When I became a Christian, I was on a mission field. I was surrounded by  missionaries. Many of them were serving the church behind the Iron Curtain.  When I came back to the states and began working with youth, I discovered that there were many of my colleagues that did not have a sense of mission, of being a missionary, and yet, I felt that youth ministry really was a unique and important mission field. So to talk about that now, and talk about in particular, the 3R’s of  Christian Community Development. First, our engagement with youth is a  principled engagement. It was David Bosch, in his book transforming mission,  he defined mission as the participation of the Christian community in the  ongoing work of the living Christ as witnesses and pointers to the love of God for the sake of the world. For many, the idea of mission was for something over  there or with someone else, but it was not related to me. But the scriptures  seem to talk about mission as as something that is for everyone, that we, in a  sense, we're all called to do something significant for God's kingdom. It doesn't  have to be big, but there's something God calls us and gives us purpose. And so with mission, the Reign, or the kingdom of God, is central to its essential  passion of the entire Christian community. Jesus's ministry, and therefore the  church's ministry has as its focus the bringing of God's reign to those on the  margins of society. And so to follow Jesus is to embrace a missionary  discipleship. So youth ministry is tied to mission. The western church has tended to view mission as a calling of a few to foreign lands, not as applying to us and  our relationship to our neighbors. And there is a reason for this and this, this  gets theological. At least we in the West, we have tended to place the Great  Commission go and preach the gospel above the great command to love God  and love your neighbor. This has great implications for us in ministry. If we place  the commission above the command, it very easily can take us into a place  where we reduce people to souls in need of saving and compassion to a mere  technique. It's what created. It contributed to the great divorce evangelism  divorced from social social action back in the early 1900s and so it ends up, it  has an impact on us. It justifies a physical social economic isolation from  society's poor, and therefore it can blind us to the it can blind the church to the  kingdom and our role in society. We are called to be God's people in society, but this, this flipping of the great command and commission, it can blind us to the  opportunities that are among us. Sense in which God has brought the world to  the city, and because of that, we are now in a position where perhaps we can  get mission right. And so yeah, we we have a role to play. We all do when it  comes to serving the poor among us, we all have that responsibility. It was when I was introduced to John Perkins that I learned about the 3R’s of Christian  Community Development. These form the core theological missional rationale  for working among the poor, and I found that these were foundational to  transformational discipleship. And so what I did was I took the core values of  Christian Community Development, and I looked at youth ministry through the 

grid of those core values, so looking through the grid of CCD, what does urban  youth ministry look like? And we start with relocation. Relocation involves  making the community your home. This is, this is one of those. It's a linchpin for  Christian Community Development, but it's also one that people have had the  greatest struggle with. But I have some stories. I remember when I started  working with kids. I did not live in the neighborhood. I lived outside the  neighborhood, and I would come in to work with kids, but I began to have this,  this conviction that I needed to live among the people I serve. And so I I moved  into the neighborhood within one week, I was broken into and robbed twice. I  mean broken window, all of my possessions, the possessions I valued, were  gone. And I remember just this, really being in disarray. And then, and then  some of the kids came over, and they looked around, and they looked at me,  and they said, Well, Ted, you're one of us now. Now you understand. I didn't  think I needed that to understand. But what was significant was that they saw  me as now experiencing, or at least being in a position where I could experience the same things that they experienced. And somehow that made a difference for them. It certainly made a difference for me, because now I, while I don't believe  you need to go through the same thing that you're you're the people you serve  go through, you do need to be in a position where you can see and understand  and contribute to making, to making a difference. Another one was Charles, at  that time, living in the neighborhood, and this was a few years in the ministry,  and on my block, my block had some gang influence, on my block, and I was  standing on my porch, and I looked down the street and I saw this kid actually, a  young adult now in a wheelchair. And what I didn't realize until he came up to  me was that this used to be a kid in in club, at least he attended once in a while  when he had gotten himself in the gangs and gotten so shot, so he's in a  wheelchair, so he's talking with some of the gang guys on the same block, and  he says to them, he later tells me, he says to them, says, hey, that's Ted. You  know, that's Ted with neighborhood ministries. And the guy say, Hey, man, he's  calling the cops on us. And he said, No, he's not doing that. Come on. He's a  good guy. Come on. I'll introduce you. So he came over and brought him over,  and I get I shared with them as a guy. Look, I work with young people. I care  about you guys when it comes to drugs and gangs. I'm not for it, and so to that  extent, I'm going to be on the other side of things. Then afterwards they left, and Charles says, you know, Ted, you could really talk to these guys and I said, you  know, I'm really I'm trying to reach, reach young people before they get to that  stage. He. Says, Yeah, but you know Ted, you could talk to them, you know  why? He says, you're black, but also you're here, you're in their neighborhood.  And that meant something. I lived in a neighborhood where right down the street was one of the largest African American churches in the city. And every Sunday,  people would drive in in their Cadillacs and their Mercedes, wealthy African  Americans, they come in dressed to the hill, and they'd walk in the church on 

Sunday, and then the and so you couldn't Park on Sunday, because they they  The streets were filled with their cars. And then when church is over, they would  all leave again. And this, this did not escape the notice of young people growing  up in the neighborhood. And so being there, being close, being able to be a part  of the community that you serve was an important position to have if you're  going to have this kind of impact on young people. And I want to add, I'm not  saying everybody needs to move into an impoverished area. Everyone has a  different role in ministry, although I have to say, because God has brought the  world to the city now, there are communities that there was a while, I would say,  Hey, y'all need some of y'all need to move to the neighborhood now, because  God has changed things and no, don't move. Stay and love your neighbors. God has brought the poor to you. Love your neighbors, so relocation through the  good of CCD, what does youth ministry look like? Well, it looks like a ministry  that emerges from within the community that his leaders have made the  community their home. The second R is reconciliation, an essential focus of  Christian ministry. Can be summed up in a single word, reconciliation. He has  given us the ministry of reconciliation. To be a reconciler is to be a peacemaker.  Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God. So  reconciliation plays out in youth ministry through honest answers to honest  questions when you are with young people to give them honest answers to their  honest questions, you are applying God's truth to felt need, but also when a  youth group becomes a safe place To be genuine and honest, you've created a  social context that involves engaging God together, so the group becomes A  place where reconciliation is actively pursued. That's reconciliation. So through  CCD, what does youth ministry look like? It looks like a ministry engaged in  peacemaking and in sharing the good news of the gospel in ways that speak to  young people's deepest needs and encourage mutual growth. The third R is  redistribution, and the idea of redistribution is not a robbing from the rich and  giving to the poor. It is about bringing new skills, relationships and resources  and putting them together to work to empower the residents of a given  community to bring about healthy transformation. So it's about empowering  people from within, bringing those skills together. So in transformational  discipleship redistribution manifests itself primarily in the area of capacity,  capacity discovery among youth, and in the unleashing of those capacities in  ways that benefit children the following generation. So it's putting the resources  of youth to work for the good of the community. Skye was one great example of  this. She was one of our Emerging Leaders high school, and she was walking  down the street. One day with with a friend of her’s, high school friend, and her  friend was swearing those kids do, but while they're walking down the street in  the neighborhood, a child is coming towards them, and Skye recognizes this  child as someone involved in her program. She has been teaching this child and working with her and her peers. Well, Skye turns to her friend and says, You got 

to stop talking like this, or I can't be with you, because I am a leader with this  young person, and that's going to affect my ability to lead her, if she sees me  accepting this kind of talk from you. So you need to tone it down, because I  have a relationship with this kid. Understand that no one told her that, no one  coached her in, that that was something that just happened because she  realized who she was, and which meant she needed to change it. Began to  change her behaviors with her peers, because of the influence that she had on  young people, and then with our summer day camp, we use that as the  apprentice time with our leaders. They months ahead of time. They would plan  and prepare, they develop the curriculum. They ran the summer day camp, if we had, if we had college volunteers, they would come in and assist our high school leaders. Well, they were so effective that I'm my role changed when I I directed  the program, but during the during the school months, I would be coaching and  training when it got to the summer day camp. I was the chaplain, and so I would  lead the Bible studies in the morning, and I would I would deal with anything that would come up in the middle and in the day, any problems that would come up.  But one of the great delights was when an elementary age kid would come up to my office and say, I want to do what they're doing someday. Can I do that? Can I when I get to be their age? Can I be doing what they are doing? And so it had a  transforming effect. These high school students were the ones that were leading and making the difference to the extent to where the elementary kids said, Can I do what you're doing someday? And so peering through the CCD grid, what  does youth ministry look like, well, it looks like a ministry engaged in  redistribution that is the Unleashing and nurturing of capacity in ways that invest  in the long term development of youth and children. So the 3R’s and their  implications for youth ministry. Number one is we need to realize that urban  youth ministry is rooted in mission. Mission is the study of God's movement  through history, and we are all a part of that. We play a role in God's bigger  Kingdom agenda. The great command is the greatest command preaching the  gospel is most potent when it's done in the context of loving God and neighbor,  and it's the three R's. They're they are values that drive the transformational  discipleship approach to urban youth development. So for your reading, I would  encourage you to look at two books. One is David Bosch's transforming mission. Paradigm shifts in theology of mission. Now his original book is a big book,  almost 500 pages long. It's very in depth. There is a smaller book that a concise  version, but David Bosch, first, he examines what mission is through the writings of Matthew, Luke and Paul, and he derives from their their their writing, their  understanding. Of what mission is, the participation of the Christian community  and the ongoing work of the living Christ as witnesses and pointers to the love of God for the sake of the world. But then he goes through the he examines the  different epics of history, and with each of them, he looks at how the church has  responded to and exercised the mission within the context of that age. There 

were times when the church would compromise. There were times, but there are always times where there was a witness to genuine mission activity. It's a  fascinating book that I would encourage you to get to see how God works  through the ages, and that he's working in our age right now, and you play a  major part in that. And also, again, John Perkins, restoring at risk communities,  doing it together and doing it right again that that book, the kind of Handbook of  CCD talks at length about the 3R’s of Christian Community Development. 



Última modificación: lunes, 6 de abril de 2026, 09:37