Brian Kirk and Jacob Thorne
Zondervan, 2011, 160 pp., $16.99
In 2006, Brian Kirk and Jacob Thorne began blogging about questions we’ve all had. Are we entertaining our youth to death? Have Sundays become just another day of class? Are Christian teens too busy at church to have a relationship with God? Why are young adults leaving the church in search of spiritual experience?
Missional Youth Ministry assembles several of their blog posts, conversations and conclusions, chiefly that “what teens really need is quiet, rest, time alone with God, authentic relationship, and a chance to see the reality that exists just beyond the veil of our consumer culture.” This is not to say Kirk and Thorne advocate youth ministry become one continuous silent retreat.
By applying the missional mantra of other-focused faith formation, they have developed some significant twists on the old standbys: weekly mission trips to your own neighborhood, photo scavenger hunts about doing unto others and recruiting spiritual mentors instead of volunteers. Ultimately, they want churches to stop rhapsodizing about the children being the future and begin raising young people into the whole life of a whole church being church for the world right now.
