YPT Podcast Episode 36: Relational Discipleship and Youth Culture (Jordan Francis)
For all the talk about relational discipleship, it’s confusing to know what that really looks like. Every youth worker knows we need to meet students where they’re at… so where are they, and how do we lead them to discover the joy of Christ?
When youth workers talk about “meeting kids where they’re at,” what does that mean and how do we approach that with theological depth?
When you’re writing your Reframe curriculum or meeting with a student as their therapist, how do you approach the difficult topics and help students develop a Christian worldview?
How do you approach youth culture in a way that avoids complete acceptance and complete rejection of culture?
Excerpt from this Episode
Could you share a little about your heart and experience in relational discipleship and meeting students where they’re at?
When I look at Gen Z, I see a generation that is very anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian. And so if we can establish our youth communities to be actual communities where there's this discovery of truth together. Now I don't have to be afraid of the discovery of truth because I know what the truth is. And I'm confident that if you put Jesus up against any other truth, Jesus is gonna win. So I'm cool with that, right?
So what we can do is we can create this space Where we can ask questions and be on this journey to discover truth together. And while we're doing that my job in the midst of that is going to be to proclaim the truth for us to discuss, which is obviously the gospel and the Scriptures. What we found is that's just like the most fruitful way to approach it when you create an environment where up what they feel, even bring up their challenges towards the biblical text.
One of the cool things is sometimes students will bring up challenges and then another student answers it. I don't even have to say anything like they're like, “yo well this actually is how you should think about this and here's how I've come to understand it.” That's like great and I didn't have to say anything.
Sometimes when you create that space as well one of the things that I've really found that's helpful is you can be talking about a particular topic, put it out there, and what you'll find is they'll tell you where they're at. They'll tell you what's really going on. They'll tell you their barriers to believing this in a biblical way.
So now you get to specifically address the issues that they actually have instead of hoping that you're addressing the issues, if that makes sense. It's just that the way that their world works and the way that they see things is very different from the way that we do. If we can understand that a little bit, then we're just gonna do a better job of proclaiming that truth and them actually hearing it, listening to it, going away, thinking about it, and then coming back later.
About the Episode
Jordan Francis is the founder of Reframe Youth and is a Christian Therapist in Phoenix. Reframe Youth provides biblically rich content about the timely issues students are facing, in order to help them form a Christian worldview.
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