Reaching beyond Ourselves
I think there comes a time for any youth ministry to look around and ask, “What are we doing?” This past Wednesday we had a night just like that. Only a few of us were present during Spring Break week, and these few made up the majority of the tried and true “core.” I was teaching from Romans 8:29-39, crazily enough, and we’d had an excellent discussion on that oft (sometimes too oft) visited topic of predestination, election, and perseverance. Good stuff.
But I’d made a comment that the doctrine of election gives no believer the right not to evangelize. The doctrine encourages just the opposite, as Paul carries it out. Romans 8 and 9, the most “calvinistic” of all Scriptures, are followed up with Romans 10, in which Paul stresses that “faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of Christ.” He’s not indicating some voice from the sky, as it happened with him, but the message of Christ is spread from Person to person to person. How will they hear unless someone tells them? So I looked at the students and told them it’s time we began reaching beyond ourselves. It is one thing to strengthen your core of students with sound doctrine and, I hope, meaningful relationships. But the fact is, people on the fringes who happen by once in a while do not stick around long enough to form meaningful relationships. Perhaps the strength of the “core” has made it hard, impervious.
So the challenge to the students was to begin thinking not of ways to attract students with gimmicks, but to first adopt an attitude of welcoming others into the body of Christ. I’ll go to Chuck-E-Cheese’s for the gimmicks, but I won’t stay because Chuck-E-Cheese’s is not the place where friendships mature. (Rather, it’s where diseases grow.) In the same way, I don’t want church to turn into Chuck-E-Cheese’s. I simply hope and pray it would be a place where people encounter the true, living Christ, are bonded to Him, and from there bond to other Christians. But this will not happen unless all of us begin to reach beyond ourselves in every compartment of our lives. I am not my own, I have been bought with a price; therefore, I am at the disposal of the One who has purchased me with His own precious blood. Likewise, no youth ministry belongs to itself; it exists solely for the glory of God. Therefore, God gets to do with a ministry what He wants. And He wants to make Himself known, to manifest His glory throughout the whole earth.
But the first step of seeing ourselves this way is crucial.
Beyond Despair 