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I was reading this artical on Christianity Today. It talks about Young Life (YL) fireing or accepted resignations from 10 staff members in the Durham-Chapel Hill area of North Carolina, basically, as far as I can tell, because the staff members were not upholding the traditions of the way  YF explains  the Gospel. Later on the artical states:

“When composing the Non-Negotiables document, YL leaders were evidently concerned to differentiate between style and substance. “We affirm Young Life’s style is relational and incarnational,” the statement reads. “This means that our proclamation of the gospel will most always proceed from the context of relationships with adolescents.” The statement welcomes creativity in methodology but bolds the line, “However, while our methodology may change, our message does not.” ”

Richard Passmore was speaking the other day about Leonard Sweet’s garden analogy taken from The Church in Emerging Culture: Five perspectives, this looks at the way that the ways the Church responds to change in culture:

• The Garden - keep the same message and methods
• The Park - keep the message but change the methods
• The Glen - change the message, but not the methods
• The Meadow - change the message and the methods

Passmore later pointed out, the church thinks that it is being faithful to the message as Jesus proclaimed 2000 years ago, but in fact the message has changed and will continue to change. All we have to do is look at any church history book to see how it has changed. The forming of the NT cannon, The great councils, the printing press, the Reformation and so on all brought change to the message.

I cant help thinking that to be truly missional and incarnational we have to change our message as well as the way we explain the Gospel.  This means that the ‘holy cow’ of our untouchable core theology has to be taken out of the dusty box and reexamined in the light of post-modern youth culture in which youth worker/ministers swim.

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Technorati Christendom, Evangelism, Ministry, Missiology, Theology, Young Life, Youth Work/Ministry