By Nic Cass
Over my past nine months at Faith Lutheran Church, we have worked to develop the mission and vision of our youth ministry program. We began by looking at our youth vision statement “Equipping youth for life through the CROSS.” This vision illustrates our goal of working with youth to build up and equip them in their faith. Now, as I continue to share with you the whole of our youth ministry, what we will focus on over the next few months is not a program or a plan, neither is it a vision or mission statement. Instead, it is a framework that gives understanding to where youth may be at in their faith lives and a framework that helps us as leaders know how to meet youth where they are and encourage them on the journey in their faith.
To better understand this idea, I want to share with you a diagram that represents different levels of commitment that youth may have to our ministry. As you can see, there are five levels of association with our ministry that can help to describe what already exists with youth. These levels also help to illustrate the goal of what we want youth to be working towards. We will talk about each of these levels individually over the coming months, but hopefully this help you to visualize how we are working within the community at large to grow and nurture the faith of youth to the point where they can become a core member of our youth.
Now, before we go any further with this idea, there is one thing that needs to be made very clear. Our goal is not simply to put youth through these levels until we get to that day when we can call them a core youth. No, as I stated earlier, our goal is to build up youth and equip them for a life grounded in the saving grace of Jesus Christ. All this diagram and idea does is provide a guide for us to better understand where youth are at and how we can continue to build up their faith.
Emphasized here is the largest cohort of youth and here we define that as the community. A community youth is one that simply lives in Lake County or about a 30 minute drive from our ministry. Now, you may recall that way back in August I shared with you the there is an estimated 25,000 middle and high school youth that live or go to school within 30 minutes of our church. Now, I’m not saying we personally are going to reach all 25,000 but the opportunities for ministry within our community are plentiful. It should excite us that we have such a bountiful community in which to share the saving message of the gospel. As begin build our programs and events we must always be mindful of the community around us and what we are doing to engage community youth and encourage them in their journey of faith.