In Touch with Jesus
I caught this quote from a Time article from 2006 called In Touch with Jesus:
“Youth ministers have been on a long and frustrating quest of their own over the past two decades or so. Believing that a message wrapped in pop-culture packaging was the way to attract teens to their flocks, pastors watered down the religious content and boosted the entertainment. But in recent years churches have begun offering their young people a style of religious instruction grounded in Bible study and teachings about the doctrines of their denomination. Their conversion has been sparked by the recognition that sugarcoated Christianity, popular in the 1980s and early ’90s, has caused growing numbers of kids to turn away not just from attending youth-fellowship activities but also from practicing their faith at all.”
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Great article. How interesting that the trend from your article seems to have continued and blown up over the last couple of years, not only in youth ministry, but in whole congregations.
Which leads me to think about the implicaitons that our current youth ministry is going to have on the church as a whole. Most major moves by churches - at least in America - seem to have originated in the primal ooze of youth ministry.
So true, Adam. But I’m not sure how I feel about my youth ministry being referred to as “ooze” =)