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.

"He said to them, Go into all the world and peach the good news to all creation"

Mark 16:15