Borthwick

Youth ministery means reaching teenagers where they live. I belive this wholy. We need to get out into the worlds of the youth and learn it. There is no way we can just sit back and watch them and learn everything we need to learn to reach out to them. We need to get out in their world, do stuff with them, learn stuff from them, and know where they are comming from when they come to us with problems. Some ways we can do this is go and take them out to the movies for a night. Tell them they can invite a friend or two and just enjoy their company.

We need to get out into their culture without trying to conform them to ours. We need to realize that the times have changed (even if we are only a few years older) and that the things we did when we were their age is no longer the "cool" thing. We need to learn from them about their culture and when they try to tell us how somthing goes, let it go that way and not correct it because we think it is suppost to be done another way. However, if the act being done is morally wrong or could hurt others or the person commiting it, then we have the right and power to step in and say it is not right.

After we reach teenagers where they live we have to get to know the church. Knowing the church will help us to better communicate to the youth about it. Also when we know the church we can integrate the youth into it little by litte, not all at once by shoving it down their throughts. To get the youth into the church we also need to be CENTRIFUGAL, reaching out to the different cultures and not trying to make them all into one culture. There are many different cultures wherever you go, therefor it is very, very important to get to know the culture before we try to move the youth into the church.

With my calling to youth and to become a missionary Salvation Army Officer one day i feel the need to get a jump start and dive head first into getting to know others culture more and more. God has placed a call upon my heart to know others cultures so that i may be more productive in my work of spreading his gospel. As in the book where a church transformed itself to reach out to the "punk rock" genre of youth I want to be one who changes my ways of thinking and acting so i might be able to learn others culture. Im also going to start to build goals for myself and ask someone close to me to help to keep be accountable to those goals. The first goal is to learn spanish enough to be able to understand and communicate. I know this is going to take time and i am ready to dedicate my time to this because i feel it is very important to know a second language, exspecially spanish.

To end i just want to thank Steven Bussey for being such an inspiration to keep learning and educating myself. Before this year i had just done work to get it done but Steve has inspired me and given me a yearning to want to know more and more about youth and how they work. He has shown me the things i can accomplish when i put my heart and mind into it and not give up but work all the harder when i come to rough times. Thank you so much Steve.