National Youth Young Adults Ministry

Growing Souls: Experiments in Contemplative Youth Ministry

Growing Souls: Experiments in Youth Ministry, by Mark Yaconelli (Zondervan, 2007)

** highly recommended **

Growing Souls: Experiments in Youth Ministry brings together scholars, youth directors, pastors and youth who speak about their struggle in exploring contemplative prayer and presence in youth ministry. It is a collection of stories, experiences, conversations, and insights from a group of Christians seeking to reform youth ministry and speak to the deeper cry of the adolescent soul. It is a chronicle of the experience of in working to move Christian spirituality out of the retreat centre and into the youth room. All the ideas and visions within this book are grounded in experience: real churches with real youth ministers struggling to integrate prayer and presence with real young people.

The author's hope is that the book will encourage churches and youth workers to let go of approaches to youth ministry that seek simply to keep young people distracted and entertained. Most youth workers want to address the deeper, spiritual longings of young people. Most youth workers know their real calling isn't to keep young people amused. Most youth workers long to work beside Jesus in addressing the great need within the human heart for love and truth and meaning. The desire is for more basic, more authentic forms of adolescent discipleship.

The soul prospers in silence and prayer and ritual. The soul seeks to befriend suffering and pain. The soul is bored by material goods, security, results and accomplishments. The soul prefers poverty, emptiness and simplicity. The soul trusts life in its rawest form. The soul seeks to realize our interconnectedness with others. The soul enjoys great risks in the service of love and eagerly us to abandon our hopes and plans to God. Most importantly, the soul trusts Jesus.

It's no wonder youth ministry avoids the soul. Could anything be more counter to western life than silence, prayer, surrender, poverty, suffering, trust and befriending strangers? And yet, the longing to minister to the souls of youth persists. Contemplative prayer and presence was the way the author became more sensitive to and aware of the needs of the adolescent soul, as well as morre aware of and responsive to the movement of the Holy Spirit.

Growing Souls: Experiments in Youth Ministry presents the testimony of many of us who have persisted in seeking to address the deeper longings of youth and youth ministers through a contemplative approach to ministry. The author's hope isn't to convince the reader to practice 'contemplative youth ministry', but rather that the reader will be encouraged and inspired to create ministries with youth that address the great spiritual hunger that exists within western culture.

(from the introduction, Growing Souls: Experiments in Youth Ministry)

http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Souls-Experiments-Contemplative-Ministry/dp/0310273285