W hy is youth and family ministry important?

The Five Principles for Youth and Family Ministry, identified by Dr. David Anderson of The Youth & Family Institute.

Faith is always passed on relationally and incarnationally, as God demonstrated in Jesus Christ, God’s ultimate gift to humankind, with the Word made flesh.

Faith is formed by the power of the Holy Spirit through personal, trusted relationships. Virtually all of us can point to adults who were the first voice and hands and face of Jesus in our lives. We can equip all of our adults to become this God-bearer in the lives of children and youth.

The church is a living partnership between the ministry of the congregation and the ministry of the home. The body of Christ is not limited to the building where we worship on Sunday, but is loose in the world, especially evident as we partner congregations and homes to make Christ known.

Where Christ is present in faith, the home is church, too. Home is often the first church for children, where they learn to pray and hear the stories of faith from the people they love most in the world. For those who are not engaged in congregational life, the front door of your congregation may very well be the front doors of the homes of your members. Faith is caught more than it is taught.

Who were the saints who made faith contagious and utterly irresistible to you? How did they do that? Often, it was not by preaching a sermon or having you memorize the Small Catechism, but by loving you, by being the person you wanted to become, by gently sharing that you, too, are beloved of God. If we want Christian children and youth, we need Christian adults and parents. So, we have come full circle. We need to equip adults to be able to have those personal, trusted relationships that the Holy Spirit will use to help children and youth to see Jesus. How will we begin? A friend recently quipped, “Jesus blessed the children and taught the adults. We, in the church, have reversed it.” We need to make sure that we have robust Christian education for all ages and that we connect the generations, so that they will hear one another’s faith stories.

Then, we need to teach all of our adults and youth and children to do the Four Keys for Nurturing Faith, at home, in the congregation, on a walk, in the school cafeteria, in our workplace. These are simple faith practices that can be woven into our everyday life together.

They are:

1. Caring Conversations We need to be available to talk and, especially, to listen to one another. This is the floor under relationships, that allow us to talk about all of the important things in life.

2. Devotions Turn up the faith talk under caring conversations and you have devotions. Help children find themselves in God’s story and
God in their=2 0story. Let Scripture be God’s fresh and living Word for them each day.

3. Rituals and Traditions We all have them; now, just fine tune them to be God-bearing. Light a candle to remind family and friends that we gather around the Light of the World. Make the sign of the cross on each forehead each night, remembering their baptism and God’s love that has claimed them and will not let them go.

4. Service Filled with caring conversation, devotions, rituals and traditions, we are free to pour ourselves out in service, sharing the love of Christ that fills us to overflowing. Make it a part of every day, a natural way of loving God back, not a “got to,” but a “get to.”

God’s in the midst of this shift to Youth and Family Ministry, calling all of us to be about passing on faith in Jesus Christ to all the generations. A friend calls this, “the reformation of our time!”