Reflections on the National Youth Workers Convention

November 8th, 2007 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0) |

Now that I’ve had a few days to collect my thoughts, talk with friends, and reflect on my experience at the National Youth Workers Convention, here are a few things I’ve been mulling over.

The next time I go, I won’t go alone. I’ll invite my volunteers and/or coworkers. More than once I thought to myself “I wish my volunteers were listening to this.”

I wish there had been more mainline protestant speakers. Marko has been outspoken in the fact that getting these people to speak at the convention is a difficult endeavor (”we ask two or three times as many people as we get!”), and I understand. It’s also true that my experience with NYWC is extremely limited, and they’ve had many mainline speakers in the past. Although certain speakers left a sour taste in my mouth, I think that the diversity is ultimately a good thing. Productive conversation and progress can’t occur with only one theological party present.

As a side note, I wasn’t the only one who had problems with Greg Stier’s talk. In fact, it’s kind of “blown up” in the blogosphere. If you’re interested, check out Marko’s email conversation with someone who was extremely offended and be sure to read all of the comments, where the speaker himself even gets involved. Greg has a post on his own blog as well called YS fallout continues.

But that’s all water under the bridge. I think my favorite seminar might have been Tony Campolo’s “What Youth Ministers Can Learn from Sociologists” (I would post my notes, but my MS Word is being obnoxious). Good youth ministry is inherently affected and influenced by other academic disciplines such as sociology, neuroscience, computer science (technology), linguistics, gender studies, psychology, and so on. Why not invite some leaders in these fields to come and talk about what they’re learning and discovering in regards to youth? They don’t even necessarily need to make their message relate to ministry; the point would be to simply inform youth workers, who are working intimately with youth, what the heck is going on with them from multiple perspectives. My mind was blown when Marko, in his “A New Vision for Middle School Ministry” seminar, talked about new research in neuroscience as it relates to young teens. What if whole seminars were devoted to such topics? My point here is that youth ministry needs to be well-informed and not huddled into its own corner of the universe.

There were a couple of “Book Clubs” available, but I would like to see this made a bit more prominent within the conference. For example, when people register for the event, Youth Specialties could suggest 5-10 books (and comp them?) to read before arriving at the conference. There would then be multiple meeting times for individual groups that read particular books, perhaps even moderated by the author him/herself.

Overall, I was pleased with the conference and I can see myself going back again for sure. Although there were a couple of things that I didn’t like, I found a way to make the conference really benefit myself and my ministry, and Youth Specialties should be thanked for building that kind of freedom into their conference.