Code Red Club

Hi everyone. It's me again. Recently I attended a meeting for one the leading youth leaders conferences in South Africa called change Agents. This year the conference will be looking at the theme of "Nova"- THINK NEW DO NEW. There three different kinds of people in youth ministry and ministry in general. 1.Firstly we have leaders in ministry who THINK OLD AND DO OLD. These type of leaders never bother themselves about the current affairs of the world and are detached from the people they are trying to reach. They base their ministry of past experiences.

You can say they are campers. In other words, they like to camp around ideas of the past thinking that they are the only way of having success in ministry.2. Then we get those leaders who we can say that they THINK NEW but DO OLD. These are very deceiving leaders because, they can fool you by what they say, but their actions could go a completely opposite direction. These leaders are more dangerous than the first ones.

In the Salvation Army youth ministry, we have good supply of such leaders. This creates a problem in growing our youth ministries to become relevant to the young people we minister to. And we need not entertain new thinking only, but we need to progress to the next level.3. Thirdly, we have a type of leader who is not thinking old, doing old, or thinking new doing old, but these people THINK NEW and DO NEW.

They model what it means to be a New Testament Believer: 1 Corinthians 5:17 "If anyone is in Christ he is a NEW creature, the old has past, the new has come" New here has very little to do with programme, but everything to do with character/process/relationship/community and many other aspect of ministry which Jesus practised during His earthly ministry. For us to be truly used by God in the 21st Century, we will need to ask God take from us as youth leader in the Salvation Army "a heart of stone" and let Him give us a "heart of flesh"

Ole