10 from 2010: challenges facing Europe's churches anD their work among young people

Colin Piper, is Youth Adviser to the European Evangelical Alliance, and a coordinator of EEA21, a community of people passionate about reaching young Europeans for Christ. With his wife Melissa, he is International Director of International Christian Youthworks, www.icy.org.uk

This selection of ’10 from 2010’ is based on what he has written over the previous year. 

1.  Recognise that a true measure of success is seen in what your young people have gone on to achieve, not what you have achieved (30th December).

2.  A major obstacle remains those churches that say that they see the need for change but equally say that they do not want to change (26th November)

3.  Effective youth and schools ministry will value student and youth participation as a key component of success (19th November)

4.  Churches need to continually encourage its volunteer and paid youth workers in the regular reading of the Bible (20th September).

5.  Jesus’ model of counter-cultural denial and identification requires churches to be visibly connected to the world of young people and requires them to be contemporary and therefore intelligible (5th August).

6.  Success in working among young people requires an over-riding commitment to being relational so that Christian organisations can make best use of all the resources, vision and gifts they have available to them (7th July).

7.  Professional youth ministry is not necessarily the same as missional youth ministry (28th June).

8.  There is a need for flexibility in responding to European young people raised with traditional values as well as to other Europeans shaped by post-modern values. One does not fit all! (4th March).

9.  At the end of the day, it’s all about the Kingdom of God, not just expanding our own ministries to young people (28th February).

10.  Youth ministry must remain ‘people-centred’ rather than ‘programme-centred’ if it’s to avoid losing contact with the people it’s intended to serve (24th January).             

Darrell Jackson