THEOLOGY IN YOUTH MINISTRY: DO YOUR STUDENTS KNOW WHAT THEY BELIEVE?
March 13th, 2008I had the unique opportunity during my college days to work for a couple of summers at an enormous Procter & Gamble paper mill near my hometown. The factory was an huge operation. On one end of the massive complex, loggers would deposit their semitrailers loaded with felled trees from the northeastern Pennsylvania forests. Out the other end would come a wide array of Procter & Gamble products ranging from Bounty paper towels to Pampers disposal diapers. The process this company went through to turn timber into paper was amazing. The logs were made into pulp, and the pulp was then turned into an assortment of paper products.
I have often wondered about this process as an illustration of local church youth ministry. At one end we receive undeveloped and immature early adolescents – called junior highers. Out the other end of our “factory” comes the finished product – high school graduates. Of course, I understand that this analogy breaks down in places. The natural resource we work with is the lives of individual teenagers (along with their families), which makes our task of molding hearts and lives vastly different than the inanimate process of turning wood into paper. Yet I do believe that we must begin to think intentionally about our product as well as the process by which we turn out graduates from our ministries. (more…)





