Back to work. I've got over a hundred e-mails at work to deal with, plus lots of voice mails.

I've been thinking a lot about what kind of legacy the Youth Ministry i've been involved in is going to leave kids with when they hit college and beyond. For the last few years most of the ministry I've done has been heavily relational and I often wonder what kind of biblical fundamentals I'm leaving kids with. My goal has been more to support kids in their walk with Jesus, showing them real people with real relationships with God and inondating them with the God's deep love for them. I wrestle with wether that's enough. I just came across this
article by George Barna dealing with a teen evaluation of the church-based ministry they received as kids. The conclusion is pretty interesting:

"We discovered fairly strong correlations between understanding how to use the Bible for life decision-making with becoming a born again Christian during the younger years, having an active spiritual life as characterized by consistent prayer, Bible reading and church attendance, and possessing a biblical worldview. Unfortunately,” Barna noted, “less than one out of every ten churched teenagers has a biblical worldview. In other words, the result of their involvement at a church is that they can recite some religious facts, they made some friends, and they had fun. That’s wonderful, but we also find that most of them have neither accepted Christ as their savior nor altered the basis on which they make their moral and ethical decisions in life. For most teenagers who have spent years attending church activities their faith is not integrated into who they are and how they live. Most of the young people who claim they developed an understanding of the Bible that enables them to make decisions based on biblical principles show no evidence of using that understanding in relation to the core beliefs and lifestyle choices that we studied.”