Youthwork Magazine Review ‘August 2014 Special Edition’

Here’s a quick first snap of doing a whoollllle Youthwork Magazine Review.

Youthwork Mag did something amazing this month – they wrote their magazine for young people rather than about them – and loads of it is written by young people too. The result is pretty cool!

There’s the obvious, yet nevertheless helpful summer article on ‘how to survive festivals’ – brilliant tidbits considering how easy it is by day 2 to have no tent, no dry clothes and a full-on tummy bug. I particularly enjoyed the correlation between a sweaty onesie and no friends! Something – albeit perhaps too parent-esque to make it onto the list – that would have been a good addition is to hydrate, hydrate, hydrate! The number of people keeling over from heat stroke this year is crazy – drink a shed load of water every day. If you sweat it out – you need to put it back in.

There are some fun, simple reviews too. It would have been good to see more books (only 3, yet 5 CDs), but again helpful and good comments. Great CD’s, particularly Rend Collective’s ‘Art of Celebration’ and Guvna B’s ‘Scrapbook II’ – although I guess all the buzz now will be Beth Croft’s new release that didn’t make it onto the list (probably because it wasn’t out in time). It’s worth saying that nothing makes less than 4 stars – which is probably the Christian way of being nice to our mini-Celebs – but that does make the reviews slightly difficult to trust totally. Can’t comment on the books as I’ve not read any of them – although I bet Rachel Gardner in ‘The Dating Dilema’ is fab! A few good wee interviews/Q&A’s thrown in too by Rend, Guvna and Beth.

What I loved about this edition was the short testimony articles. There are two particularly powerful stories – one from Katie, a girl who moves to Russia to work with trafficking victims, and a second from Yasmin, who ran from her Muslim home to become a Christian. In the same vein there are also convicting challenges from a bunch of young people to get them more implemented into the life of Church through service, including real-life examples of young people who have set up websites and school groups to great effect. Bekah says “In 20 years time I would hope to see the divide between the young and old diminished. I would love to see the youth take on bigger roles within the church, leading services, being part of the worship band, or offering to pray with people.” Right on girl – bring it on Church! And let’s add being co-opted onto Eldership boards and PCCs too!

One of the best and surely most useful parts of this issue is #AWKS – awkward questions about life, the world, and particularly relationships, answered form a Christian perspective. The amazing thing about the answers are how totally grace-centered they are. They are not prescriptive, black-and-white or legalistic in any way. I am totally proud of the authors for this! Only crit I’d really make is perhaps a couple of answers are too grey or lax. A teenager wanting to go further than they should might be able to interpret some of the grace as license – so throwing in a few more solids for anchors of holiness might have been a good call too.

Nudge presents an interesting conundrum for me. The thrust of the article is an encouraging look at how Christians in every aspect of the world can survive, thrive and make a massive difference – so this really makes the piece invaluable! It starts with quite a cool little set of quotes from ‘Christians’ in the celebrity world. In one sense that’s awesome; it’s a great encouragement for young people to know some of their fav celebs are following Jesus! That said, I’ve got two big issues with this: 1st When a celeb looses their faith publicly – which happens surprisingly often – shaken young peeps who were in their wake can come crashing down with them. 2nd when ‘Christian’ celebs – like Katy Perry (who features) spend half their public time getting almost naked and singing about kissing girls – it does tend to water down the importance of walking the walk as well as talking the talk. Generally though – a good stab at an important topic!

The Bible Reading Notes is a really welcome section as always. A week of Bible-driven challenges that’s easily accessible to a wide range of young people with a strong thrust on application is simply brilliant – well done YWM! There’s an amazing mix of passages that really gets you bobbing around your whole Bible which is massively important, and the simple approach makes them poignant, pertinent and easy to digest. Fab! The only slightly awkward thing about these (which is unfortunately the case with most youth Bible reading notes) is they model a sound-bite-with-explanation Bible reading habit that doesn’t teach how to actually engage with the Bible itself. Context, exegesis, word analysis and structure are all sadly lost – and if we don’t teach these things then our young peeps will always be dependent on spoon-feeding, constantly needing more ‘extra stuff’ with their Bibles – making us the same as any other religion. Let’s make a pact shall we? Let’s learn and teach how to let God’s word speak, come alive and burn within us for itself. It’s hard – and lots of us don’t know how to do it ourselves – but it’s well worth it!!!

Finally, the comic at the end is a brilliant, inventive and very funny opening-up of Jesus’ epic relational and conversational skills, both with the religious brainiacs of His day and those from ours. It’s actually a masterful way of teaching Bible stories – and with the distinctive ‘thought’ and ‘speech’ bubbles you get a whole world of subtext and commentary in the timeline which is wonderfully instructive. This follows a huge spectrum of apologetics and ethics and packs a great punch. Absolutely brilliant!

Thank you Youthwork mag. A great gamble well worth it! Again maybe? Perhaps room for just one more regular publication Premier?