This is especially true for youth. Student’s are bombarded with different ideas, opinions and worldviews everyday. They find themselves in a wide range of difficult social situations and they are just learning who they are as people and are starting to dream about who they want to become as they grow up. Middle school and High school are crazy and confusing times for youth but they are also some o
f the most formative years than you experience. The things that we learn as youth help to shape us into the adults we become late in life. This is why student ministry is so important. We have three guiding principles for our youth group:
1. We think that youth should know about God as much as they know God. Knowing God and knowing about God are two different things. However, both are very important. We can’t know someone that we don’t know anything about. We want youth to become followers of Jesus but we also want youth to know who Jesus was, what he taught and why it matters to them today. This is done through culturally relevant bible studies, topical lessons, theological conversations and general fun community time. Our aim is to help youth not only be followers of Christ but to know who he was in a deeper and culturally relevant way.
2. We want youth to be empowered to be able to continually and faithfully follow Christ every day. What does it mean for a student to follow Christ and be faithful everyday? What does it look like for a student to follow Christ at school, at home, during sports, with friends? These are some of the central questions facing youth as they learn what it means to follow Jesus every day during their normal lives. We think that youth group and church are vital and important aspects of the lives of youth as well as the way that youth engage with each other and the world around them during their daily lives. As an old saying goes, “being a Christian on Sunday is easy, it’s on Monday that it becomes hard.” We here at Cornwall Student Ministries seek to empower youth to take what they learn and participate in during youth group on Sunday and live it out in their daily lives the rest of the week.
3. We think that Youth should have a safe place to ask questions, wrestle with their faith, and grow together as a community. At Cornwall Student Ministry, we seek to create and embody a safe environment where youth can ask hard questions, wrestle with issues of faith and the Bible and grow together as a community. Youth are at a point in lives where they are starting to think for themselves and beginning to question everything around them. While some people might be uncomfortable with this, because youth tend to question some of the aspects and core values that adults hold as sacred, we here at CUMC Student Ministries encourage questions and strive to create an environment where youth feel comfortable enough to ask questions and wrestle with the big issues of faith and life. We have a saying, “an honest question is never a bad one” and we seek to live that out as a group. Honest seeking and youthful questioning aren’t the only things that happen at CUMC Student Ministries. We seek to present various issues of faith that aren’t clear cut with the aim of having youth wrestle through their own opinions about things and to challenge them to take responsibility for their own faith and come up with their own opinions. We discuss various issues of ethics, current events, experiences that youth have in school among others. We know that the best thing you can do for a student is to empower them to take ownership of their own faith, and that students who do, will continue to grow in their relationship with Jesus even when they are out of our program. Community and relationship are important words for us at Cornwall Student Ministries. God created us to be in community with Himself and with each other and we believe that Community and relationship are two of the foremost lenses through which Christians should view the world. We seek to create a space where students can come and get to know God, each other and the leaders.
