I promised a blog post on church planting questions, but I’ve been answering these for the past few days, in an email to a church in Waco, TX. Let me know your thoughts. The underlined parts are the burden/problems they see in youth of today, and the rest is my response.

Youth is addicted to secular portals via internet.

This is true of youth everywhere, and while the desired impact stated in your action plan is great – (i.e. take their focus off the secular portals) it is not reality. Youth in today’s culture have an ingrained desire to be in community, and these social networking sites allow them to do this with minimal commitment. The best response as a youth ministry is to join with them in it. This sounds like giving in, but it isn’t. It is meeting the kids where they are at, and providing a Christ centered corridor within the already used websites for them to share.

Another way to offset this fear of their (parent’s) kids being on the internet and sharing too much personal information, is to train both parents and students on how to best use these resources, such as Facebook, or myspace. Church ministries can make excellent use of both of these, with their own facebook page or group, or myspace page where the kids can check up on church activities, ask the youth minister/pastor questions, and connect with others in the youth group.

Youth that are lacking leadership and character

I loved the ‘actions needed’** on this point- it is absolutely necessary to give our students leadership in different things, to foster the sense of ownership in their own faith life. One of the reasons that some youth lack these things is that it is not expected of them. If we raise expectations of our students, they can and will rise to the occasion. The best thing we can do for them is give them a task, and let them fail at it, if they must, to learn responsibility and leadership skills.

**actions they wanted to try: place youth in leadership roles with church activities.