To address effectively the issues of Youth Ministry, requires a focus on the needs and characteristics of young people. Carefully evaluate the aspiration and dreams, fears and needs of Youth.
Maturing Personalities
As Youth develop a mature CHRISTIAN personality, they encounter a platform of confusing challenges and decisions. With their bodies growing and changing, youth worry about how they look, what they wear, who they assosciate with. Youth are worried about life, friendships, studies, careers and sexuality.
Filled with insecurities, questions, hopes, dreams and ideals, young people are presented with countless contradictions.
At times youth feel alone and abandoned, convinced that no one cares, that no one is concerned, feeling unloved and unwanted.
At other times, however, youth feel the very centre of the universe; the still point around which all else revolved. Think back and ask: What were you like at 18. 21 and 25? With what were you concerned? What weer your aspirations and dreams, your fears and needs?
The changing and complex environment
The word in which we live is growing more and more complex. There are countless insecurities and cravings for acceptance, clarity, reassurance, affirmation, direction and guidance that are a natural part of being a youth. Add to these the potent draw of international yh outh culture often erroneously imported from abroad, heavy metal, drugs and sensual images, the drive for money and weak obsession with fashion, overt homosexuality and defacto relationships which demand acceptance; cultural clases, generation gaps.
This our youth swim in a sea of confusion desperately seeking an answer to the Meaning of Life.
The Power of Love
In the Loving, Healing and Restorative Ministry and Teachings of the Lord Jesus and in His Church we find answers to our questions and solutions to our problems. God, says St. John is Love. (1 John 4:8) St John proceeds: “ Let us love one another for love is of God.” (1 John 4:7)
Love, states St. John must be expressed in deeds: ‘Let us not love in word but in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:18)
Our youth- all youth- need something stable, permanent, eternal in which to place their faith and hope and by which we discover the true meaning of love. Love is perhaps difficult to define this. St Paul describes it as: Love suffers long and is kind, bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.
No one can seriously defend the notion that Orthodox youth are untouched by the problems faced by their non-orthodox or non believers, that ‘ our people’ are unaffected by the world in which they live.
All youth therefore need to taste love. An expression of that love is listening without prejudice or arrogance. In loving them, the youth discover their strengths, discern their unique gifts and talents. Let there be no mistake that if these essentials are not felt within the fellowship of the church it will be experienced elsewhere. The vacuum is idols, which produce a disastrous impact on the identity and sense of community for the young person.
The babies we baptize today are tomorrows Priests, Bishops, Monks, Nunbs, Sunday School and Youth Servants, Deacons and Deaconnesses, Parish Council Members, Responsible Christian Parents and faithful members of the Body of Christ [ ie. HIS CHURCH]
WE cannot, however, relegate our youth to a place in the future; as they have an essential and vital role in the present life of the church.
The ministry to and with all youth that has been entrusted to us is awesome, almost keeping our vision clearly focused on MINISTRY to and by the youth rather than organizational structures; important as they may be.
Our vision must be on the needs and concerns of youth and cultivating their gifts and talents.
Last modified: May 26, 2020
