verse of the year 2013

Taste and see that The Lord is good. Psalm 34:8

At the start of each year we have our National Youth for Christ conference which is a great time of blessing, encouragement and challenge. Around ten years ago we were all sat in the evening meeting feeling encouraged and good about ourselves.  As a national organisation we were reaching tens of thousands of young people each week with the Gospel message.  In Nottingham we had been running for around two years and were slowly growing and impacting more and more young people through the work we did. 

As we move forward ten years to 2013 one of the biggest issues facing the Church is the lack of young adults that are around. Therefore I ask myself the question, were we doing that good a job? because if we were impacting all those young people why are we not seeing them ten years later?

Don't worry I am not saying YfC and in particular Nottingham YfC haven't been doing a great job, in fact I think that we have been and are continuing to be at the cutting edge of youth ministry,  but I do wonder  what our aims are. I have been personally challenged by a particular organisation I work with in terms of spirituality.  I think sometimes we seem to be content with getting people to a point where they are sympathetic to the Christian faith rather than followers of Jesus.  In a world where people no longer believe in right and wrong or one way is the right way we may have fallen into the trap of getting people to understand why we believe what we believe, rather than getting them to experience it themselves.

In schools RE is being more and more reduced and as a core subject seems to be being pushed to one side before it disappears, yet spirituality is gaining higher priority, do I think this is a bad thing? Not really as getting young people to explore Christian spirituality means they won't just hear about it they will experience it.

So how do we engage young people in experiencing the Gospel?     We already do it in some respects, our eq: missions and our missions to India are just a couple, but how do we engage young people in our day to day ministry?  Where do we get young people to engage with God and help them understand where God is?  Where did you last experience God?  We might say a church meeting, a small group maybe but we deny so much of His presence if that is what we limit Him to.

In Galations 5 it talks about the fruit of the Spirit and the things we see when the Spirit is around.  Are we showing these to young people and are we giving them opportunities to understand that they are experiencing God?

Our vision for 2013 is that the young people we come into contact with have a fresher understanding of God and get a chance to 'taste and see that The Lord is good' and therefore want to become a follower of Jesus.