Dawson McAllister’s 1999 book on the Millennial generation is aimed at parents and youth leaders. The title tells us quickly that those parents and leaders are concerned about the emerging generation and culture: 
Saving the Millennial Generation: New Ways to Reach the Kids You Care About in Uncertain Times

This book is nothing short of brilliant and should be in every youth workers library, and if not the only real excuse is that you’ve loaned it out to a young person for a while…

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Essential Youth Ministry Reading

Young people find this book “funny” which is not what you would usually expect from this kind of offering. It is certainly not “preachy” or typically conservative.

”The Sacred Life of Us” is written for young Christians beginning their faith journey but the value goes far beyond that, it will work equally well for older “new” Christians or for younger “not-so-new” Christians.

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I’ve just ordered a copy of Pete Ward’s sequel to “Liquid Church” titled “A Practical theology for the Liquid church” Liquid Church had me asking a lot of questions of my youth ministry and how I named the changes I was seeing in culture and I’m really looking forward to reading this new book. Participation [...]

Trevin Wax has just finished going through the new book by Robert Wuthnow “After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings are Shaping the Future of American Religion” chapter by chapter, his thoughts on the book are definitely worth the read. You might even want to go and read the book after you check the [...]

Presence Centred Youth Ministry is more than a quick fix to many of our youth ministries, infact it’s anything but a quick fix to anything, instead its a recognition that our ministries are for the long haul, that we need to see further than the short term, fast food, quick fix ministry. This is what Mike calls the art of the long view, this book is almost the anti-mcdonalds based youth ministry which many people still subscribe to and still wonder why it fails…

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“Youth workers as spiritual guides will resist being so consumed with planning and executing programs that they can’t guide their youth. The way of the kingdom is through relationships, not events. Youth workers who serve as spiritual guides for youth nurture a presence-centred youth ministry by engaging in the hard work of creating an environment of authentic community.” pp69

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Michael’s interested in exploring a culture’s ability to influence people, but moreso to enable people to enter into conversation with that culture and it’s meanings and signs that we would normally passively consume. I would say that this book however is about how we talk back to culture more than entering into conversation with it, a conversation goes on for some time, while it seems that Michael is speaking about a short-lived conversation in which culture speaks and we speak back ending the communication.

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Review of the book “4 Views of Youth Ministry” by Wesley Black (Author), Chap Clark (Author), Malan Nel (Author), Mark H. Senter III (Editor), Mark Senter (Author)

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