Rebooted

The subtitle of this book takes the rest of book cover: Reclaiming youth ministry for the long haul. A Biblical framework. I took a risk with this book. I didn't read it before I gave it out to all the youth leaders who helped out on our week-long youth camp. Handing out books you haven't read can be risky, but I did trust the fact that Glen Scrivner wrote the forward to this book.

The biblical framework in this book is quite broad and perhaps a little artificial, in that the author uses a genre of the Bible to say something they want to say. The framework has eight parts and is pretty much the table of contents:

• The Pentateuch - Teach everything
• History Books - Disciple everyone
• Wisdom literature - Connect authentically
• Psalms - Cultivate people
• Prophets - Prioritize participation
• Gospels - Focus on Jesus
• Acts - Be missional
• Epistles - Love always

The framework isn't a way to teach different parts of the Bible to Youth, these are about different elements or focuses you should have in your youth ministry. So you should disciple people and the justification was to look at the history books with Eli and Samuel, Ruth and Naomi, Elish and Elijah etc... You should also teach propositional truth from the Bible and the justification was to look at the Pentateuch as Moses does in telling families to teach that to their kids. I found the practical points drawn from each genre a bit arbitrary and if you are looking at whole slabs of text you could easily draw out similar principles throughout. Eg: The Prophets taught what God told them, the Epistles also have lots of propositional truth in them In Act Paul says he has tried to peach the full counsel of God, Jesus in the Gospels also taught a bunch of things. Paul and Timothy had a discipleship relationship, Moses and Joshua probably did. The Epistles focus on Jesus, not just the Gospels. Psalms is made up of about half corporate songs, which I would think encourages participation. etc...

Now don't get me wrong the principles drawn from selected passages from the Bible are helpful, I just wasn't convinced of the framing of it as a holistic Biblical framework in eight neat breakups. To be a little fair the author does talk about simplifying whole sections and does say they are speaking in broad brushstrokes. I would say they are so broad you could park a 747 in the strokes.

Another thing that annoyed me was the summaries at the end of each chapter. They would spell out a word, but they weren't really easy to remember. Here is the shortest example (two letters).

For Acts, we are to be missional and GO. Which stands for:

G - Gravitate towards the Bible. It's the best tool you have, so use everything in your creative tool belt to bring it to life. Speak God's words
O - Openly cover young people in compassion. Meet needs and reach out to young people from a place of heartfelt connection. Give God's love (p

So GO stands for Gravitate and Openly. When really the two points are about the Bible and Compassion or Love. So BC or BL would be better for memory recall, except they aren't words. I found all of these neat little anacronyms at the end of each chapter trying to be a learning tool but not being very useful.

So putting aside some of the framing and meta bits of the book, I thought the book was helpful in thinking about areas of ministry and trying to not be so narrow but instead to think about things in eight areas to build up a more Biblical trained teenager.

The book also presented four main frameworks for Youth and points out strengths and weaknesses. For my setting, I think we most resemble the funnel method as we consider our Friday nights as an entry point to our other small groups, camps and to church. The main problem the author had with this method was that this could come across as a bit of a bait and switch in attracting people. I agree this is a danger, but one thing I took from Fruit That Will Last to help stop this was how you advertise your events, modeling how you want your teenagers to invite people. I always try to mention what passage of the Bible we will be looking at on Friday night in my communication before mentioning what the activity of the night will be.

I would have loved to have seen in some tangible way how the author had implemented all eight things of this framework into his youth program, and how he builds up teenagers and integrates them into the wider church. Like what does his week/month look like, what checklists does he do when planning, running and reviewing an event? There were probing questions at the end of each chapter to help you think about that topic. I did always appreciate that there was always one about connecting youth to church. I think there is a big danger in siloing off youth ministry from the rest of the church community as it makes it harder when they "graduated" and have to integrate into "adult" church.

Mostly for my own future reference below is the framework with all the hard to remember anacronyms.

Taking out the meta-justification for the framework, I found this book to have some quite helpful ideas and noble goals on what youth ministry should involve.