Prophets Among Us: Offering Youth Space to Live into Prophetic Witness
This post by Jonathan D’Amico on Building Faith outlines concrete ways to engage Young People in the ownership of their own Christian Formation without watering down scripture or the theology of The Episcopal Church. Jonathan is the Youth Minister at Church of the Servant in Wilmington and creatively used the study of Prophets in the Bible to engage the young people in his parish in the mission of the church. He re-emphasizes the importance of engaging young people in real ways of making an impact on their local communities and the world. Jonathan poses an excellent question in this post:
“Data shows that younger generations — millennials, GenZ — are not necessarily leaving the faith as much as they are leaving the organizational religious structures and renegotiating the faith they were given. Their powerful, loud, honest, and truthful voices are still speaking; they are just going out there into the world with it because that is where they are being led. That is where they find space. That is what prophets do. Our youth heed that whisper in their hearts, something in their guts, and they go. As the church body, we should start to listen and see where they lead us. What if we turned our ear to the prophets in our youth groups and children’s ministries?”