By Kenny
I am about to head into fulltime youth ministry at the end of this school year. I have given a good amount of thought to what ‘missions’ should look like in the context of my ministry. Truthfully, I haven’t given much thought on how to cultivate ‘missional’ students until this class. Going to New Orleans or Ensenada or Haiti to help build, or rebuild homes or to run VBS for the kids of those communities is one thing, but to in still in my future students a passion for becoming missional is something that I am having to think hard about.
Middle school students, in all their hyperactive glory, are simply a different species of human. Sure they resemble humans, occasionally even speak like humans, but in reality they are unique creatures. Don’t get me wrong – I adore middle schoolers and believe they have a deep capacity for profound thinking, but their world is so different than the one where we non-middle schoolers live. Yet they have an equally important mission field! There are those students who are not surrounded with a supportive family. There are those students who don’t have someone to eat lunch with. And there are those students that simply do not smell good. All these kids who have been ostracized for one reason or another crave the love and attention that any person on this planet craves. It is these kids that Jesus would hang out with and it is these kids that provide an opportunity for their peers to act missionally.
Do we try to get our students to a point where they risk social scrutiny and become like Jesus? Do they have responsibility as Christians, despite their age, to start living missionally? I never want to compromise the Gospel message and therefore feel compelled to teach about putting oneself out there, to prepare for some persecution and be willing to take some risks. What is a good balance in this teaching? Please comment and give me some guidance in this area!
-KH
