By Jeremy Del Rio
March 3, 2010
The Information Age has changed the cultural landscape, and our models for ministry must change along with it to stay relevant -- and raise more effective urban leaders.
As I watched countless groups of white kids invade our inner-city neighborhood to do "missions," I grew to depise the idea of "drive-by" urban missionaries. But years later, God gave me a new perspective. How I learned to love short-term missions.
After my 13-year-old's jarring confession, I talked to other youth about their impressions of God, the church, and "Christ vs. Christianity." I quickly discovered that my son was not alone in his doubts about the integrity of adult Christians.
My 13-year-old son's shocking confession forced me to confront my tendency to obscure Jesus behind the "religious" parts of my faith.
The new basketball documentary More Than a Game reveals how Dru Joyce coached future NBA phenom LeBron James and his high school teammates to a national championship. But more than that, it shows how Joyce poured his life into mentoring a group of talented but ordinary teenagers.
It was only logical for my student to conclude that society didn't expect much from him and his classmates. As a result, they didn't expect much from themselves.
How many eighth-grade Bible studies lead with Lamentations? Or Leviticus? Not many that I'm aware of.
Yet last I checked, Lamentations and Leviticus are part of the biblical canon, along with Romans and Revelation and lots of other heady reading material.
Should it matter to pastors, then, that the average graduate of America's city schools reads at an eighth-grade level and that many high school graduates don't even rank that high?
But Jesus called the children to him and said, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these."
This week the U.S. Census Bureau released data showing that in 2008, the number of children living in poverty increased by 750,000 to 14.1 million. This is the biggest increase in child poverty since 1992.
When I read this I felt a pit in my stomach. In the wealthiest country that the world has ever seen, over 14 million of its most vulnerable citizens are coming to age in the midst of poverty.
Earlier this year, in Parts 1 and 2 of this series, we looked at urban teenagers' attitudes about sex, and their behaviors and practices that reflect those attitudes. Part 2 ended with a question about how parents and churches can fill the gap in teens' knowledge about sexual health issues and thereby prompt a change in their behavior. We now tackle that tricky subject.
Greetings from Brooklyn, the most populous borough in New York City. Birthplace of Jay-Z. Home of the integration of Major League Baseball. And site of the largest battle of the Revolutionary War. If Brooklyn were its own city, it would be the fourth largest in America.
My name is Jeremy Del Rio, and I'm an addict -- if you can call ministry to young people an addiction. Or if you can call city life addicting. Either way, I'm hooked.
"It takes a village to raise a child."
Yeah, we've all heard that repeated ad nauseam since Hillary Clinton dropped the line and attributed it to an old African proverb over a decade ago. Maybe it's just me, but when non-African-descended folks start quoting African proverbs, they start to have as much validity as those old-school Calgon Detergent, "ancient Chinese secret" commercials. Just ain't all that convincing when folks turn ancient wisdom into worn-out clichés and marketing slogans.
