“Identify your high school grads and their plans.” High school graduation is an exciting time in a person’s life. It’s the closure of one chapter and the anticipation of the next one to come. As the pastor, acknowledging this rite of passage is crucial. At least know who’s graduating this year in your church. You may not be able to connect with them regularly, but at least knowing who they are is a great start. What specific
Last Monday to Wednesday (October 7-9, 2019), 12 youth pastors came to Camp Kwasind to tackle Renegotiating Faith (RF). We were honoured to have Rick Hiemstra (Director of Research with the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and principal author of RF). Rick led our group through some key insights from RF and other thoughts on attention, social media and its impact on youth. This led to some great in-depth conversations as
Calling all CBOQ youth pastors and leaders to join together for three days of fellowship, networking and learning at Camp Kwasind. This year, we're focusing on Renegotiating Faith with one of the key authors, Rick Hiemstra (Evangelical Fellowship of Canada). Together, we'll delve deep into this research, discern how it impacts our local churches and across our region, and formulate some action steps out of this. Mike Janzen will lead
Last Saturday, we had high school grads, upper year students and campus staff from 18 schools across Ontario at Wycliffe College. Our goal: to connect the class of 2019 to future "older siblings" going to the same campus in September. Grads had an opportunity to connect personally with those upper year students. They asked questions, gained the inside 411 about their specific campus. Parents had their own track to better
This is part 3 of 3 in a reflection series on Renegotiating Faith. (See Part 1 and Part 2.) -------------- The Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO), the Fear of Not Being Amazing (FNBA), and the Fear Of Passionless Monotony (FOPM) press in on young adults ever more as they approach age 30, which, for many, marks the limit of emerging adulthood and a forced entry into adulthood. (p.12-13) Many Millennials
We continue looking at some observations Renegotiating Faith highlighted its report. (Click here for Part One.) Young adults who went straight into postsecondary studies fared worse on all our measures of religious persistence than those who had taken a gap year. (p.11) I (Alvin) remember that in high school the big push was to graduate and go straight on to university. A gap year was seen as a form of
