Back to Chicago

One of the most important things I feel we can teach people in their teenage years is a theology of mission. Not a theology of mission trips...although mission trips are tools we use to teach a theology of mission...but I am talking about viewing and living our lives missionally.

Part of learning to live a missional life seems to be finding places and people that God has specifically called us to reach and minister to. After all, it isn't very helpful to say, "I am called to be a missionary to the Western Hemisphere" or "I am called to reach Humans." We need a way to focus our mission. As my Missions professor in seminary said, we ought to pray fervently for God to "Give me (whatever place you feel called to) or give me death!" Part of what he meant by that is we need to search the Scriptures and get to know the way God has gifted us in order to figure out what place and what people God is calling us to, and then PLEAD to God for him to send us there and give us a ministry there! And then, we need to obey by making that place our ministry...our mission.

This is a big reason why we are going BACK to CHICAGO this year! We want to give our teenagers an opportunity to invest in a place and people so that they will begin to understand this concept of living a missional life in a specific place. We don't want them to just be a visitor or a tourist in Chicago, we want them to actually have an interest there. We want them to feel apart of the place and feel like it matters that they go there.

Whether Chicago becomes the place they are called to on a mission, or whether it is a place that inspires them to reach a different place, we pray that our students will begin to discern where God is calling them to be missional. It could be that they will be an actual Missionary, or maybe they will be called to go to school or work in a certain place, which will become their mission field.

Jesus promises us in Acts 1:8 that "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” We could say that Jerusalem represents a city, Judea a state/home country, and Samaria a foreign country that we could be called to. Where is your Jerusalem? Where is your Judea? Where is your Samaria?

For this week and for this Youth Ministry, it's Chicago!