Graham Stanton has written a great chapter – Connecting Word To World – in Youth Ministry on the Front Foot. The chapter is seeking to counter the errors “…that all we need to know is what the Bible says and culture is unimportant, or, that we must be culturally relevant above all else.” The challenge is to let the Word of God help you to understand the world in which we live and minister.
We used the chapter as a training paper at a recent SOULIES Team Meeting. Our leaders found it a really useful exercise. Here’s what we did:
- Read the chapter
- Discussed where our youth ministry is on the spectrum of word to world (0 = word only, 10 = world only)
- Shared ways in which we are engaging well culturally
- Using 3 cultural touch points (KONY 2012, The Hunger Games, Peer Pressure) we brainstormed ways in which the word helps us to understand each of them. This final step was really useful. You can see some of our ideas on the whiteboard, but it was more about the process rather than any conclusive answers.