It may (or may not, depending on how effective your little think was) come as a surprise to you that the subject Jesus discussed most was the kingdom of God. Everywhere you look in the Gospel accounts, Jesus uses obscure, everyday items to describe the kingdom of God. From mustard seeds and evil vineyard owners to pearls and banquets, Jesus is pretty passionate about bringing it up, time and time again.
Despite this, it is very possible that young people leave our youth groups and churches having never heard about the kingdom, or having grasped what it actually is. They may know the parables and the stories Jesus told but not make the link between them all to the kingdom itself. I know I didn’t. I have spent the majority of my life in church buildings and studied theology at university, and yet somehow the penny has only recently dropped with regard to the centrality of the kingdom to all that Jesus did and said. How can this be?
This month we’ve gone to absolute kingdom-town and asked theologian Conrad Gempf to write about the what, where, why, when and how of the kingdom. We’ve also included session plans to put this into practice, helping your young people to join up the dots for themselves. Let’s not let any more young people move on from our groups without an understanding of the kingdom.
There is another significant element of the kingdom for us youth workers. As our youth work roles and activities become more and more disparate, from Bible studies to mentoring to schools work to young motherhood projects, ‘making young people Christians’, or even more crudely ‘getting young people into church’, just doesn’t cut the mustard seed as far as a theology for our practice is concerned.
This isn’t new or particularly radical thinking, but is something that has been bubbling around in youth ministry circles for a while. We need to reframe our youth ministry in order to contextualise and understand exactly what it is we are trying to do, and where we seek to lead young people. As such, I think the new paradigm of youth work is about the kingdom.
It is only under the banner of ‘kingdom’ that we can join together these fragmented parts: the outreach projects with the mentoring, the youth clubs with the picking up of dishcloths for the church kitchen. If a young person on a detached bus project decides one week not to take drugs as a consequence of our support and encouragement, then the kingdom has broken through. If a child has been fed at lunchtime because of a food programme we run, the kingdom has broken through. We ultimately want all young people to encounter the love of God and realise that Jesus is king, but this doesn’t render all else just a stepping stone to this end point. In the kingdom, the small things have merit and value, in and of themselves.
As participants of this now and not yet kingdom – which we see only through a glass darkly – we partner with God in the full restoration of the earth, beginning now. Through our work, in its many, many forms, we become vessels of God’s invitation into the kingdom.
Maybe this is obvious to everyone apart from me. I kind of hope it is. But I encourage you, as you read about the kingdom this month, to reflect on what having a kingdom vision for your work might look like, and how the king – more and more – might make his appeal to the Earth (2 Corinthians 5:20) through all that you do.
THIS MONTH PHOEBE... went to Thailand for two weeks leaving other people to finish off the magazine. As such, any typos, wrong information or misplaced whimsy are not her fault.
