Discipling Post Modern Youth: Issues & Challenges

1) Revisiting Postmoderns’ (POMOs) Issues

a) Their Nicknames…

- Starbucks Generation (wanting a holistic experience)

- Entitled Generation (weekend parents who give in, compensate & have lost discipline, children are the centre of everything)

- Abandoned Generation (parented by their grandparents or maids)

b) Their Rocky Travels

- Travel with disillusionment (finding their idols have clay feet, fail them)

- Travel without anchor (estranged from God)

- Travel with missing pieces (haven’t found themselves their identity, not enough safe place)

c) Oddyssying with Them

- Disciple making in the midst…

2) Discipling Issues Unraveled

~Mathetes~ - Learner, Pupil

J.I. Packer: “Jesus said feed my sheep, not my giraffes!”

a) D’Textbook Disconnect

- Systematic Erosion: life is erratic (不稳定), our systematic syllabus, feel hollow & irrelevant

- Sterile Contamination: the messes of their lives, contaminate our clean sterile messages about God

- ‘Shock’ Phobia: we tell them without words, “no shock” allowed, get cleaned up and then only come in

b) Crisis-Oriented Discipling

- We see crisis as a blot to be solved: it becomes an end itself

- We become crisis-busters-seeing our role as putting out “fires”

- Forgetting that our role is to set them on a journey: with new anchor, new mindsets, new values, new purpose

c) Life, Our School Ground

- learners, pupils using the materials & syllabuses of their lives

- disciple-maker ~ the road sign, the facilitator, the connector

- a classroom of one is preferred ~ where each learner gets individual attention

3) A Re-Examination of our Discipling

1 Chronicles 28

Esther 2:5-7; 3:5-9; 4:7-17

a) David’s Boost to Solomon

- Giving up his personal agenda

- Sacrificial company

- Commending the Lord’s presence

b) Mordecai’s Pricking to Esther

- Providing a safe place for her nurture

- He spoke with his lifestyle ~ picked her to act

- Pointed to the Lord’s acting & showed that the current reality did not nullify that

c) Making Shifts in our Discipline Making

- From informing to making

- From activity to relationship

- From accumulative to deploying

- From program to purpose

4) Our ‘Incarnational’ Vocation

To provide an arena where SPIRITUAL COMPANIONING can take place

a) One disciple at a time

b) Schooling without a ‘right’ textbook

c) Willing to get feet, hands & heart dirty

d) Searching for, pointing to and becoming road signs to God

e) Helping them put out anchors

Source: By Annette Arulrajah organized by Ministries for Asia Pacific (MAP) on 25th June 2016