Our Children’s & Youth Ministry at Niddrie is currently going through somewhat of an overhaul. Working with teenagers on the scheme is brutal and slow work. The children’s ministries in general have lacked cohesion and so we are working hard at trying to bring everything together towards a united vision and purpose.
The whole issue of whether youth ministry has ‘failed’ as an experiment in Christian churches has been much debated recently. Here are an interesting set of articles from The Gospel Coalition website on some of the current debate around youth ministry. Also, there is another article here on the topic.
In Niddrie the issues are somewhat different given that we have only one new Christian, teenage girl at the moment. More teenagers are coming along to our services but, as yet, we have not seen any credible professions of faith. The rest of our work is, on the whole, evangelistic. We have no ‘crowd’ to attract a crowd, so to speak, and therefore this does present us with some difficulties. We do have lots of things going on but with no real fruit. Please pray for a breakthrough in this area over the next few years. We are currently building a solid foundation and hope to reap a harvest in God’s timing.
Again, please pray for us, particularly for a female youth worker, currently an urgent need. We have some potential people in the pipeline but as yet we have not found the right person.