Category: Youth Ministry
Tech & Youth Ministry
I can remember when I thought having a set of two-way radios would be really helpful on a youth trip. The first time I rented a set of commercial walkie-talkies was in 1992 for a youth group musical tour when I served at Beargrass Christian Church in Louisville. I never went on another trip without having walkie-talkies. I can also remember the first cell phone that I had. It was a “bag phone” 
that could only be used in my car. Not only was there a monthly fee but it also cost .25 cents a minute to use it after making just 10 calls during a month. Technology has drastically changed since my first full-time youth ministry gig in 1991 and most of the time it has made the pragmatics of doing youth ministry easier. But, just as technology has helped those who plan and participate in youth ministry it has also brought challenges. Helping parents understand what their children and youth can connect to is an ongoing task just as tough as helping young people understand that once you have a digital footprint there is nothing you can do to erase it. Are you old enough to remember the threatening tone from a teacher, mentor, or parent: “You know things like this will go on your permanent record and follow you the rest of your life.” In a hard copy world I doubt that would have happened though for a time I believed it. In the digital world it most certainly happens. One photo uploaded to Facebook, Myspace, or anywhere else for that matter just created a digital footprint that will be accessible by someone long after you have closed your subscription or deleted the image.
Technology has made it easier to communicate and connect with a person or a group of people, but it has also made actual communication (face to face relationships) harder. What technology has granted through speed it has also taken interpersonal relationship skills from many youth. I often remind adults that youth are not that much different than they were growing up. Youth deal with the same basic issues no matter the tech age: peer pressure, finding acceptance, community and identity, what is the meaning of my life, sex, drugs, alcohol, and (fill in the music that makes your teeth itch here). But, youth also deal with parents today that are living vicariously through their kids too much. Parents that have forgotten that their job is NOT to be a BFF, nor insisting that their child is always right and a teacher or institution always wrong when conflict happens. Grade inflation and teaching to the test has left many children behind because they don’t have any idea what their capable of nor their limitations. These lessons are harder to learn the older you get and particularly harder without having accountable benchmarks as a guide.
Technology is “using” us to sell a feeling, connection, spirituality, or experiences that are based in marketing a fantasy (Guitar Hero is a prime example) instead of solving communal problems. I don’t have anything against entertainment or games. I spent lots of time and quarters at the video arcade and even worked at one for a bit in high school. I saw the original Tron in the theater and enjoy movies. But it seems that we have become a culture obsessed with entertainment as a salve for exponential and uncontrollable change. Maybe it has always been this way. This is the challenge for youth ministry in this new decade of the 21st century. How can technology be used to deepen relationships, connections to other cultures, spirituality, and the exchange of ideas rather than be a balm for the sin-sick soul?
Below are the opening words from an article from The Daily Beast predicting innovations in 2011. Some of these will make youth ministry (and ministry in general) easier and harder as we retreat to our digitally gated communities rather than explore our world or seek out new life and ways of living in equal and peaceful civilization. We are living in a time of Star Trek gadgets seeking the boldness to depart from old scripts of ways of believing or behaving as people of faith, no faith, ideology and sharing this planet. May God bless us all to figure it out so apocalyptic literature and film can remain escapism entertainment.
21 Tech Predictions for 2011
by Weber and Ries | The Daily BeastImagine going back to the start of 2010 and sitting wherever you are right now. At that point in time, tablet lovers had yet to smear their greasy fingers over the impeccable screen of Apple’s now-revolutionary iPad. Three-D televisions were but a glimmer in high-end consumers’ eyes. And Xbox had yet to unveil its Kinect, a cutting-edge gaming console that uses a video camera to track its player’s every move.
If this year is any indication, 2011 will prove to be yet another year of intense technological innovations. Will the smartphone soon replace the wallet? Will we be professing our deepest secrets to robot shrinks? Will Steve Jobs rule the publishing world?
To help chart these stormy waters, The Daily Beast lists 21 technological innovations we predict will happen in 2011—from the probable to the not-so-likely.
Reminders this Week
A movie and a satirists caught my attention this week and reminded me that the practice of Christianity, that set of teachings that the gospels all share, is more important than Christendom’s dogma, theological relativism, or desire to dominate the world. I had heard about the film, The Book of Eli and read a review or two. It is set in America after the great flash. The America that exists after nuclear war. Eli wanders east to west through a wasteland of charred earth, vehicles, and occasionally people surviving by force and fear. A voice told him to protect the book and carry it to a place in the west. It is a brutal film in its vision of the aftermath and the cause of the great flash. “People said that it was because of the book that the war began so the survivors found all of them and burnt them.” Near the end of the film the two main characters, Solara and Eli share this brief exchange.
Solara: I didn’t think you’d ever give up the book, I thought it was too important to you.
Eli: It was, I was carrying and reading it everyday, got so caught up in protecting it, I forgot to live by what I’d learnt from it.
Solara: And what’s that?
Eli: To do more for others than you do for yourself.
Also this week I caught a bit of The Colbert Report. One night Colbert did this opening bit that is brilliant. Is Jesus a democrat or a liberal? Well, no. By today’s labels though he would be. He simply cared and practiced an ethic, a way of living that leads to Truth and gives meaning to life. Some say his death and resurrection are the most important. I think it was his living that mattered, matters most in my living.