By Ryder Mills, C4SO NextGen Leadership Team
It’s January. If you are like me, this month is full of making plans and setting goals for the year. I have a tendency to get so busy imagining myself as I could be that I end up creating a dramatically different, completely unrealistic vision for my life in the next 12 months.
I think we misunderstand the New Year. We could all benefit from focusing less on what we might become and more on who we are today. We cannot have proper perspective on our growth until we understand who we are. The way forward will look different depending on who we are now.
Our goal with the C4SO NextGen Leadership Team is to stay away from overly broad prescriptions for “the Church,” “American Christians” or even “Anglicans,” mostly because prescriptions require the specificity that can only come from personal experience with the particularities of place, time and people. Rather than offering quick fixes or arbitrary goals, we want to challenge you to take a good, honest look at the current reality of your church’s NextGen ministry.
This year, we ask you to consider pathways, not programs. Programs require ongoing resources of time, labor and finances. They are designed to meet general needs for the crowd. A pathway is a route to take, something known and understood by the people, something that someone else has laid out ahead, something you are invited to walk alongside others. You can get on and off the path; you can take a break and pick it up again. Programs are generally done at or to people, while pathways are lived and learned with people.
We tend to prefer programmatic approaches because they are simpler and easier than pathways. Programs require technical proficiency and consistency; they are primarily focused on serving the “customer” in the relationship. Pathways are more difficult because they require us to recognize the particularities of a person, to develop their potential and skills, and to send them out empowered to serve the Church and the world. It’s easier for us to imagine a young adults service than it is to consider involving college-aged people in our adult small groups. It’s easier to buy pizza and plan games for youth group than it is to help a 14-year-old develop their spiritual gifts. Providing childcare is easier than teaching a child to pray.
In the New Year, the NextGen Team invites you to think in terms of pathways instead of programs as you take stock of your congregational life. Realistically consider the places and spaces of your own life and the shared life of your community. How can those places become pathways for the Next Generation to accept Christ’s call to come and follow him?
In the days to come, we look forward to sharing ways to build these pathways and blaze a trail for young people to become spiritual leaders in your community.
Ryder Mills is two years into full-time youth ministry at Christ Church Anglican in Overland Park, Kansas, a church of about 750 with 50 students engaged in its youth ministry. He serves on the C4SO NextGen Leadership Team and is excited to plan and test strategies to develop leadership in students.