Fluid In Motion
A Profile of Waves Church (continued
6/7)
Challenges of Ministering to this Generation
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"They’re busy, they’re wired, they’re high tech," said John,
describing some of the challenges the pastoral team faces in making an impact in
the lives of the youth. "We’re competing with a lot of things in their
lives." He cites the challenge of balancing innovation with the word of God
and prayer and talking to this generation without compromise. As the youth
ministry point person of the Waves Coaching Team, he emphasizes that in order to
build up the youth generation into leaders, the church needs to influence the
areas of their lives that really matter to them: families, schools, and church.
To do this, he says, "a triangle of family, school and church needs to be
built around their lives and impact them in that way. If you look at most of the
people here, most of them are under 25 years of age." "The Bubble Tea
age," laughs Dann. The ages within Waves, however, vary from early teens to
late 60’s.
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| The pastoral team spends a lot of time researching culture, and keeps up on
the latest movies, books, CDs and trends, to understand the culture of Asian-Canadians and thereby communicate effectively. Dann asks, "How do you watch
The
Matrix with them and screen out the Buddhist and Hindu takes, and at the
same time, screen in the Christian themes. It takes lots of discernment. First
we exegete the word of God, and then we exegete the culture." The
overriding principal of Waves "is that the biblical text is over and above
always the cultural context. So we do our best in understanding our cultural
context, but it’s not the source of our theology."
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