Today has been a really loooooong day. I had class at 7 am, so I decided to get to my office early to make some coffee for me and my students. It turns out that I have the wrong top for the coffee pot, meaning that the coffee won’t drip, but instead it spills all over everything. So, I ran to the bathroom to wash off the coffee pot to find that there was no water at the seminary today. Luckily, the lady who cleans the offices was outside and helped me (she’s the one that told me that I have the wrong lid).
Class, on the other hand, was very good. I have three new students, one all the way from Ecuador, one from Puebla, and the other from Vallarta. They will be studying youth ministry with me for the next 4 years.
I went to my Youth Discipleship class, and Huberto and Oscar had invited a ton of students from third year to attend class. So, I have about 8 students in that class now, taking it as an elective, but still participating and making the discussions much more interesting. Class was split up with an hour in between the first hour of class and the second hour of class. We got that fixed. Now I have class on Tuesday and Thursday basically from 7 am until noon. That’s five hours straight, but that’s it. I’m tired today, though. I should have drunk more coffee.
Click here to watch the video.
I’ve got class at 7 am tomorrow morning (oh boy). I’m not looking forward to getting up so early. I can’t even say that I’ll be able to be finished early in the day because I have another class in the afternoon. That’s going to make for a very long day on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Anyway, at least I only have to “work” two days a week (that’s what most people think). I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow.
The 2006-2007 school year was officially opened tonight at the opening service at the seminary. While class doesn’t actually start until next Tuesday, the seminary year has started. We had three days of orientation that culminated tonight with the worship service.
During the service, we prayed for the 13 new students. I have been told that three or four of them will be studying youth ministry, including one student who came all the way from Ecuador to study youth ministry. I’m excited for class to start. It’s going to be a pretty good year.
Since I’ve been researching so much about discipleship in youth ministry, I decided to make a Squidoo Lens on the subject. Make sure you go check it out, rate it, comment on it, and forward it to people who are working in youth ministry. If you have suggestions for it, let me know.
I finally translated the survey results fron the National Baptist Youth Conference that took place this year in Puebla.
If you want to know more about the young people in Mexico, please feel free to download the results here (324K, PDF). Please remember that they are released under a Creative Commons License. This means that you can use the information in the survey as long as you attribute the original author (me), don’t make anything commercial out of it, and re-release anything you do with the results, using the same license. It’s pretty simple.
In the next few days, I hope to be writing some more thoughts (see part 1 here) about the results of the survey.
Answers: 10 years or more: 76%; 5-10 years: 12%
Eighty-eight percent of the young people surveyed have attended church for 5 years or more. This tells me that we have a generation that is not being reached. If the only people who are attending this conference are long-time, life-long Christians, we have not been effective in reaching this generation.
We have either not reached any new young people for Christ, or the new Christians are not participating in the “youth groups†of the local churches, meaning they either don’t feel welcome or don’t feel that it is relevant to their lives.
(more…)
