This Monday through Wednesday (April 20-22, 2009), a group of 17 youth ministry professionals gathered together for 3 days of dialogue about the future of youth ministry. Many of us have felt some sort of discontent with where youth ministry is at. We have great foundations to build on…mentors we’ve learned from, a plethora of material to sort through and use, experience to build on. But we’re interested in considering together what it means to continue to be as effective as possible in reaching the younger generations for Christ.
We’re using Mark Oestreicher’s Youth Ministry 3.0 as the base for our jumping off point. Marko’s done a great job of creating a very readable and provocative manifesto about where we’ve been in youth ministry and some possibilities about where we could. While we’re all in different places and agree & disagree with different parts of Marko’s ideas, it’s great for starting the conversation and allowing us to figure out how it applies to our context. Over the next several days, I’ll be posting notes from our time as I’m able to and hopefully some reflections as well. Look for the first installment of who’s here to come during lunch time
