I’ve finally had an opportunity to compile my notes from last week’s 3rd Annual Messiah College Youth Workers Conference, so I’m ready to post a wrap-up of the event.

The highlight of my day was most definitely the keynote speech (broken up into two parts) by Kenda Creasy Dean, a professor and the director of the School of Christian Education at Princeton Theological Seminary.

The focus of the speech was that today’s teens don’t have a Christ-centered faith. Instead, they follow a faith system called moralistic therapeutic deism which has the following creed:

  1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
  2. God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and most world religions.
  3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
  4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
  5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

The problem, Dean said, is not that they’ve learned this faith from television, movies or music; instead, youth practice this type of faith because that is what the church has been teaching them.

Dean continued by saying that teens need a consequential faith, a faith that is the foundation for everything that matters in a person’s life. To get there, we need to let teens know that there are four key toeholds to consequential faith: a creed to believe (is God worthy of my devotion?), a community to belong to, a call to live out (vocation) and a hope to hold on to. In particular, the hope teens are looking for is that the world is going in a good direction and that they have a role in getting it there.

One of the best parts of the keynote was that I was seated next to a youth leader from a town not too far away from Selinsgrove. It was great to be able to talk with someone from the area who I can interact with after the conference, instead of someone from hours away whom I will likely never see again.

In addition to the keynote speech, the conference also had two other sessions in which participants could choose from a number of topics/discussions. I chose “Writing God’s Story on the Heart of Teens” by Mike Harder and “The Jesus Contradiction: Why People Like Him but Dislike Christians” by Rob Tucker.

In those sessions, I learned how to share the Gospel with students in new and creative ways and be more effective as an evangelist for Christ.  Both sessions were decent, but they seemed rushed, which is typically the case at day-long conferences.

Looking back, the conference was a great opportunity to be refreshed and revitalized for youth ministry.  Each time I attend a conference or training like this, I return home more excited than ever before about serving God by reaching out to teenagers.  If you’re involved in youth ministry and have the opportunity to attend a conference such as this, I highly recommend it!