The most compelling thing Marko said yesterday when he closed the St. Louis YS convention was "In the future of youth ministry, let's be not-driven. Instead, let's be present." The comment came out of a conversation on his blog about what we in ministry hope the future looks like.
It's a really cool idea. What if we weren't pushed along by whatever system we were using, or striving to create one, but were able to respond to what our students really needed from moment to moment. Jesus had an agenda in his teaching, after all, but it was a simple one-- preach God's kingdom coming near and show people how much He loved them-- and it wasn't bound to a schedule or a checklist. Christ, when he came to earth, was able to minister where people needed Him. So why couldn't we work that way?
The other very compelling thing he said was "I don't know how to make this happen; we'll all figure it out." This is one of those instructions I give my church school teachers all the time. More than that, the message reminded me what a unique field we are all in; a field where the guys we respect as "experts" or whatever else we call them aren't expected to be able to give us foolproof answers to all the questions we have.
Finally, kudos for saying that while the philosophy of youth ministry that we're using today is different from the ones they used in the beginning, what the youth ministers who worked with us, or even before them, used the best methods they had, and those methods fit the way people thought during that time.
The YS team put together a great convention, and one that brought up things I'll be pondering over the next couple of weeks here on the RYW.
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