Is youth work worth it?
Is youth work worth it?
There are some questions which are too hard to ask and too important not to? Is God for real? is one! Shocking as it sounds, I'm glad I have to ask myself this question on a fairly frequent basis. It shows it matters. I'd hate to be in a place where to be honest, Jesus is the context but no longer the reason for all I do. I'm glad to be pushing boundaries that need extra assurance. Even John the Baptist in his last days of his life asked the question whether Jesus was all He said He was.
You see it mattered. John was about to die and he wanted to know if Jesus was worth dying for. Christian ministry is about death: we put aside and die to all our other dreams. For me it was a legal career. So after 28 years of ministry, I ask: Was it and is it still worth it?
And its a hard question to answer. So much of youth ministry appears pretty fruitless, but we sow seeds of faith and speak words of life that people carry with them for the rest of their lives. Who knows when and how those words bear fruit.
The more important question I've come to realise is: Am I being faithful? I only want to do what I see my Father in heaven doing. I only want to hear those wonderful words summing up my life: Well done good and faithful servant! If I know I'm being faithful to my Father's call, then I can cope with the frustration of failure and fruitlessness. If not, then I'm not sure even the most incredible apparent success will satisfy.
Last week a Polish man emerged from a 19 year coma. The miracle of the story for me though wasn't he emerged from a coma, but that his wife nursed him for 19 years with apparently no hope of his recovery or even the belief of the medical experts to tell her he was worth giving up her life for. She hung in there, and now she knows it was worth it, every last minute of it. She is a heroine!
Waking up to the reality of relativism
Britain woke up the morning after the riots crying out for a return to morality. In reality of course what Britain was doing was waking up from a decade or two of relativism. I can't deny I'm encouraged by this- I've become increasingly critical of valueless selfish Britain. I have some nagging doubts mind you. How soon will we forget our good intentions, particularly when morality challenges? And will the Christians step up?
I have confidence the British church will step up to provide the social support, care and even lead. We are genuinely good at that stuff, particularly in youth work. Will we though step up with the message behind the morality. We're not so good at that. We've been so worn down by the past decade of relativism that we're out of practice, lacking confidence and perhaps even belief in sharing the gospel.
If though we try to provide values in a vacuum they lack not only context but also purpose and power. They are nice ideas but will only patch up our problems not solve them. Only Christ can do that. As we take up the challenge and opportunity of bringing healing and reconciliation to our society, we have an even bigger challenge and opportunity of bringing salvation and revival.
So what's the real problem with Europe?
London's burning and who's to blame
My town is under attack. These may sound sensational words, but it is. I watched a shop down the road being looted and burned on live TV the other night. It was surreal. London has become the scene for kids and their parents to descend into lawlessness, and as tends to happen with England at least, London leads and then the rest of the country follows what they see on live TV.
The problem with 24 hour news is that it needs to be filled and anyone and everyone with an opinion, however valid, seems to get airtime. This means there have been numerous theories as to why young people decided to riot, loot and burn the city. The genesis but no longer the cause was a police shooting. These are rare in the UK, and rightly provoke a response. In the eary days this was a right response: a peaceful protest. But then it all went wrong! Why?
Some experts put it down to social degradation, and there is a hopeless among many young people. But it then turned out the people being arrested included professionals like graphic designers, unviersity students and evidently affluent people. Some blamed it on the parents, and shockingly there were parents out there with their kids climbing through the windows kids had broken to steal TVs or whatever they could get their hands on. Others said it was just criminality, pure and simple, kids enjoying the thrill and power of theft, destruction, lawlessness.
And the answer is almost certainly:Yes! The kids are committing crime: pure and sinful! The parents have been too selfish and self absorbed to care. And society isn't any better. We're busy reaping the whirlwind after decades of sowing the wind and living indulgent, debt ridden lives, and our austerity measures mean this generation is going to lose out. Hard luck and shut up! It's a mess
Underlying it all is our godless futility and lostness. One of the few shared values we have today in Britain is: What's right for you is right for you and what's right for me is right for me. It sounds great, liberating, non judgmental and wonderfully tolerant. But of course that all falls down when someone decides its right for them to burn a shop down and steal a TV. Our cult of individualism: No one tells me what to do.. I owe it to myself to..... I've got to look after number one... It's my life, I'll do what I like with it.... permeates all society from top to bottom. These riots are just the latest symptoms of a failing society at every level: family, community and nation. They are highly visible, but not isolated incidents. Other symptoms include government expenses corruption, press phone hacking, middle class alcoholism, spurious insurance claims, lying to get credit and mortgages to name but a few.
New Labour anounced a few years ago that this government doesn't do God! Well we need to. We all do. Young and old, rich and poor, the lot! We need to discover God's heart for integrity, justice responsibility and love. The good thing about symptoms is that they show up an ailment. It's time as a nation we went to the Doctor and asked Him to sort us out.
Colin Piper