Friday Review (11/3/23)

Each week we compile a list of helpful articles from other sites, in a variety of categories, for youth workers to read, reflect on, and/or discuss with parents and volunteers. If you have any articles you’d like to suggest, we’d love for you to share those in the Youth Pastor Theologian Facebook group. That’s a great way to bring them to our attention and to discuss them with like-minded youth workers! (Inclusion in this list does not imply complete agreement with the publishing source, but we have found these articles to be beneficial.)

Youth Ministry

The Kids Are Not Ok: Why the Adults Have to Step Up, Face the Truth, and Serve: Rooted Workshop Preview, by Andy Cornett (Rooted) 

If that’s you (or any number of other possibilities), odds are you are asking this question: what’s the church’s role in bringing the gospel to the next generation? I do not want to take away from the responsibility a mom or dad has to lovingly lead their children to know the Lord, but in their  zeal to cultivate that role, church leaders can often miss the reality that God has given us the church to help us along in this important task. 

Biblical & Theological Studies

What Should We Make of the Hypothetical “Q” Source?, by Michael J. Kruger (Canon Fodder)

If your eyes are glazed over by now, and you’re feeling confused, don’t feel bad. My students often have the same reaction! There are few topics in Gospels studies as convoluted and mind-spinning as the Synoptic Problem.

Orthodoxy in Exile: Church as an Alternative Community, by Jeremy Treat (The Gospel Coalition)

How can the church thrive in a city that sees it as outdated, irrelevant, and morally offensive? It must be an alternative community that is different from the city but also seeks its good.

What is Eschatology?, by Samuel G. Parkison (For the Church)

Eschatology is about God’s ultimate goal—his telos, his purpose, his intended end—of creation. God makes nothing purposelessly—to exist is to have a telos. And the telos of creation is its glorification.

Cultural Reflection & Contextualization

Movies, Moral Revulsion, and a Post-Christian Age, by Samuel D. James (Digital Liturgies)

It seems to me that the idea that you can elicit moral revulsion merely by depicting evil assumes two things. First, it assumes that the realm of the visual can be manipulated to bypass titillation and proceed straight to condemnation. Second, it assumes an audience who possess a moral imagination that would both motivate and equip them to do this.

Pastoral Ministry

The Half-Baked Sermon: Missing Ingredients in Much Preaching, by Jeremy Walker (Desiring God)

To return to the bakery, mix the ingredients of your sermon, let it rise in contemplation, knead it thoroughly in prayer, let it prove in meditation, bake it well in your own heart, and serve it warm from the pulpit. In dependence on the Spirit, nourish the very souls of the hearers.

The Opposite of Abuse Is Care, by Nadya Williams (Christianity Today)

So on the one hand, yes, we should condemn the “bully pulpit” and the calls for the church to seek political power in a time of crisis. At the same time, yet more calls to unmask abuse and fight it are insufficient. We also need encouragement from the pulpit and in writing from Christian leaders on matters that were always part of the church’s countercultural witness in a cruel world: practical and spiritual care for the poor, the sick, widows, single mothers, orphans, and immigrants (James 1:27).

Less Leader and More Shepherd and Servant, by Stephen Kneale (Building Jerusalem)

I think somewhere along the way we got stuck on the term ‘leader’ – which the Bible uses only once (and in passing at that) – and embued both husbandly headship and church eldership with a particular understanding that much of scripture would actively suggest ought not to be so in the church. We somewhere decided ‘leader’ was better than ‘servant’ and ‘shepherd’, which has pointed much of how we operate..

Family & Parents

The Lies We Love to Believe: Helping Parents and Teenagers Replace Lies With Truth, by Angela Tiland (Rooted)

We need to help our children learn how to decipher truth from lies. In order to protect our children against the danger of lies, we must be dedicated to studying the truth of God’s Word and encourage our children to do likewise. Like with money, the better they know God’s Word, the better they will be able to spot any lies that contradict it.

“My Greatest Accomplishment”—I Get it Now, Mom, by Rebekah Matt (Great and Noble Tasks)

And oh dear Lord, I am so glad that I had children—so grateful that you entrusted me with these four precious souls who are forever “mine.” Yes, raising them was hard. To varying degrees, they gobbled up my time, my energy, my money, my sleep, my space, my patience, and sometimes my sanity, but they are still and always will be my greatest accomplishments.

From YPT this week

YPT Podcast Episode 48: Avoiding Heresy at Christmas with Todd Miles

As you prepare for Advent season, it’s absolutely essential to teach rightly about both the Person and the Work of Jesus Christ.

Preaching the Gospel to an Honor/Shame Generation, by Sean Dotson

GenZ and GenAlpha are shifting towards an Honor/Shame Culture. How does this affect the way we preach and apply the gospel in our youth ministries?