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Going Deeper With The Complexities of Adolescents Spiritual Formation
By: Brock Morgan
When I first started in youth ministry, I really thought bigger was better. I thought true success was about big events, big growth, with a big movement. Granted, I did grow up in the '80s, when parachute pants were the norm. Walking into my high school youth group room as a 15-year-old was like going onto the set of the MTV show Remote Control (google it if you don't know what that is). Our youth group's name was Battle Zone, and it was all set up with smog machines running and Steve Taylor singing "Meltdown" in the background. This was what being a Christian teenager was all about for me. When I went into youth ministry as a leader, these were the images I had of youth ministry.
I remember being a youth pastor in L.A. in the mid '90s and drawing large amounts of students to our mid-week programs. I was still operating out of an old model of youth ministry. As a result, we were definitely light on substance. Honestly, you can only do attraction-based youth ministry for so long. Shallow ministry, as we all know, does attract students, but it does very little to nurture spiritual growth and development, and it doesn't effectively engage students in the faith journey.
Grant Wood's article in the July/August 2011 issue of Immerse, "The Complexities of Adolescent Spiritual Formation," resonated with me. The first thing that jumped out about the article is that Grant is no longer a youth worker.
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