Vision Progress

The vision for the youth ministry has stayed consistent which is “To enable youth to become independently dependent on Jesus in community”. The progress towards this goal has been steady and consistent which is a huge win for the entirety of not only the youth ministry but the church. Many of the youth have begun to become introspective and started asking very good questions of their own faith prompting them to take their faiths more seriously.

Visible Progress

Visible progress of the youth at growing in their independence of depending on Christ has been shown by the fact that they contemplate more of their faith themselves voluntarily. Whether this contemplation occurs at school, at home, or during their leisure, this contemplation occurs which is a big step in their walk with Christ.

Another is the consistency of voluntary attendance of the youth coming to Friday fellowships and Sunday service. Long gone are the days of forced youth attendance by parents (despite their being some still), with the reverse now of youths bugging parents to bring them to church (even at the parents inconvenience). This shows the visible desire of wanting to be engaged in community making strides toward our goal of the latter half of our vision of being “... in community”.

Challenges

Growth challenges the ministry faces is the creation of an attitude of serving and serving culture. Many of the youth are still learning to feed themselves (from the word of God, prayer, worship etc) and thus do not have that progress yet in learning to feed others. There is much growth that needs to happen with internal growth before there can happen with learning to serve others. There are a few youth who have already stepped up to the plate in serving in a few capacities but many have yet to arrive at the stage yet. The challenge is not only to create individual readiness for serving but also a culture and desire to serve.

Next Steps

Our next steps will be to continue to grow in the aspects of community building towards the love of Jesus more both individually and corporately. One of the big next steps we will be trying to accomplish is the building up of the skills for the youth to both feed themselves and feed others. This will comprise of Christian education workshops as well as being plugged into more environments that show the atmosphere of serving and community engagement (whether in connections with other churches or conferences etc).