Family and Youth Ministry

In my class at Tabor on Family and Youth Ministry we studied a book on family based ministry and I would like to share a couple of paragraphs from the paper I wrote on it. The most important point I want to make is the last sentence which I have bolded.

Family-Based Youth Ministry by Mark DeVries
Before I provide the thesis of the book, I would like to spend a paragraph sharing what the author thinks is a crisis in the youth ministry of many Churches. The author states the ways youth ministry is being developed and implemented in most Churches does not provide the foundation for the young people to become mature in Christ. His concern is that the young people are becoming ‘reactive Christians.’ He states, “. . . they are constantly waiting for someone or something to attract them, to involve them, to impress them. A reactive Christian always puts the responsibility for his or her spiritual life on someone else.” (p. 28) This crisis does not allow for the young people to mature in the faith to a point that becomes their faith. It is not becoming a faith that they own and fight for against all the ‘anti-Christian’ movements in society.
I think the best synopsis of the thesis presented by the author is stated in the introduction when the he writes, “One of my working assumptions is that the contemporary crisis in youth ministry has little to do with the programming and everything to do with the families.” (p. 17) The author then spends the rest of the book defining how the family is the most important factor in a young person’s life for helping them appropriate a faith of their own. It was interesting and encouraging to me when he made comments such as the most important things a parent could do is to talk about their faith in the home and bring the young people into ministry with them.