Passion

I'm trying to read a book called, "Practicing Passion: Youth and Quest for a Passionate Church" . Actually the book is pretty heady so I should just give it someone like Brandon and let him read it and then explain it to me. But there were a few quotes in there that jumped out and seemed to make sense.

"Adolescents are searching for something, for somone, 'to die for'...a cause worthy of their suffering, a love worthy of a lifetime and not just a Sunday night. In short, they are searching for passion"

"The Passion of Christ is good news to adolescents, not because Jesus suffers, but because Jesus loves them with such wild, passionate hope that even death on a cross cannot stop his determination to win them."

"Passion asks something of young people; in fact, it asks everything of them"

"salvation is at stake, for they will not give up on true love until they find it, or until consumer culture numbs them into a kind of lobotomized compliance, whichever comes first. Whether they discover the true source of passion - whether they ever connect their desire for love with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ or with the church at all, for the matter - largely depends on whether the church bears witness to a love more true than those available in popular culture. And that, of course, depends on whether the church practices the passion we preach"

Reading this book has made me grateful for the great examples of passionate selfless love that many of our leaders demonstrated for our youth. Some like Lori for moving to Ukraine and giving her life away because of her love for Christ and the people of Ukraine and also for the ones who stay here and give up so much in order to spend time discipling students.

But I also am very challenged by this book to think about the way we do ministry. We do so much for students. I'm not sure that we do enough to encourage them to do for others. All of the students we put in the category of 'getting it' seem to be the one's that find opportunities to serve and minister. We assume they serve and minister because they 'get it'. But maybe it's the opposite. Maybe they 'get it' because they serve and minister.

In process...

tags: God Youth Ministry Jesus Passion