Ministry

The Plight Of The Summer Missions Trip

By jgiroux ⋅ October 19, 2008 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Recently on his blog, Kurt Johnston, junior high pastor at Saddleback Church, started up a dialogue on missions and some of his thoughts on how junior high ministries typically do them.  For many churches it’s a summer trip to another city to put on a VBS for students or some other low-intensity, small time commitment style work project.  He started to ask some questions about whether that was effective, strategic and worth all the time and energy it takes to do.  It’s not so much that it isn’t making a difference, every house painted and repaired (or built), every little bit of love helps, but for KuJo (my nickname for him, not his) I guess he’s just wondering if the one week out of 52 a year is enough.  Is the mindset that missions is the same as camp, you amp up for one week a year and then forget about it.

We’ve been doing the same thing in our ministry as well, trying to figure out how to create a missions oriented culture within our junior high program. Here’s where I get to come up with a catchy phrase, get ready.  I think that junior high ministry needs to be less about missions and more about mission.

The Lord’s Prayer is that God’s kingdom would come to earth now as it is in heaven, a mandate that is both something we can do now and will come later.  That being said, God’s kingdom is all about serving the poor, widowed and orphaned, the ‘least of these’.  That is a very narrow view of God’s kingdom and truthfully it’s a lot bigger than that but in the context of service, this is a great place for junior high students to start.  We need to work at teaching our students that it’s not about the one week a year road trip but that service and justice are a key component to God’s kingdom being here on earth.  When our focus as a ministry becomes the mission of seeing God’s kingdom established here on earth opportunities to express it year round become the natural in and out breathing of a ministry.

Donald Miller talks about it in terms of story.  He says that people are looking for a great story to be involved in.  The story of God’s kingdom being established on earth is a great story. It’s a story that can captivate and motivate people.  If we as junior high leaders can find great ways to tell this story and create opportunities for students to be involved in it, it will become their story and we all know how much junior high students love to hear stories, be part of stories and share stories with us and with each other.

Christ was all about ‘the mission’, he served people everywhere he went, what a great example to follow.  In terms of the practical side of Kingdom Living here’s some stuff we’ve been thinking through and have started implementing.

Project(SHIFT)

At SHIFT Junior Youth we took a look at what the whole product(red) campaign was doing and we decided that Project(SHIFT) would be a ‘current’ branding umbrella to give to our justice and service opportunities. Those opportunities include serving at a food bank, shelter, or soup kitchen, profiling students of ours that are participating in missionary trips with their families or doing stuff within the community to help out other people, finding projects that the schools and city are involved in and helping out with those (30 hour famine, food drives, clothing drives, etc.).  We’d like to extend God’s rule and reign (his kingdom) to those different areas, sometimes even giving leadership and administrative assistance to help those projects be successful.

What does missions look like for you and how are you adapting to a generation that is way more socially conscious than previous ones?

James Giroux.