Friday, February 6, 2009

Teen to teen Evangelism

So teen to teen evangelism is something i view as really important. Having said that, i think i probably haven't done enough to train my students to do so. Right now, evangelism in our ministry is inviting your friend to one of our Saturday night "it" services. As a youth leader, i have tried to make the focus of that a comfortable place where kids can get introduced to Jesus without feeling to "churchy". I think we've done ok there, and in a month we are taking that service to every week instead of our trial, once a month meeting. My plan is for this meeting to be student led, with only the sermon given by me (including a gospel message every time!). We will even start encouraging our teen leaders to give messages or testimonies instead of hearing me preach every time.
That's our evangelism in our ministry. But that's really adult to teen, not teen to teen. I've tried to give importance to teens to showing them that they are the best communicators of the gospel to their friends, and not me. I think we've tried to mobilize teens with some apologetics but not enough. This last year we've purchased some Dare2Share resources and are planning on taking a group to the Invincible conference at the end of this month. We purchased a case of the "Venti Jesus Please" book by Greg Stier (excellent source for teen apologetics) and handed out numerous copies to our students. They've all read it and enjoyed it, but the problem is that they really aren't using it.
I think that one of the main things that still stand in the way for my kids to engage their friends in evangelism (of any sort) is their fear. Fear of losing friends and fear of being made fun of. This is something that i want to work on in our ministry, but it is pretty hard to get kids to witness, when they are afraid of people knowing that they are a Christian. That might be one of my biggest failures as a leader is that i haven't taught them that their faith is something for them to be proud of. Something i need to work on for sure....
I'm planning on purchasing some more curriculum on sharing faith so that kids can see it is something they can do on their own (Gospel Journey comes to mind), but i could use some ideas.....anyone?

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1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Andrew - great post. I will definitely be praying for you and your teens. The Dare 2 Share conferences and curriculum are great resources that will train and equip your teens! Thanks for your faithfulness to keep the Gospel in front of your kids every week. Here's to mobilizing a generation to relationally and relentlessly share the Gospel with their generation!

February 6, 2009 at 11:05 PM  

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