Picture this:
“New in High School, starting a new school year, leaving behind that fact that you were the big one at middle school, and becoming the small and insignificant one in High School”
This is the picture that this movie had shown to me, the main character is a little girl coming out from middle school, living in the “growing up” world, setting up standards in how to dress, and how to behave, or to act; being the one who everybody look up to, but then becoming nothing, becoming the scratch of the School society, being the one who everybody mocks, or make fun of.
The kind of effect that this situation create in the little girl who is the main character, is stress, stress created by her peers, peers that were in the same situation before, peers that know how does it feel to be the one who everybody make fun of; but in this new scenario there are the ones making the dirty job of mocking.
The stress created by the peer pressure takes her to look up to a way to get out of the situation, to be recognize for those who are in the top of the school social structure seems to be the solution, but how to get there, what do I have to do to get to know them? They are so pretty, they wear make up and provocative clothes everybody knows them and everybody talks about them. How can I get to that level?
The peer pressure stress takes our main character to find a way out of thousands of thoughts that come to her mind, the only way that she finds is to write; writing in her personal diary she feels like she is getting out of all this new world that is driving her crazy, but it is not enough, the thoughts are taking her far away. She is starting a new process in her mind, she now understands and processes the information in a different way, she is now getting into the cognitive thinking process, and she is now really starting to think what to do, asking her self how to get to the next level and also how to get out of all the problems.
As your workers, we have to find the way to get into this world, the best answer so far seems to be related with relationships, knowing each other, knowing the world and social groups, knowing the subcultures and the traditions that involves all the new generations, are going to help us to stay in between, and to create those bridge that we need to connect the new generations, which seems to be so compact in the way they think, that seems to be so right when the stand for the Rights of other, but we all know as Christians that good actions don’t take us to the heaven, we must learn how to communicate in their language the gospel of the eternal life, and intentional relationships play an important roll in this scenario, it is in this way that we are going to get to know them, and to get them to trust us, so through the relationship we can get to talk to them about God and how He can help them to get our, or to go through all the new experience.
“80% of the Christians made their decision to follow Jesus under the age of thirteen... only the 5% after the age of 19 choose to follow Jesus”
Monday, February 25, 2008
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Postmodernism
“I define postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives”
Jean-Francois Lyotard
Postmodernism has been described like the era where everything is absolute subjective, it means that if you think that something is good for you, it is just good for you, and it is not going to have the same “good” effect on someone else. It is not the same in the Modern era where everything was absolute objective: “Tell me what you believe and I will believe it”
Postmodernism could be thought of as the Individual Era: “don’t tell me how to apply this Bible passage to my life. You don’t know anything about my life. Just tell me what it really means. I will decide how to apply it”.
But one of the values that remain from the worldview is the Relational Value is “Most people come to church because someone they trust invite them. Relationships will always be the best investments we will make”
The first period of Jesus’ ministry on earth was not to develop in the big cities or talking with the big masters of the time or preaching to thousand of people; it was in the country, in small places, and village. His main objective was clear and deep “Make Relationships” for a long time. Christians have been consumed with maintaining political power, conquering lands, writing laws, and a lot of other things that Jesus did not seem the least bit concerned with. Maybe this era is going to help us to recover some aspect of the early Christianity.
Postmodernism has been described like the era where everything is absolute subjective, it means that if you think that something is good for you, it is just good for you, and it is not going to have the same “good” effect on someone else. It is not the same in the Modern era where everything was absolute objective: “Tell me what you believe and I will believe it”
Postmodernism could be thought of as the Individual Era: “don’t tell me how to apply this Bible passage to my life. You don’t know anything about my life. Just tell me what it really means. I will decide how to apply it”.
But one of the values that remain from the worldview is the Relational Value is “Most people come to church because someone they trust invite them. Relationships will always be the best investments we will make”
The first period of Jesus’ ministry on earth was not to develop in the big cities or talking with the big masters of the time or preaching to thousand of people; it was in the country, in small places, and village. His main objective was clear and deep “Make Relationships” for a long time. Christians have been consumed with maintaining political power, conquering lands, writing laws, and a lot of other things that Jesus did not seem the least bit concerned with. Maybe this era is going to help us to recover some aspect of the early Christianity.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Manhattan Citadel, Friday 15, 2008
Youth Work is a nice trip, it is awesome how many life we can touch and change, how many of those life are under the legal age, and how many of them have been take it away of the regular church progrmas, just because they are to young to be part of, or simply they dont understand growing up words.
Last friday we went to visit the Manhattan Citadel Corps and we expend a couple of hours in the After School Program that is running there, we had a good time with the kids and with the mentors, sometimes we dont have much time to chat with them about how the feel working and helping this young lifes, most of the time we just jump to work, and help.
But this time was different for me, this was the place were i expend my Winter Intership, so I was "kind of in Home", again, i knew some of the mentors and the program director, and I totally knew the class of the little ones, because we expend some time together, singing and learning about God.
As they are little kids, they didn't remember my name, but they do remember the song that i teach them:
I say L
I say L O
L O V
L O V E
Everybody needs Gods love
Everybody needs Gods love
Everybody needs Gods love
Everybody needs Gods love
It really touch my heart when some of this kittle kids came to me , and they only thing that they remember was the song, and they started to sing it to me, it make me realize how important is what we show and what we teach, because from little things like a song, we can change and turn lifes to God.
From that point my Friend and I took a trip to Ohio for the long free weekend we had, and this lesson was working on me, to the point that it is changing my mind, and making me think that everything I do has to have a porpuse, there is nothing else I can do, that be complete in my commitment to work with Youth Ministries.
Last friday we went to visit the Manhattan Citadel Corps and we expend a couple of hours in the After School Program that is running there, we had a good time with the kids and with the mentors, sometimes we dont have much time to chat with them about how the feel working and helping this young lifes, most of the time we just jump to work, and help.
But this time was different for me, this was the place were i expend my Winter Intership, so I was "kind of in Home", again, i knew some of the mentors and the program director, and I totally knew the class of the little ones, because we expend some time together, singing and learning about God.
As they are little kids, they didn't remember my name, but they do remember the song that i teach them:
I say L
I say L O
L O V
L O V E
Everybody needs Gods love
Everybody needs Gods love
Everybody needs Gods love
Everybody needs Gods love
It really touch my heart when some of this kittle kids came to me , and they only thing that they remember was the song, and they started to sing it to me, it make me realize how important is what we show and what we teach, because from little things like a song, we can change and turn lifes to God.
From that point my Friend and I took a trip to Ohio for the long free weekend we had, and this lesson was working on me, to the point that it is changing my mind, and making me think that everything I do has to have a porpuse, there is nothing else I can do, that be complete in my commitment to work with Youth Ministries.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Understanding Culture
"Where there are people, there is Culture"
Why it is so important to know about Culture or Cultures?
Culture is s system of living by those in a particular society, it is a attitdues and behaviors unconsciously assimilate.
As Youth Workers it is really important to know about culture, because these knowledge gives us the permission to get into the world of those who we want to reach. The new generation living in a post modern worldview were everybody, individually chose what to do, what to say and what to believe, can be very tricky to understand just because it seems that every single one is going in a differente way, but this first image it is just because we are not acquainted of certain ways of behavior, or specifics attidues that this social groups, cultures or sub-cultures have in comun.
To know about differents cultures it doesn mean that we have to become part of them, it could be even worse if we try to look like a teenager in our middle 20 or 30, it is better to know about it, but keep our owns believes and thoughs, this make us legitimate in a foreign world.
As Youth Worker we should expend time studing and understanding the different cultures that get together in our youth council, or in our youth meetings every week at our church, so in this way we are going to know how to preach the word of God, to all this different worlds.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Youth Pastor = Missionary?
A missionary, is a person with a specific task, in the case of the christians, this task is to preach the gospel (Mark 16:15), but this idea of Preach the Gospel, in some areas, was taken to far.
In the history of the conquest of South America, missionaries were the ones who oppressed the people, and the ones who forced them to accept their religion, they took their religion, and made it their judgment and sword, based in what the gospel of Mark says. They killed them, judged them, so they only way, fot the native people of South America, to get out of this unjust treatment was to become religious, and to follow all the teachings and rituals, to stay alive.
That is the because of the question mark next to missionary, most of the time, we think that we are right in what we think, just because we were told that we are right, most of the time we want to do what we best know, so we are not going to make mistake, but we are doing this same things in our ministry and to those who are under us: church, youth groups, boys and girls clubs, etc.
Acording to the dictionary missionary means: "someone who attempts to convert others to a particular doctrine or program", these definition does not involve environment, culture, language, it is a general definition of what a missionary is, and it is sometimes, what we do with our ministries, we just generalize terms, ages, languange and cultures, we go over all this things, and we do meeting, programs, and all ministries activities, with out think about what we are doing, we just go, just like the missionary in South America, we attempt to convert Youth to chritianity.
Paul Borthwick makes a different diagram of what really mean to be a Missionary Youth Ministry, he explain that in order to reach those who live in a different age's spectrum or sub-culture, we have to go, and learn how they live, communicate, and more important, how they learn. For me it is a matter of time, how much time do I have as Youth Pastor, to go and talk with my teen group when they go to the movies, or to bowling? or how much time do I have to study how their behave under different situations like stress or peer pressure? Do we expendt time doing this things?or we just rush to make our own statemenst about youth?
It seems to me that in the more time we expend learning about our youth groups, less time we are going to expend getting them to Christ, and it makes a lot of sence, because in the more we know them, the more we know how to talk to them, and more important we learn about what we should talk to them.
The message is the same, it never changes, but people do change, and we have to learn how to communicate the Message, to the new generation. Jesus gave us the perfect example of how to do this, Jesus expend the first 12 to 18 month of His ministry, out site the big cities making relationships, getting to know those who later in His ministry he was preaching, He knew their needs, He understood their way to communicate, He lived with them, and them He taught them about God, in a way that they easily could understand.
Jesus took time to do his ministry, and that is what realy missionaries do, they take time to learn and to listen, then they teach and talk.
In the history of the conquest of South America, missionaries were the ones who oppressed the people, and the ones who forced them to accept their religion, they took their religion, and made it their judgment and sword, based in what the gospel of Mark says. They killed them, judged them, so they only way, fot the native people of South America, to get out of this unjust treatment was to become religious, and to follow all the teachings and rituals, to stay alive.
That is the because of the question mark next to missionary, most of the time, we think that we are right in what we think, just because we were told that we are right, most of the time we want to do what we best know, so we are not going to make mistake, but we are doing this same things in our ministry and to those who are under us: church, youth groups, boys and girls clubs, etc.
Acording to the dictionary missionary means: "someone who attempts to convert others to a particular doctrine or program", these definition does not involve environment, culture, language, it is a general definition of what a missionary is, and it is sometimes, what we do with our ministries, we just generalize terms, ages, languange and cultures, we go over all this things, and we do meeting, programs, and all ministries activities, with out think about what we are doing, we just go, just like the missionary in South America, we attempt to convert Youth to chritianity.
Paul Borthwick makes a different diagram of what really mean to be a Missionary Youth Ministry, he explain that in order to reach those who live in a different age's spectrum or sub-culture, we have to go, and learn how they live, communicate, and more important, how they learn. For me it is a matter of time, how much time do I have as Youth Pastor, to go and talk with my teen group when they go to the movies, or to bowling? or how much time do I have to study how their behave under different situations like stress or peer pressure? Do we expendt time doing this things?or we just rush to make our own statemenst about youth?
It seems to me that in the more time we expend learning about our youth groups, less time we are going to expend getting them to Christ, and it makes a lot of sence, because in the more we know them, the more we know how to talk to them, and more important we learn about what we should talk to them.
The message is the same, it never changes, but people do change, and we have to learn how to communicate the Message, to the new generation. Jesus gave us the perfect example of how to do this, Jesus expend the first 12 to 18 month of His ministry, out site the big cities making relationships, getting to know those who later in His ministry he was preaching, He knew their needs, He understood their way to communicate, He lived with them, and them He taught them about God, in a way that they easily could understand.
Jesus took time to do his ministry, and that is what realy missionaries do, they take time to learn and to listen, then they teach and talk.
"He said to them, Go into all the world and peach the good news to all creation"
Mark 16:15
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