This year in SOULIES Youth Community we are kicking off term 1 and term 3 with a ‘Mission Month’. My hope is that the young punks in our community are happy to invite friends along any week of Soulies, and they do. But the thinking with the Mission Month is to give some explicit opportunities to bring friends to hear about Jesus. Hopefully that will then create some momentum that will continue on. Here’s the promo postcard:
I think it has been well received. Praise God for those who have responded to the gospel over the first 3 weeks!!
Involved in youth ministry? In what ways are you seeking to encourage young punks to share Jesus this year?
1000 bonus points if you can name the beach in the photo…
Is that a very old photo of Freshie?
We’re trying to do a similar evangelistic push. Being away for the first three weeks (after Hayley was born 2 weeks early!) hasn’t been great for getting that part of it going, but we’ll get there.
Something we’ve started working on is in each week’s talk and discussion group, trying to teach a key word or concept. Not as explicit as Sesame Street’s ‘word on the street’ thing, but just a bit of using a word like ‘Messiah’, explaining it, using it lots in discussion groups (we’re looking at Mark). Words we’ve done so far are Messiah, Authority and Divinity. ‘Resurrection’ will be fun. We’re thinking of doing something along the lines of a video like ‘Resurrection v Zombie Apocalypse: what’s the difference?’
The idea behind this is to build up our regular kids confidence in understanding the words, so they can articulate something of the gospel, in a way that is more clear and accurate than ‘Jesus died to save our sins’. I’ll be working at building on this across the year as a kind of subversive evangelism training; at the same time, we’ll be really encouraging our kids to be talking to their mates about Jesus and inviting them along.
sounds really good. keep us posted on how it goes!
well, the term’s finished.
In some ways, I’m a bit disappointed. I kind of felt like I had to sell the concept all over again towards the end of the term – it felt like we were forgetting about the word each week, forgetting to use it in talks and discussion groups. But then I remember that I basically had the first three weeks off with Hayley’s birth etc. So training/reminding etc didn’t work out ideally.
So my reflection is that with a bit of creativity, we should have been way more ‘word on the street’ about it. Or, I move back to me doing most of the talks and work with that mindset – but most of our leaders are keen to speak, and are good at it; so I’m not keen on hogging the speaking spots. So it’s either a training thing, or a more explicit thing.
Come to think of it, word on the street could be fun.
thanks for the update!
how many different speakers do you plan on having next term?
word on the street: supralapsarianism
;)
There’s about 6 or 7 leaders who have the potential to grow into brilliant soeakers. The biggest issue we need to work on is confidence. As for next term, I’m still mulling over how we do term 2. We’re thinking of using april/may as mission prep (why, how to share the gospel) and june as mission month (I’m sure I heard that idea from somewhere…).
So how that will influence the breakdown of speakers, yeah, I’m still contemplating that.
WAIT! Queenscliff.
freshie!