Dear Friends,
As we prepare to gather this fall, I want to share how we approach ministering to our youth and invite you to take another step forward into the life of our Youth Fellowship.
At Redeemer, we describe our life together with the phrase "Gospel Formation for Missional Presence," and because our Youth Fellowship is an integral part of the whole of Redeemer, this is true for us as well.
Gospel Formation presses on every way that we relate to Jesus; it involves how we think about Jesus, who we believe he is, and how we choose to follow his teachings.
When we say that we want to be formed in the gospel, we make an essential pivot away from the gospel as an abstraction, concept, or memory tucked away in our minds, and we move towards its full claim: Jesus is the life of the world, and we are invited to make our life in him.
The gospel is essentially about new life in God. It is about being born again, the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come – a whole new creation in Jesus. The Gospel could never be just another commodity that we can choose to fit – or not fit – into our lives. It encompasses everything, and it calls us to give everything we are and everything we have to the hope of renewal in Jesus.
This is all to say that what we believe about the gospel shapes everything about how we share it with our students.
As we, the Youth Fellowship team, pursue formation in the gospel together as we practice our new life in Jesus, we will invite our students to be formed along with us.
We want them to practice with us the new identity that Jesus gives us as sons and daughters of God; we want them to know that the true stories of their lives are not defined by the victories and defeats of middle or high school but by the victory of Jesus over all things and all time. On and on, we want to be formed completely in the life of Jesus together.
In the end, it is our own formation in the gospel, our own practiced life in the new creation, that is our missional presence to one another. This is what Redeemer Youth Fellowship is all about, and we are excited to begin again!
With Peace,
