An ongoing challenge for churches in Australia is how to engage and connect with today’s youth. This is an issue for Anglo churches and also churches from other ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
Recently Darren Cronshaw and Beth Barnett led a training day for Karen children’s and youth ministry. It was hosted by Werribee Karen Baptist Church on 6th August. It is part of ongoing training to help Karen and Chin and other LOTE churches with their children’s and youth ministry. There are more training days coming up with one for the Karen at Croydon Hills Baptist Church, and for the Chin on September 17 at Sunshine and in February 2017 in the Eastern suburbs.
On the day, there were 44 Karen teenagers and young adults, involved or open to being involved in Sunday school and youth ministry. The attendants were really engaged and interested to learning more about approaches to ministry. Darren Cronshaw noted, “I was really encouraged by the Karen young people’s eagerness to learn about their own faith and discipleship and how to encourage faith and discipleship in others. They are keen to adapt, to celebrate their own culture but to thrive in their adopted culture."
(Darren Cronshaw leading discussion)
The training is about meeting the needs of children and young people in the church. Darren and Beth taught leadership and modeling, as well as basic principles to help children learn and grow in faith. This included interactive teaching, classroom discipline and creative resources. Some of the youth leaders learnt about Sunday school and children’s ministry in refugee camps, which may not be completely applicable to the new socio-cultural context in Australia. The training helps them to transition their thinking and approach to children’s and youth ministry, in order to better engage with children growing up in an Australian setting.
(Discussion Groups)
The training series is part of a broader effort to engage with and learn from LOTE churches, including the Karen and Chin people groups. There is a lot that they can learn from us, but there is much that we from Anglo and other cultural groups can learn from them. As Darren noted, we need to engage with Christians of other cultural backgrounds "to learn lessons about community and communal living, and perseverance in faith, and how to relate to people of different religions, and how to learn new cultures.” The Karen and Chin people groups have come to Australia from Myanmar. Their experience before arriving in Australia is frequently one of hardship, facing conflict and persecution in their home country and facing difficulty coming to Australia. They can teach us a lot about standing true to faith and persevering in the midst of suffering, especially as the issues we face in Australia are generally less dire by comparison.
As Chin Baptist Church Pastor Arohn Kung noted ”Unless we bring up our children well in faith, who will be the church of the future?” The Senior Pastor at Werribee Karen Baptist Church Rev. Gail Moe commented further that, “the future is all about the young people” and thus “when we’ve lost the children, we’ve lost everything.”
This training aims to promote fruitful and positive children's and youth ministry. By doing so, it aims to help young people grow in their faith and mission and empower them to become the next generation leaders of the church.
By Benjamin Cronshaw
Source: BUV News