Last week, there was a great comment on my post about Youth Ministry’s Illegitimate Children. Aaron Decker asks two great questions:

1) Are we doing evangelism because we want to add members to our church-organization, or because we truly rejoice in the new life we have in Christ, and want to share that joy with others? It has to be the latter. Any other motivation–to win converts, to add members, whatever–won’t work.

2) Are we doing youth ministry all on its lonesome, or do we have as our goal the real incorporation of our youth as full members of the whole body of Christ?

These questions should be asked by every church. I wish more ministers would ask these questions. While the questions are more important than the answers, I will try to give some answers as well.

Evangelism

Evangelism from a Biblical perspective brings good news. The change of focus from good news, to hell, to a church’s good news that they get more givers (money) becomes a problematic error in theology. I say theology only because the error comes from faulty beliefs.

If I could provide good news that was life changing, then I wouldn’t need God. Since I can’t, then the outcomes of the gospel have to be placed in God’s hands, not mine. When the church makes its goal to receive new converts, it drifts away from the gospel.

The imperative of the church has always been the work of Jesus in his Kingdom. The gospel isn’t a message of fire insurance. Jesus came to free people from sin and give life to those who are perishing. More then that, the life he gives is better than we can imagine. That’s good news. Anything else becomes suspect.

I teach 1 Peter 3:15 in all of my evangelism efforts.

Youth Ministry Ghetto

Every church I have served has had this problem. Maybe they all do. I personally have gotten comfortable with it, and that bothers me. The seclusion of teens in churches points to several issues of spiritual unhealth.

• Young adults aren’t real believers.
• Young adults can’t do anything of kingdom value.
• Parents should be the focus of youth ministry (a growing trend just as disturbing as any).
• Parents need surrogates to care for their children’s spiritual health.
• The church needs a mobile group that can do things for them to feel good about.
• The church needs a place to fence in all that craziness.

I could go on and on, but what really matters is that all of these are again misplaced or non-existent faith. If the Bible is true, then a lot of our heroes in the faith were young adults. From Timothy, to David, to Mary, you have to acknowledge that God uses young people to do his work. Any church that doesn’t realize that wastes valuable resources and misses part of God’s plan for his Kingdom.

The only solution I think will work is to give young adults the space to serve like any other member. Sure they may be less mature than some older members (or they may not), but they have the same call as any other believer. Any youth who has proven themselves able ought to be able to serve in leadership. They ought to be in any ministry in the church where their gifting is a good fit.

So here are two problems facing the future of youth ministry. They aren’t new. Hopefully with all of the attention being focused on the future of youth ministry, we will start to see new practices evolve that better the situation.

I have been bothered for a long time about how the Gospel is presented and conceived in the institutional church. Be it, the four spiritual laws, evangelism explosion, or whatever method is used, canned gospel presentations suffer from a very limited, convergent thought.

Convergent thought is characterized by focus on one aspect of a problem and gathering peripheral resources to “prove” a solution the the problem. For the contemporary gospel presentation, this focuses on sin and the solution of its ultimate effect – hell. It points to a single “correct” answer. So many of the evangelistic teachings focus on hell and salvation from it. While this is true and the presentations aren’t false, they don’t provide the whole truth. It also has a limited appeal to anyone who hasn’t recognized the problems of depravity.

Divergent thinking would open up the gospel to a less vague, more profound “good news.” In divergent thought, ideas don’t converge on the central idea. Instead it moves outward from the problem and has many perceived effects and answers. A divergent gospel focuses on the problem of sin, but then moves outward and sees many solutions.

Now before someone accuses me of accepting anything other than Christ’s atonement for sin, hear me out. That isn’t wat I am saying. Instead, I am saying that the effect of the gospel is more than just salvation from hell. The good news is that, yes we won’t go to hell, but also that we enter a process of being redeemed from it now.

The problem with canned evangelism is that it doesn’t bring fluency. Fluency acknowledges the many possible ways that we are saved from sin. Sure, we have this one ultimate solution, but we have many others as well. Jesus often confronted individuals in the place he found them. The woman at the well, the adulterer, even groups like the pharisees were confronted on their individual problems with sin. It showed a personal solution to each of them according to their need.

The next time you have a chance to share some good news, remember that there is a personal story for each person. They need to see how Jesus frees them from their specific problem of sin as well as their ultimate problem.

This past Sunday we had the pleasure of hosting Bishop Sandy Green at our church. He told a story about a Rabbi who spoke to a group of Jews and Christians. The Rabbi having sized up the tension in the room asked the Christians if they believed that the messiah has come. They all agreed. He then asked them if they believed he was coming back again. They all agreed. He then asked the Jews is they thought the messiah was coming. They all agreed. Then he made a bold suggestion. He said, “I have an idea. If we both believe that he is coming or coming back, then let’s wait together. When he gets here, we should ask him, ‘Have you been here before?’”

It’s got a couple of chuckles Sunday morning, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Advent is the celebration of Christ’s coming, but it’t also a hopeful looking forward to his return. I was thinking of how often we treat the gospel in the same way. For some reason, when people think of the gospel, they think of the work that has already been done. But that work isn’t complete yet. There are so many things that were begun in the birth and resurrection of Jesus that haven’t been completed.

I am trying to celebrate this season thinking of the work that is coming. The finished work of Christ that we will one day experience fully. Not just the fact that I am saved from my our brokenness, but that one day I will be completely redeemed and reconciled to the life I was created for. It’s a new gospel for me. One that I hope that brings fresh hope for this world.

There are many ideas out there about what will happen the the western church and the ideas it’s built on. From what I understand, some like Phyllis Tickle are thinking it will be a convergence of ideas from many backgrounds that learn to play together. Others like Alan Hirsch seem to think a more radical shift is in order away from the model of Christendom into what the early church looked like. I don’t pretend to have any prophetic gift, but I do see a problem that I am not sure either of those ideas discusses.

The problem I’m thinking of is one that I don’t think either the early church nor Christendom has faced yet. That is a people inoculated to the gospel.

By my understanding, inoculation is a small taste of something that keeps you from getting the full blown effect of it. Flu inoculations give you just enough of the flu so that you build up antibodies against it and are, therefore, prepared to fight it off should you encounter it in the wild. It seems that is what has happened to the western church. When the church reduced the gospel to what happens to us when we die, by making Christianity into a decision to “ask Jesus into your heart” that is a one time assent, it inoculated people from receiving a good news for them where they are now and in the afterlife.