: Your youth group's Olympic evangelism event goes badly. I mean terribly badly. One person comes, and he doesn't even realise the Olympics are on. The young people are baffled as to why, while you're just baffled. That is until one young person says "I know we had a year less preparation time than everyone else, but we still did a good job of it right?"
August: Due to various complicated reasons, you take your young people to New Wine, Soul Survivor, Greenbelt, and three other Christian festivals you've never heard of till now. Surprisingly enough, they go without incident, but the first week of September is ruined as, like a lion raised in a zoo being released into the wild, you have to spend seven days being reintroduced to the concept of a soft bed, healthy food, and showering.
September: You finally get around to updating the Child Protection Policy at work. The policy itself isn't that long, but the accompanying appendix that explains the circumstances on which you can touch a child, written in a helpful "Choose Your Own Adventure" style format took forever.
October: There is great rejoicing as two of your former young people announce their engagement to each other, and there's special rejoicing for you, as you're asked to speak at their wedding. You ask them if you can tell the story about that time when you found the two of them in the same tent, they say no. You ask them if you can tell the story about how they got together the night he split up with his previous girlfriend, they say no. You ask if at the start you can do that ice-breaker that seven years ago ruined her dress, make-up, and friendship with the rest of the group for two years. They ask someone else to speak.
November: This year you get your Christmas programme in place before advent actually starts. While theoretically this is no bad thing, it does mean you run out of things to say about the incarnation by the time you light the first advent candle. And then it hits you, run out of things to say about the incarnation? How on earth is that even possible? You are knocked over by the power and majesty and great humility of God, and spend the new few weeks weeping over the goodness of the Gospel. Which completely messes up your Christmas programme.
December: You scrap your child protection policy and revert to the old one. Having to flick across seventy-five pages of tightly written prose whenever you want to shake a young person's hand turns out to be quite the burden.
Glen Scrivener has a great new blog going through some 365 every day phrases that we use that come from the King James Version of the Bible, a bible which celebrates it's 400th year anniversary this year.
(Aside, while I'm all in favour of celebrating the influence the KJV has had on the English language, can we all not forgot William Tyndale, the man who first translated the Bible into English from Hebrew and Greek, and who's translation was so good that it makes up the bulk of the KJV. He is my favourite Christian martyr ever. As he set out to translate the Bible into English he said these words to a clergyman protesting against him "I defy the Pope, and all his laws; and if God spares my life, ere many years, I will cause the boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost!" It says something about how much, by the power of the Spirit of God, he achieved that when Shakespeare writes fifty years later he can allude to scripture and expect his audience, full of plowboys and stable keeprs, to pick up on phrases and expressions without any difficulty.)
One man gives an account of lying for a living. One of the interesting things from a Christian point of view is what he says about lying to yourself:
The jewelry business--like many other businesses, especially those that depend on selling--lends itself to lies. It's hard to make money selling used Rolexes as what they are, but if you clean one up and make it look new, suddenly there's a little profit in the deal. Grading diamonds is a subjective business, and the better a diamond looks to you when you're grading it, the more money it's worth--as long as you can convince your customer that it's the grade you're selling it as. Here's an easy, effective way to do that: First lie to yourself about what grade the diamond is; then you can sincerely tell your customer "the truth" about what it's worth.
This is how sin works, it's not that we don't know we're sinning, it's that we do but persuade ourselves we're not. How much do we need God's Spirit to cut through our lies with the Word of God so that we can repent and fix our eyes on Jesus. (via)
Cultural things! You know, like things that are part of our culture, like having a top five list of albums, but including films and comic books in there because you can't be bothered to think of five separate films you saw in the cinema and enjoyed because let's face it, London prices are really expensive and you didn't actually see five. Onwards!
Albums
It's a straight-up tie between 65daysofstatic and We Were Exploding Anyway and Fang Island and Fang Island. One is an electronicy rock band releasing an almost instrumental dance album, the other is an electronicy rock band releasing an almost instrumental 80's metal album. If either of these albums were any more up my street they'd be knocking on my door at 11pm asking me to stop playing them so loudly as they were trying to get their sleep patterns back to normal after that flight in from that gig in LA. Third place goes to Frightened Rabbit and The Winter of Mixed Drinks.
This is easy, the best comic written last year was Jeff Parker and Kev Walker's Thunderbolts. It's still on going. If you buy comic books, you should buy this. If you don't you probably should buy this anyway. (If you want to start buying comic books and don't know where to start, then you should probably pick up in paperback format All Star Superman, All Star Batman and Robin, or Ultimate Spiderman Volume 1, depending on which of those heros grab you most.)
TV Shows.
Doctor Who. Though it's a close run thing, because Sherlock was great, and I'd probably love The Walking Dead, where it possible to buy it in this country, because you know, Zombies! Comic book adaptions! Quality American TV drama! Simon from Teachers!
Films
Scott Pilgrim. I mean it's an adaption of a comic book about a geek that continually references pop music, cartoons, and computer games. The music was by Beck and Nigel Godrich, and it was directed by Edgar Wright. You know how you occasionally watch a classic film with some guy who is really into films (except he says he's really into "Cinema") and they point out all the references made to other great films in that one film? They sample the soundtrack to Zelda and I felt like that guy! I grew fashionable facial hair and starting wearing thicker framed glasses because I could now be that guy!
Computer Games
Pro Evo 2011 is much improved over 2010, and still better than FIFA. Remember, real youth workers don't allow their young people to play FIFA.
