GenMin presentations

Generations Ministries leaders gave several presentations on sharing God's trinitarian life at the WCG-USA 2008 regional conferences. 

Audio recordings of presentations given at the Kansas City conference site may be downloaded on the WCG Kansas City congregation's website: click here.

Social networking and Generation Next

Social Networking media (such as FaceBook and MySpace) have become deeply engrained in the life of GenX and GenY (the Millennials). In Leader's Edge newsletter (from the A.M.A.), Dr. Maurice Ramirez writes the following in "Three Buisiness Skills Generation Next Can Teach Us Today":

The newest generation to enter the work force, Generation Next, is the first truly digital generation—people raised and educated using digital media and the Internet as an integral part of their basic thinking. Generation Next has learned to use simulated environments, virtual spaces, teleconferences, text messaging, and myriad other technologies individually and in combination.

 To read the full articile, click here.

Here Come The Millennials

The November 24, 2008 edition of Businessweek Magazine says this of the Millennials:

 "Who are the Millennials, exactly? Born between 1980 and 2000, [currently as old as 28 and as young as 8] and 78 million strong, they are a generational cohort that's bigger than the baby boomers. Generalizations about them should, like all generalizations, be applied with caution. But they like personal attention and are used to getting information how they want it, when they want it. They are strong-willed, passionate, optimistic, and eager to work. And...they care deeply about the world and its problems" (p. 47).

The article goes on to discuss ways that business schools are reaching out to Millennials - adapting to their needs and proclivities. It notes the need for "high touch" approaches with more personal involvement from academic advisers - often using "high tech" communication tools to deliver personalized/interactive mentoring and coaching.

The church would be well advised to take a page from what these schools are learning and doing. The Millennials, who are included, like all humanity, in Jesus life, will be drawn into active participation in that life not through lectures, and other impersonal means. This post-modern cohort will not be reached with the tools and techniques of modernity. Rather, I believe, they will be reached primarily through "hands on" apprenticing in "real life" ministry.  

Where do we look for apprenticing models?  I suggest we look to pre-modernity (which has a strong resemblance to post-modernity), and specifically to the apprenticing ethos and methods of Jesus who discipled his followers in high-touch, personalized, life-on-life ways. 

We can (and should) use high-tech communication tools to augment this apprenticing, but the goal is to be personally present in their real lives, showing the real life and love of Jesus as their "tour guide" not as a remote (and often aloof) expert. GenMin's Journey with the Master seeks to facilitate apprenticing relationships.