Within the book You Lost Me by David Kinnaman, the author discusses why young Christians are leaving the church and rethinking faith. He gives us an overview of the trends within the mosaic generation. Through this overview, we as student ministers can better understand the generation in which we are ministering to. With this understanding, we can reach these students and bring them back to their home, that is the Church. In this report, I will discuss the book by chapter and finish with my reflection. In chapter one, the author starts by defining the dropout problem and interpreting the urgency we must have. According to the author, the age range between 18-29 is the black hole of church attendance. He categorizes …show more content…
This group either deconvert or change faiths due to negative experiences. Their characteristics include: varying levels of resentment, disavowed returning to church, moved on from Christianity, regrets usually center on parents and they are broken out of constraints. The last of the three groups is the exiles. Kinnaman discusses these in chapter four. He uses the example of Ryan. Through this we see exiles are pushed out and pushed away from something familiar, which in this case is the Church. According to Kinnaman, in the modern day we see those who grew up in the church are now physically or emotionally disconnected in some way, but also remain. These mosaics are energized to pursue God-honoring lives. Their profile includes: they are not inclined to being separate from the world, skeptical of institutions but not wholly disengaged. Young exiles sense God moving outside the walls of the church and are not disillusioned with tradition. They are frustrated with slick or shallow expressions of religion. They also express a mix of concern and optimism for their peers. They found faith to not be instructive to their calling or gifts and struggle when other Christians question their motives. Finally, most exiles feel tension between work and their
Pipes and Lee, in Family to Family: Leaving a Lasting Legacy seeks to provide parents with a framework for passing a lasting Christian legacy to their children. Of course, they do so with a decidedly conservative underpinning one would expect from Southern Baptist ministers and they make no excuses for doing so. Pipes and Lee lay out a plan in six chapters where parents can pass on their faith to their children and reverse the trend of them leaving the church upon turning 18. Beginning with Healthy Families in Chapter One and concluding with sharing the message in Chapter Six, Pipes and Lee provide and outline filled with helpful tips and ideas on how families can grow closer
“The Gospel for Those Broken by the Church” by Dr. Ron Rosenbladt is a presentation that focuses on those who have left the church behind and no longer associate themselves with it. He categorizes those who have left into two sections: “sad” alumni and “mad” alumni. Sad alumni are those people who really wanted to believe but never could really get it right, while mad alumni are those who were “conned” by the church into giving themselves over to Christ and trying to believe and then when things didn’t quite work out, they were tossed away. This presentation focuses on how to bring people like this back to the faith, both the sad and mad alumni.
Gone is the first book in the Gone Series by Michael Grant. In the first book, everyone over fifteen disappears, and the city they live in, Perdido Beach, is enclosed by a barrier. Kids begin to develop powers, and some are beginning to go crazy. It’s known as Fallout Alley Youth Zone, or the FAYZ. Sam helps lead the scared kids. Students from the prestigious Coates Academy, where your rich parents sent you when you were ‘difficult,’ arrive. Diana is able to gauge powers; Caine and Sam are the only level fours, the highest she’s seen. Caine, a student at Coates, tries to take over, and Sam tries to stop him. A war breaks out between Sam’s side and Caine’s side and normals and freaks. Sam’s group eventually wins, but this war is far from over. To make matters worse, they’re still trapped in this barrier. But don’t worry, it’s only a FAYZ.
No doubt, you are aware the Church is in decline—both in membership and in its influence in the world, for the past several decades. Several key elements are missing in the lives of most Christians, which are rarely addressed in our church pulpits or in the books we read. How We Christians Miss The Boat unabashedly addresses these issues, with dead-on solutions, which will change and revolutionize the lives’ of all its readers.
In Okay For Now, written by Gary D. Schmidt, he wrote about certain people who talk about their rough times, and they say okay for now because things could always get worse. In the book, the characters best for the topic is Doug, Lil, and Lucas. They all struggle with something, but they keep it to themselves for the most part. Okay For Now means the characters feel good and Doug, Lil, and Lucas all feel okay at the moment.
“I have carefully and thoroughly read the entire book as assigned.” Throughout David Platt’s book, “Radical : Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream”, he encourages the reader to take a look at their life and see whether or not Christ is all they need to impact their life for Jesus in a radical way. He asks the reader to carefully examine their life, and see if there are areas that perhaps the Lord would desire for change to take place. Platt challenges the Church to step up and see the urgency in missions realizing that this is the way God designed the lost and dying world to hear the Good News of the Risen and Glorified Savior Jesus Christ.
In separatist, there are insiders, culture warriors, evangelizers; in cultural, there are blenders and philanthropies. After introducing these concepts, he emphasizes another type of Christian----Restorers, who envision the world as it was meant to be and they work toward that vision. They seek to amend the world’s brokenness. They want to preserve the value of Christianity. Christ’s death and resurrection not only saved people from something but save people to something. Therefore, the next Christians are participants of God’s restoration project for the whole world but not simply wait for
Dean argues that if teenagers don’t have a firm grasp of core Christian principles and instead worship at what she calls “the Church of Benign Whatever-ism” or they don’t worship at all. She claims that it’s because youth pastors and other leaders have” watered down” the message. The first part of the book draws upon extensive research data to diagnose the problem that teens are being taught a brand of Christianity that is shallow at best. Dean lays the responsibility for the emptiness at the feet of Christian parents and churches.
This chapter is Jim Lynn’s call to the church to WAKE UP! He uses an organization of a factitious church complied by his many years of observation and personal experience (p. 221). The church is dying from the inside but a change is about to take place. In the beginning, the church was full of excitement, as with any new local body of believers. A building was built, a pastor was called, and attendance grew steadily. The church became a “rock” in the community offering many different programs. “As time went on, the church begin to lose its flavor. What started out with the freshness of new beginnings begin to fade, and the church began to decline in membership.” (p. 223) A number of the congregation became sick with many different diseases,
The chapter starts with a story about a man in a church who wanted to start a group for divorced people. The pastor said it is a great idea. He asked the other man whether he would like a special section in the auditorium just for divorced people. The man said that would be good. The pastor said that he would have a section for liars, wife-beaters, alcoholics, and others. The man got the message. A healing church must resist the urge to categorize people. A pastor could play the gender or race card, pit the old verses the young, or rich verses the poor. Each could have their own section. “Yet, one of the first, giant steps away from love is to view a person as a representative or a statistic-something other than the unique individual God created.”
For this reading assignment, we were reading chapters 1, 2, and 3 I find it helpful to me to read, take notes and write out summaries as if this was two books. I will start off each time with Wes the author. As the book opens, we have Wes remembering a day that he and his older sister, Nikki, were playing a game. Wes caught her, and not knowing what to do, punched her in the face. Joy, Wes’ mother, was very upset because Wes had hit a “girl”, and sent him to his room.
a need with today’s young worshipers. The challenge is to bring young people into a sense of
For the first third of the book, there were some sections within the book that affected me in some way. When I began reading this book, I hypothesized this book was going to have someone doing something illegal that could get them into trouble, hence, “Catch Me if You Can.” My hypothesis was somewhat correct after grasping important information from the first section of the book. He had to have several important materials that would get him looking like a Pan Am Pilot. On page 30 of the book, it stated, “He took the jacket to a sewing machine and deftly and swiftly tacked three gold stripes on each sleeve cuff.
I would definitely recommend the book, Forgotten , to others! I would recommend this book because it is relatable. It also gives many life lessons. It shows us that even when the struggles get hard there is always a way to overcome. The main character says, “Every night I fall asleep, my memory is erased and all I can remember is the events of my future. I study my notes hard every day to jog my memory and I tell myself that it will be okay.” This shows that London had a hard life because of her amnesia, but she was willing to do whatever it took to feel normal. This novel also shows us that if you truly believe in something you take a stand. The book shows us this when Jamie says, “We’re done! We were never best friends and I never want to
“Nobody’s Perfect” is a realistic fiction book written by Marlee Matlin and Doug Cooney. This story has been told from the point of view of a deaf girl named Megan who was getting everything the way she wanted. Her house was filled with everything purple… purple invitations, purple cake, purple food, purple clothes, and purple balloons. Everything is going perfect until Ms. Endee announces that there is a new girl in their class named Alexis Powell. All 12 girls are invited except Alexis. “She’s practically perfect ... She is smart, pretty and good with a soccer ball”, Meghan thought. But, Meghan figures out that Alexis is acting strange every time she talks to her. For example she never looks at Megan directly at her face, and every time Meghan