Youth Ministry in a New Key? Substance over Sugarcoating

The following article comes from http://www.albertmohler.com/ and you need to click here to read all the article.  This article deals with an article in Time magazine about how the church is reaching out to teens in a different way than the past. Read the article and let me know what you think.  This that you see here is just a short quote to cause you to want to click on the link and read the rest of the article.  We must do all that we can to get the word of God to the young people.  Games don’t get the job done.  They need a purpose and a passion that can only be found in the glorifying of Jesus Christ by preaching His word around the world. Youth ministers have been on a long and frustrating quest of their own over the past two decades or so. Believing that a message wrapped in pop-culture packaging was the way to attract teens to their flocks, pastors watered down the religious content and boosted the entertainment. But in recent years churches have begun offering their young people a style of religious instruction grounded in Bible study and teachings about the doctrines of their denomination. Their conversion has been sparked by the recognition that sugarcoated Christianity, popular in the 1980s and early ’90s, has caused growing numbers of kids to turn away not just from attending youth-fellowship activities but also from practicing their faith at all. Now, that is an astounding approach — maybe these kids are hungry for biblical substance and something more than entertainment and pizza. Well, they probably still want the pizza, but they don’t want to waste their time in useless and superficial youth programs. After all, they are swimming upstream against an adolescent culture. In many cases, they are more seriously-minded than their parents. They have to be, because the stakes are higher. Read the entire article