Category: Youth Ministry
Missional Ministry with Children & Youth
One difference that I’ve observed as I have aged is that our country treats children and youth like “mini-adults” and that we train them to consume. I recall “chores” as well as “play” as a kid. But, there is no room for play, unstructured or structured, in the lives of children and youth anymore. It is a problem that is effecting how children and youth learn to live in diversity, problem solve as a group, and develop skills that can help them as adults. One important aspect of Christian community could be creating an environment where children and youth can be who they are, children and youth, by creating safe space for play, worship, conversations, and study. This may be one of the most important “missional” ministries that the Church can offer children and youth. I think youth group, whenever you have it, should be 60% fun and 40% learning opportunity, but that doesn’t mean that learning is not happening during the “fun” part of youth group. I’m not advocating an edutainment style of ministry with children and youth. There is much, too much of this happening in religious and secular life. I’m advocating for allowing kids to be kids and respecting that age of development so that persons are ready to enter community at age 18, the age we consider someone an adult, equipped to participate in shaping their community rather than extending adolescence into their 20’s. The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article on the topic of play. Here is an excerpt from the article. Click the title to read more.
Toddlers to tweens: relearning how to play
By Stephanie Hanes, Correspondent / January 22, 2012 / The Christian Science MonitorThat has changed dramatically, she says. In the early 1980s, the federal government deregulated children’s advertising, allowing TV shows to essentially become half-hour-long advertisements for toys such as Power Rangers, My Little Ponies, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Levin says that’s when children’s play changed. They wanted specific toys, to use them in the specific way that the toys appeared on TV.
Today, she says, children are “second generation deregulation,” and not only have more toys – mostly media-based – but also lots of screens. A Kaiser Family Foundation study recently found that 8-to-18-year-olds spend an average of 7.5 hours in front of a screen every day, with many of those hours involving multiscreen multitasking. Toys for younger children tend to have reaction-based operations, such as push-buttons and flashing lights.
Take away the gadgets and the media-based scripts, Levin and others say, and many children today simply don’t know what to do.
How Fares the Dream?
This is a good article by Paul Krugman in the New York Times.
How Fares the Dream?
by Paul Krugman | The New York Times | Jan 15, 2012Yet if King could see America now, I believe that he would be disappointed, and feel that his work was nowhere near done. He dreamed of a nation in which his children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But what we actually became is a nation that judges people not by the color of their skin — or at least not as much as in the past — but by the size of their paychecks. And in America, more than in most other wealthy nations, the size of your paycheck is strongly correlated with the size of your father’s paycheck.
Goodbye Jim Crow, hello class system.