Youthwork = Cross-Cultural Mission

At a seminar we held on 'Youth Culture' last night, our guest speaker proposed that we should view our youth work as cross-cultural mission. I think he hit the nail on the head.

Our young people have never known life not surrounded by mobile phones, laptops, ubiquitous Internet, Internet retailing, and numerous other things that we simply did not have in our generation. It is therefore no wonder that they see the world and relate to it differently than we do. Their assumption-base, and the feeds into their assumptions are quite different to ours.

Cross-cultural mission is where we go to people who think differently, have been brought up with different assumptions, and thus live differently to us. That is our youth!

The crucial point is to then realise that church for them may turn out looking quite different to how it looks to us. The best cross cultural mission examples are where missionaries have engaged the culture, led people to Christ within that culture (bringing challenges to the culture where necessary), and then allowed the new believers to develop patterns of worship that make sense in that culture. I.e. they allowed the gospel to flourish within the culture so that the Spirit could start his transforming work on that culture.

This will mess with our heads, because the youth are on our doorsteps (and some even in our existing churches!) rather than elsewhere in another country.

In other words the potential gospel flourish and creative work of Spirit which may develop culturally-sensitive patterns of worship may actually need to happen within our existing churches!

This should not be a surprise: for God to transform the outside world we need to let Him start with us.