Dennis and Barbara Rainey
FamilyLife Publishing, 2012, 121 pp., $39.57

A first glance, this looks like another youth ministry product to host a purity weekend with students; to my delightful surprise, it a weekend curriculum designed for parents to do with their own kids led by Dennis and Barbara Rainey via CD. The eye-catching kit comes with eight CDs covering five sessions on topics such as Friendship and Peer pressure, Changes in Him, Changes in Her, and Setting Boundaries. The first session is a message to parents and the subsequent CDs are for your son or daughter to listen to during the weekend. The kit includes a parent’s tour guide complete with all the lessons and creative activities you will need to make your weekend exciting and fun. In addition, the kit includes a snazzy, hard-backed passport journal which is part workbook and part devotion book. Once your weekend has ended, the journal offers 25 days of devotions for your child.

This is the kind of weekend you and your children’s pastor could facilitate with multiple families participating. The only drawback I see is that so many 12-years-olds are now so advanced in knowledge via the Internet that the CDs or activities may leave them feeling as if they are being treated as little kids. I think late 11-year-olds or early 12-year-olds would benefit most from this style of teaching as they still have many childlike qualities. A product such as this should get youth workers excited. As I said earlier, I was thrilled to find out Passport 2 Purity was not another youth curriculum but a family weekend strategy to give parents an opportunity to spend time with their pre-teens and talk with them about all the issues they will face as teenagers. So, why should youth workers be excited? Because it empowers parents to have these discussions with their pre-teens (instead of us), which is what all youth workers should want. Stronger family units benefit your youth ministry, church and the kingdom of God as a whole.