Ministry to Children and Youth

It was in about January 2013 that I first started talking with NETS (Namibia Evangelical Theological Seminary) about the possibility of teaching Youth Ministry courses at the seminary. On August 18th, nearly 20 months later, that vision was finally realized. I arrived at school early, around 7am, to make sure I had everything printed and could get my computer connected to the projector. I had 11 students signed up for the course, all 2nd and 3rd year residential students at NETS. Most of them had been or will be involved in some form of church or para-church youth ministry, so I hoped the material would be applicable.

After some brief introductions we started off going through the course syllabus. That was an easy start, getting the feet wet. Then we jumped right in. The general outline for the course was that your purpose plus your target group within a given context equals your program. So we spent the first day discussing the purpose of the church and a Biblical and theological basis for youth ministry. The next day we spent talking about youth and childhood development, looking at physical, emotional, psychosocial and spiritual development. This was to get a good handle on understanding our target group.

The minefield of issues that youth in Namibia are facing.

The next two days we spent looking at youth culture and the context in which today’s students are growing up. We talked about many different issues including postmodernity, family structure, media discernment, social networking, sexuality, substance abuse, depression, suicide, and more. Those were perhaps the two most depressing, but exciting days of the course. Depressing because our youth are walking through a minefield of issues and they aren’t making it through unscathed. But exciting because the church is uniquely positioned to speak the hope of Christ into those situations.

Then once we understood where we’re headed, who we’re dealing with, and the context in which we’re working, we finally talked about developing the program. We looked at challenges to programming, some characteristics of good programs and then tried it out with a few scenarios.

Overall it was a great group of students who were very interactive and taught me a bit about youth ministry in the Namibian context. This was only the first 5 days of an 8 day course. Our remaining 3 days of class are spread out once a month throughout the rest of the semester. That course format allows them to get a bulk of information, then go practice it and come back with more questions. I’m looking forward to seeing how they use what they’ve learned and what new questions they will come back with next time.