Recently I wrote a short article for a packet that the National Task Force for Youth is putting together for Vineyard youth pastors. It’s a little long (4 pages) but I thought I’d make it available to you guys and see what you think about it. It’s basically some ideas for how to take the Kingdom of God Theology and make is relevant for youth ministry. You can download it here.
This is helpful in giving us something to think about as we reflect on our approach to youth ministry.
Recently I asked my youth leadership team to listen to the podcasts of Christian teaching the KOG theology whick is available at http://www.christianjdunn.com, GOOD STUFF!
I am wondering if any of you Vineyard youth leaders out there have any creative ideas of HOW you can facilitate the youth thinking through the KOG theology and how it applies to there life?
In our group, we kick of every single youth group (sometimes even before we play stupid games, welcome guests or anything) we will stop and ask if anyone walked into the room that day with any needs (physical, emotional, spiritual, whateverual…my word covering everything), and we’ll invite the power of the Kingdom to come and touch them right then and there… if we have a lot of visitors I might share a little bit about what the Kingdom of God is and the awesomeness of the cross…but most of the time we move right into stupid games or announcement
Another example of getting them to think through it was when we gave each of them a poster board and asked them to map out their life over the course of a year. Most of them mapped out something looking like a rollercoaster, lots of ups and downs…this is a great lead into discussing the “already and not yet”
(If you don’t know what that is, take a moment to upload Christian’s teaching to your ipod and invest in your youth group by investing in your own theological development…listen to the series or ask your pastor if he/she has a KOG teaching they think you should listen to)
Any other ideas on how to communicate the KOG???
What we do each week is we ask anyone to share a testimony about how God provided them an oppertunity to share their faith with someone during the week or a story about how God blessed them. Many times this leads to some powerful prayer. This past week we dealt with many of our students in real powerful ways regarding some real struggles they were having. There were lots of tears. It was awesome. We are thinking about bringing our whole group through Prayer Ministry Training so that they can be better equipped to pray for one another and to understand what God wants to do through their prayer. Jenna I think that is a great idea about the roadmap idea through the coarse of the next year. We are totally going to do that. late
good call Chad. Do you have a youth prayer ministry training? or do you use the church one?