Archive for category: Uncategorized

A couple of years ago I conducted an informal survey of fifty-seven full-time youth ministers who considered themselves to be ‘incarnational’ in their approach. 66.7% of them gave out their personal phone number to young people, and 52.6% gave their personal address. Of these 59.6% said they did not give any boundaries for when a young person could contact them. One respondent said he had an open-door policy: ‘For the most part, our door stays unlocked and they know they have the freedom to come in even if we are not home.’

This post is all about the practical dangers with those incarnational methods.

As the discussion so far has had a theological focus, it seemed unwise to give too much space to the practical implications in the middle of the previous posts. As with all poor theology, however, poor practice is sure to follow.

Outlining the practical issues

Unchecked openness

Going back to the survey I mentioned at the beginning, this open door and always on assumption in youth ministry clashes mightily with the need for healthy boundaries. Forgetting for a second that we’re neither God nor parents, what is the realistic risk-reward of making ourselves potential targets of dependency while burning out in the process?

This is exactly the kind of openness that is cautioned against by person-centered therapists, precisely because of the boundaries it rejects and dependency it creates. Modern counselors are  trained to look for these signs so they won’t be this unaccountably open. We might in fact be surprised that a lot of what is specifically suggested by incarnational youth ministry is flatly rejected in modern counseling theory.

I think this might just be this one of the key reasons that many youth workers burnout and most don’t last past one contract, and I’m not alone.

Burnout

Renfro in Perspectives on family ministry says the reason youth workers burnout is ‘because our ministry models are fundamentally flawed’ (2009:10). Bertrand and Hearlson in Relationships, personalism, and Andrew Root, agree saying incarnational youth ministry ‘sets up problems of intimacy between unequal partners and exacerbates the problem of youth worker burnout’ (2013:50).

Todd Billings (who we’ve talked about in previous parts) draws a straight line more specifically between poor incarnational theology and practical complications. He says

Yet because they take the Incarnation as their “model” of ministry, these evangelicals often assume that they—rather than the Holy Spirit—make Christ present in the world… “you and I may be the only Jesus that others will ever meet” …The burden of incarnation—and revelation—is on the shoulders of the individuals. Such a theology often leads to burnout (2012:60).

Pete Ward in Youthwork and the mission of God does address this somewhat, saying that the worker needs to learn to help young people become independent of them (1997:66). Darren Pollock, however, was unconvinced and in The church’s mission to youth, he criticised Ward directly saying his leader-centric model was still likely ‘to foster burnout among leaders’ (2014:299).

Dr. Andrew Root goes further and says we are to us to indwell or inhabit the pain of another so completely that it becomes our own (Revisiting relational youth ministry, 2007:129-130). He calls this ‘place-sharing’. I wrote to Dr. Root about this and he responded saying ‘you can only be a place-sharer to about 5 young people.’ Isn’t empathizing at this complete level this with even just one person dangerous? This is especially true when that one person is at completely a different stage of life and when the openness (according to Root) should go both ways. This is a recipe for burnout for sure, but also quite close to a text book definition of abuse: When two unequal parties share their own respective weights of experience and pain and needs, what will happen to the ‘weaker’ party?

Blurred lines at home

Herein lies the problem with an unchecked incarnational model of youth ministry. It has an inherent mugginess of boundaries that creates a lot of potentially unsafe situations.

You don’t want to argue with a family member at two in the morning, because you’ll both say things you don’t mean. Always being on is something parents do for a set number of years and they make a lot of mistakes, as we all know.

That close family relationship, all-warts exposed, cannot extend to twenty-some young people twenty-four hours a day. It’s a recipe for the happening of terrible things — and it also sets a precedent for those young people. We might be inadvertently teaching them to fall into unsafe behaviours and practices with other people in their lives who perhaps they shouldn’t trust.

Safeguarding concerns

While always being open to young people is a drain on health and family, robbing the worker of their effectiveness, it also creates safeguarding vulnerabilities. Being alone on the phone to a young person at all hours, having them come into the house alone, regularly meeting in quiet spaces, and prolonged private conversations can create unhealthy levels of dependency and exclusivity. Things are easily misconstrued in concealed spaces, especially with hurting and vulnerable young people.

Personal boundaries and healthy safeguarding practices are necessities for today’s youth worker to be in their post for years to come. Longevity demands healthy practice and accountability – things that are often neglected by incarnational models of youth ministry.

An ‘always on’ youth worker is a ‘sometimes off’ husband, or a ‘partially available mum’, or ‘too busy doing ministry’ dad. We really need another way.

So, Tim, you don’t like incarnational youth ministry?

Why, no. No, I don’t. I don’t think it’s theologically grounded, logically consistent, biblically sound, or practically helpful. I think as a theory it has a lot to answer for, and that we as the next generation of youth leaders need to move away from it.

I know ‘incarnational’ is unwritten into our methods. For some of us it feels part of our blood, it’s become a key part of our ministry identity. I don’t want – in any way – for this to pull the rug out from someone’s feet.

There’s goodness to retain, therefore. We might want to consider renaming our approach as relational-contextual­ rather than incarnational, rediscover the importance of proclamation – even without having foundational relationships – and create a wider base of ministry that happens outside of our purview and inside our boundaries.

I think burnout is a main reason youth ministers don’t last long, and that one of the reasons for this is our oppressive links to incarnational theory. Let’s be more sensible, more theologically grounded, and more spiritually helpful. We can still be incredibly compassionate without giving ourselves up to the worlds of young people.

Let’s do better folks.

 

Welcome back to Incarnational youth ministry week. We looked at the definition in Part 1, and we unpacked the importance of the meaning of the word in Part 2. Tomorrow we’ll dig deeper doctrinally, and on Friday we’ll look some of the practical dangers with some incarnational methods.

Today we’re looking at the Bible! Woohoo!

Quick caveat. I’ve had a message from someone who was a little upset with my tone on the previous Part. I’m really sorry! I guess I came across like a bit of a know-it-all. Totally not my intention. Those of you who know me know that I hate upsetting anyone. I don’t mean to come across poor, but I do want to be clear that I think this is a really really deep problem. I really think that this needs to be challenged because it does represent a Gospel issue that cuts to the center of who Jesus is and why He came. My caveat is please trust my heart is motivated by desire to help youth ministry and honour Jesus. We’re in this together. Back to Part 3.

What we can tell from method

Incarnational theory sounds theological, not just because of the word, but because of the texts that – at least at first glance – seem to back it up.

As with any theological issue, the problem stems from how we interact with the Bible. As is endemic in youth ministry culture, I think that the problems arise from a general lack of confidence in, and competence with handling the Bible itself.

How someone uses the Bible itself should be a key indicator of the surety of their theological conclusions. What this part is intending to do is gently poke at the exegetical methods used in incarnational theory to answer the question does the Bible really support it?

Throughout the youth ministry volumes that advocate for incarnational youth ministry, three passages of Scripture are used almost exclusively: Jn. 1; Phil. 2; and 1 Cor. 9. These are all used sparingly and, honestly, in some cases just very poorly.

Before we move on to look at these verses specifically, we should stop for a moment and consider which passages are often (if not usually) used in theological discussions about the Incarnation. Sorry about list, but Ex. 25:8; Is. 7:14; Mic. 5:2; Mal. 3:1-5; Matt. 1:18-23; 3:17; 17:5; Mk. 1:24; 10:17-18; Jn. 5:18; 6:29; Col. 1:15-20; Heb. 1:1-14; 20:28; Rev. 19:11-13 all are seen by systematic theologians to be significant passages in the doctrine of the Incarnation.

Now I know that systematic theology and youth work books are different genres, but when a theorist of any stripe appeals to a well known and particular doctrine for their practice, then technically they are doing systematic theology. This is especially true if they take the same name and describe the practice as the same thing.

There are many staple Bible verses (including all those above) that incarnational youth ministry theorists don’t use at all. I don’t expect youth work books to use all relevant passages, but I think the selective way they have picked their verses is a little telling. It’s almost like they had a point ready to go, and then looked for verses that fit it – rather than the other way around.

That said, I’m not sure the verses they’ve picked actually do always support the points they make. I think their idea is too easily read into the verses, rather than derived from them. Let’s have a look.

John 1

Almost every Incarnational writer that I read (in both youth ministry and contemporary missiology) used The Message version of verse 14, which says Jesus ‘moved into the neighbourhood’ (for instance Dean Borgman, Agenda for Youth Ministry, 1998:10, and Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, 2006:131).

I’m actually a fan of the Message and this is absolutely a helpful interpretation at one level, but it’s also quite misleading and limiting at another. It is a partial interpretation of the whole, focusing on just one piece of the doctrine of the Incarnation. There are several other important aspects of the Incarnation spoken about in Jn. 1, but they get missed by this translation, and as such are all but left ignored by most of the writers I looked at.

A much better example would be Dr. Sally Nash, for instance, who uses the Message and also does a good job with the verse (as you’d expect) by pointing to the LXX to discuss the etymology of the word ‘incarnation’ as sarx egeneto (becoming flesh) (What Theology for Youth Work, 2007:13). This was a good read, but doesn’t unfortunately go beyond this revelation idea. Mostly, I assume, because of the limitations of only having 9000 words to work with.

Liz Edrington (a Young Life worker) also does a better job, spending 150 words opening both the divine and human side of the incarnation from vv.1-18. This was the most I’ve seen written about the verse in a youth ministry book, and a rare breath air of theological engagement (in Gospel Driven Youth Ministry, 2016:69-75). Her good work on the verse, however, was then not then used to formulate her conclusions. She looked closely at the text, then left it behind. Her summary was God empathised with humanity, which she called ‘presence sharing’. She then said that we are called to do likewise. This is a case of the conclusion not flowing out from the exegesis – or putting the cart before the horse.

I found very little actual textual engagement in any incarnational theorist beyond mere allusions to a purely cultural mission that we could then emulate.

You could summarise almost every discussion of this passage in incarnational books with the following line: Jesus became a relatable human, immersing himself specifically in 1st century Jewish-Aramaic culture… go therefore and do likewise to various cultures today. Todd Billings, after attending an incarnational training day, put it this way,

‘If moving into the neighbourhood and immersing oneself among the people is God’s strategy for ministry, I was told, then certainly it must be ours… But there was apparently no need to mention Jesus any further’ (Billings, Incarnational Ministry in Christianity Today, 2012:60).

In contrast, Jim Packer, when looking at the same passage on the same topic, works through each section sequentially, relating it to the broader context of John and the wider doctrine of the Incarnation. He showed actual exegesis. This resulted in a clear textual understanding of the incarnation before any applications were made (Knowing God, 1973:62).

It should be very difficult to come away from Jn. 1 without a clear sense of the uniqueness of Jesus as the Word, both eternal and creator (M. Driscoll and G. Breshears, Doctrine, 2010:212-214). Incarnational youth ministry advocates unfortunately pass over both of these aspects in their rush to make it about what we should do instead.

Making what Jesus does in Jn. 1 primarily about what we should do today is just a little bit weird. We do feature in Jn. 1, but as His creation (v.2), needing His light (vv.4, 9), and made to be His children through faith (vv.11-13). Jesus is our way of knowing God (vv.1, 7, 14, 18) and our place in this story is to believe in God by accepting Jesus. It’s not that we can’t learn from the life of Jesus, of course we can, but to focus on that in Jn. 1 and miss all the pieces about who Jesus is as our faith-given way to salvation is a tragic misreading of the passage.

Philippians 2

Packer again gives a good example of what handling the Bible carefully should look like Knowing God, 64-65). He draws Phil. 2 out exegetically to demonstrate the Christology of Jesus, as divine and born to die, drawing a straight line from the complete uniqueness of Jesus to the atonement won by His death.

This was a ‘loving act of humility’ (S. Jeffery, M. Ovey, & A. Sach, Pierced for our transgressions, 2007:133), but one which is made to show Jesus’ headship over creation by demonstrating perfect obedience to the Father (135).

Incarnational youth ministry advocates (for instance Andy Borgman, When kumbaya is not enough, 1997:xv), however, don’t spend any time on the salvation aspects of this passage.

That’s a significant oversight considering it’s the central part of the passage. Instead Borgman (and many others) used it solely as a blueprint for our own humility and work today. Using Phil. 2 without mentioning salvation won through Jesus, however, is missing the very core of its message.

Quoting this verse Pete Ward says, ‘in doing these things we will actually be doing exactly the same thing Jesus did when he became a human being’ (Liquid Church, 1992:31). No, we won’t. Not really anyway, there are aspects that we will be doing a little bit like Him would be fair, but the central place of salvation (and the central point of this passage) belongs to Jesus alone.

Billings reminds us that our place in Phil. 2:1-11 ‘means displaying a life of service, obedience, and harmony in Christ—not imitating the act of incarnation’ (2012:61).

1 Corinthians 9

This is another verse that is thrown into the mix without any real unpacking or discussion on the central ideas it contains (again, Borgman, 1997:30-31). Sometimes, things were even added to the verse to make it say it’s about us today. Steve Gerali, for instance, uses the verse by adding a likewise clause, drawing a straight line from what Paul did to what we should do, without any explanation of why. He says

‘In 1 Corinthians 9:19-22, Paul addressed what it means to become like. Paul became a student of the community and culture of those that he was trying to reach. “I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some” (v.22). Our goal is to become all things to all adolescents so that we might reach them.’ (Gerali in Starting right: thinking theologically about youth ministry, 2001:286).

In the very next chapter Paul unpacks exactly what this looks like, and it is largely about being full of grace and patience, and communicating clearly. It is not about indiscriminately immersing himself in the culture or becoming just like a teenagers to reach teenagers.

At one level that’s really unhelpful and could even be dangerous – what, for instance, would you do if you would needed to sin to enter into a particualr culture? What if you needed to flaunt safeguarding policy? At another level, however, it’s just creepy – teenagers aren’t looking for adults who dress like kids and can quote box sets, they’re looking for deep authenticity and genuine realism.

This verse is often used as scriptural basis for the accommodation principle – meaning to ‘oblige or adjust oneself to another’ (K. Creasy-Dean in Starting right: thinking theologically about youth ministry 2001:74). Richter says

‘Youth ministry must be guided by this accommodation principle. We must not expect teenagers to bear the primary burden of accommodating themselves to our agenda, schedule, and program design.’ (Richter in Starting right: thinking theologically about youth ministry, 2001:75).

The problem here is twofold. First, as A. Thiselton explains, accommodation is poor translation of the verse (1 Corinthians, 2000:706), and moves too far from the context of engaging people from a specific religious and socio-political spectrum (703-707). Second, it seems that accommodating oneself to God’s agenda is precisely what humans are called to do when accepting salvation.

There’s goodness in here, but I’m not convinced it flows out form the verse, and making it do so adds obligatory weight to our practice making muddy our boundaries. More on this in Part 5.

What does the Bible say?

To decide if something is theologically sound, we start by asking if it’s biblically grounded. To find out if something is biblically grounded we need to do more than bounce off heavily interpreted proof-texts. We need to grapple with their original meanings.

Through this exploration of the key verses used by incarnational youth ministers, we see that the Bible-reading method is to proof-text and then apply, with very little discussion or explanation of the texts in their contexts first. Exegesis is not just found wanting, it’s almost entirely absent.

I’m not saying you need to be a Bible scholar to write practically or even theologically, but all of us should start by giving more respect to the passages themselves if we’re going to use them. If, however, we are going to appropriate significant theological terms (like Incarnation), then we set ourselves up to be biblically robust.

In no case can we detect serious theological misinterpretations within the usage of these passages,  there are, however, some very serious omissions, especially in regard to who Jesus is and how He saves.

Tomorrow we will draw this out in more detail.

 

 

Incarnational ministry has become something of the prosthetic spine of youth work. It’s spinal, in that it runs right through the structural centre of many of our approaches, but it’s prosthetic because it’s a poor substitute for the real thing.

This week I’ll be posting five posts – a whole series – discussing some of my struggles with incarnational youth ministry. This is “Incarnational Youth Ministry Week” here at YouthWorkHacks.com and I really hope you find it useful.

Each post will walk you through some of my theological and practical struggles with the incarnational theory in youth ministry. We don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater as there is a lot within incarnational theory to celebrate. My hope, however, is that we can find a method that retains the good and useful, but disregards the dangerous and misguided.

This won’t be a full critique; I have a journal article going through peer-review at the moment that will offer more in the way of that. With that in mind, these five posts should be read as a first step, rather than a last word.

What is incarnational youth ministry?

I first heard the phrase ‘incarnational’ in a dimly lit room, while sat across from a very patient youth ministry professor. He was on an enormous cushy couch while surrounded by walls of books making this the closest thing that I’ve ever had to true Freudian therapy!

I had gone to see this professor because I had just realised that graduating from College as a trained Church Pastor at age twenty-one was going to leave me unemployed. Instead I would have to ‘settle’ for youth work for a while. This kindly prof was graciously helping me understand just how tragically under-prepared I was for this change in direction. I hadn’t read anything on youth ministry by this point and I was looking down the barrel of impending job interviews. He asked me the question: what do you know of the incarnational method? My answer was simple: nothing.

This may have been the first instance, but it was far from the last. As I quickly learned, Incarnational youth ministry runs through almost every western method of and approach to youth ministry since the late 1940s. I didn’t know that’s what it was called but I had lived through it myself as a teenager and as a volunteer.

The definition of incarnational youth ministry begins with the idea that we’re doing mission and ministry as Jesus did mission and ministry (W. Black, An Introduction to Youth Ministry, 1991:209).

Who could object to that, right? But let’s keep going. The thought behind incarnational ministry is that as God became human and immersed himself into a specific culture (M. Moynagh, Emergingchurch.intro 2004:43), so the worker today must adapt themselves and immerse themselves – both contextually and relationally – in order to bring the gospel to young people in their own cultures (Steve Gerali in Starting right: thinking theologically about youth ministry, 2001:290). They must become something other than what they are to become like those they minister to – in fact they must be ‘incarnate’ and become just like them. Young Life in the 1940s called this ‘earning the right to be heard’. In Burn’s words, ‘as the ministry of Jesus was incarnate in the Gospels, so our life must be incarnate in youth ministry’ (in Josh McDowell’s youth ministry handbook: making the connection, 2000:35).

Do we both mean the same thing when we say ‘incarnational’?

Incarnational youth ministry might be your ‘thing’, in which case this post is for you. It also might just be what you call your thing but isn’t really what your thing is. Let me explain.

Sometimes, when youth workers say they’re doing ‘incarnational’ youth ministry they are actually just doing basic relational driven ministry (focused more on individuals), or contextualised ministry (focused more on the specific cultural context of young people), or a mixture of both. Sometimes (especially in Britain), it just means they’re doing some form of detached ministry. You might want to rethink the ‘incarnational’ label for reasons that we’ll get to but I’m fine with those options – carry on!

Incarnational ministry as a theory definitely includes those things – its two main moving parts are contextualisation and relationship building – but it technically goes much much further.

Incarnational youth ministry as a model and as an assumed ethos has gone largely unchallenged in youth ministry culture. It appears in almost every youth ministry book explicitly or implicitly as the only way to do it.

The problem is that it sounds theological, ‘incarnation’ right? John 1:14; 1 Cor. 9:19-22; and Phil. 2:1-11 all seem like legit scriptural support beams. More than this, its proponents have many stories of how their openness to young people’s lives, and their cultural engagement in young people’s world has created immense opportunities for the Gospel.

To challenge this has been somewhat taboo. It’s the third rail of youth ministry. Step on it and you die.

Deep breath. Foot raised…

I don’t think incarnational youth ministry is theologically grounded. At all. I think it represents a serious misreading of those verses, selective reading of others, completely bypassing classical Incarnation texts, and a misappropriation – dare I say hijacking – of a significant truth about God’s person. These issues will be the themes of discussion coming in Parts 3 – 4.

I don’t think it’s healthy either. Not for young people, for youth culture, for church integration, and – perhaps most tellingly – not for the longevity of our youth workers. You’ll read more about this on Friday in Part 5.

So, I’m breaking the seal, opening the packet, popping the pringles, and stepping on the rail.

 

This week I will post four more parts to outline my issues a bit more fully. They will be:

• Part 2: It’s all semantics, right?
• Part 3: Doesn’t the Bible back it up?
• Part 4: What does the original doctrine have to say?
• Part 5: What dangers can it cause?
  

 

This week, Jonny Price, Youth and Children’s Ministry Leader in York, returns to give us some insight faith formation with a post-Christendom culture. This is the second in a two part series, so check out part 1 here.

Recently I wrote about some assumptions that we make around faith formation. Here I want to explore some positive ways forward for us in a post-Christendom world, which may be able to help us inspire, encourage, and grow our young people in a life of faith.

1. Start with Jesus

Much of our evangelism starts with trying to convince people that God exists. What if, instead, we start with exploring who Jesus is, what He did, and then move onto what Jesus tells us about the God who sent Him?

Jesus is compelling, intriguing, and captivating. Trying to convince people of the existence of God can be dry, dull, and focuses too much on the intellect. Focusing on Jesus can capture people’s imagination and encourage them to wonder about the character of God. Once they start this wondering for themselves, we can help them on their journey, rather than convince them there is a journey to start with.

2. Recover the verb-ness of Faith

Last time I said that faith and belief had become about agreeing with an idea. That isn’t what we see when we look in Scripture and it shouldn’t be what we expect from our young people today.

Think about the amazing examples of faith we look to in the Bible; how Abraham left his land and followed God’s instructions (mostly), the way that Moses stood against the tyranny of Pharaoh and lead the people to freedom, the way Samuel challenged the people to turn their backs on evil and follow God, how Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah stood defiantly before different kings of Babylon. And that is just a few examples from the Old Testament! Think of all the other examples from the New Testament, the history of the church, and from recent history. What marks them all out is that their faith involved, led to, and inspired action.

3. Treat the Bible on its own terms

I recently had a church visit from some GCSE RE students. As part of looking around the church we got into a conversation around Levitical Law. The usual weird laws came up in conversation, but when we got onto talking about what the Law was actually for, they were surprised at how contemporary and relevant it sounded. At the heart of the Law is the idea that all humans are image bearers of God, and so are worthy to be treated with dignity, respect, and care.

By talking about the Bible on its own terms, we were able to move past the surface level conversation about how weird the laws were and started to move towards a more interesting and impactful conversation.

When we make excuses for what is in the Bible, we undermine our own faith. When we promote the Bible as simple, we cheat the young people we work with of an opportunity to engage deeply with it. When we treat it on its own terms, however, we can catch our young peoples’ imaginations and intellects, and then help them to engage with their faith in a holistic way. This will draw them in and help them to be agents in their own spiritual formation, rather than simply receivers of just our wisdom.

4. De-spiritualise spirituality

Think of how conversations around spirituality are framed. The spiritual is a realm that is parallel with ours; it is other, abstract. The result is that either the spiritual is pushed to the side and takes on less significance than what goes on in the ‘real’ world, or that the spiritual is emphasised as being behind all the problems in the world.

But if we remove this lens and try and replace it with a biblical view of the spiritual, then an important change happens: Things in the world take on a spiritual significance that calls us to action.

Let me give you an example:

Unethical supply chains exploit people. In a view of the world where the spiritual is abstract, this is sad but the result of the way the world is. However, in a view of the world where the spiritual is a real and a central part of life, these supply chains are evil. Anything that reduces people to be less than human is part of this evil, anything that exploits creation is part of this evil.

If we can help our young people to develop a view of the world in which the spiritual is neither Paranormal Activity-esque, nor is it a nice luxury for those who have time to contemplate, then their choices take on greater significance, and calling them to a life of faith has a real impact on the world around them.

Also, within this framework, you need never have a conversation about how Christianity is ‘boring’ ever again, because it is clear what impact it has on the world.

Conclusion

At the heart of each of these is the idea that living a life of faith is far more than waiting for God to call us to heaven. It is about living lives inspired by God’s perspective, working against evil and for good in a way that brings peace, joy, beauty, and goodness into the world.

If we can promote these ideas in our faith formation, then we will call our young people to a life of faith in which they are bringing goodness into the world through their actions and choices.

Further reading

There are a number of books which have influenced my thinking around this. Below is a selection that I think are helpful in exploring how we develop the faith of the young people we work with:

Frost, M & Hirsch, A. 2009, ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church. Baker Academic.

Frost, M. 2006, Exiles: Living Missionally in a PostChristian Culture. Baker Books.

Hellend, R. & Hjalmarson, L. 2011, Missional Spirituality: Embodying God’s Love from the Inside Out. InterVarsity Press.

Smith, J. K. A. 2009-2017. Cultural Liturgies series. Baker Academic.

Smith, J. K. A. (ed), 2006-2015, The Church and Postmodern Culture series. Baker Academic

Viola, F. & Barna, G. 2012, Pagan Christianity. Tyndale House.

Wright, T. 2013, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging with contemporary issues. SPCK.

 

 

 

Great to have another post on Premier Youth Work blog this week. This time I was talking about the immensely popular ‘Youth Cafe’ project, how to make it work, and why you might not want one.

Check it out here.