Yeah, that's part of my tension, too. For some kids, if they don't get it at church, they don't get it anywhere at all.

What I'm thinking, though, is not that we eliminate spiritual training at church but rather we somehow cultivate a value for both the ministry and parents that it's ultimately their responsibility and we're here to support that.

Another option could be to have the parents continue to be the spiritual leaders at church and allow the kids who don't have Christian parents to sit in with a family that does. Essentially, all the parents become "youth leaders," ya know? *shrugs*

Yeah, there's a lot of danger in creating a mini youth-church inside the larger church body. We have our own youth pastor with our own youth service in our own youth room/building with the youth band and youth sermon and, although it may look good from the outside, it's unintentionally communicating something very wrong about the body of Christ. And then we wonder why students don't connect to "big church" after high school -- it's partially because they've never been a part of it from the beginning!

Encouraging students to find a place of ministry in the church is only internally focused if the church is internally focused. If the church is focused on it's community, then serving the church would mean the teens are helping the body serve the community, which is external focus.

I disagree that the point of youth ministry is to create a faith community that encourages youth to follow Jesus in real life. I think that community should be the home. Youth ministry is here to support the home community, not become a surrogate for it.

While I understand what you're saying and agree that modeling Christianity is critically important, I'm not sure I agree that students mirror us. If that were the case, then most of the kids in my youth group would be a lot more Christ-centered and would be digging into their Bibles much more at home.

I think evangelism fits in perfectly: the teens serve the body of Christ and together the body serves the community, in an idealistic world, of course. I get what you're saying, though. You're thinking that we're encouraging the teens to focus inward on the church body, which is true in one sense, but in a bigger way I think we're pushing them to think outside themselves, which includes both the church and those who are not connected to it.

Oh yeah, you're right. That's gotta be a bug. We'll look into it. Thanks.

In a forum, old threads can be resurrected by a new post, but since we don't want the site to become just like another forum, we've opted for questions and debates to be time-sensitive. Rather than having long threads on the same topic that go back and forth, we want to help users get quick answers and then have a sense of closure.

Yeah, I tend to agree with you, Jeff, and I'm sure Dale would, too. I think he's mostly reacting against the groups who debrief for hours every day. Typically on trips I've done we debrief for a little bit before going to bed. That way it hasn't interrupted our potential ministry time and we still can reflect together.

Thanks for all the input, Joseph! Appreciate you taking the time to do it. That helps. :)

I'll talk more about the organization, who I'm going with, and things like that in future posts. Just wanted to introduce you guys to the trip first without making the post too long.