yamia

I have been looking forward to Mark Oestreicher’s new book Youth Ministry 3.0 for a while and finally got a copy of it. Mark previewed a lot of the book on his site before its release, so I was really quite pleased to finally get the book.

The book starts out looking through how youth ministry started and how it grew through the ages. YM 1.0 is fairly well portrayed and YM 2.0 is so honestly portrayed that it is painful at times to think that many youth ministries still operate under that ideology. Those are just precursors to what Oestreicher is getting at, though, and that is YM 3.0.

Mark has made it pretty clear that he isn’t proposing a new formula for youth ministry with this book. Instead, this book takes a “where we might go” kind of approach. I would have to say that I was happy with the outcomes and with how he expressed each stage of youth ministry through the years. There are many possible areas that are pointed out. I especially liked the ideas of a communional group and multiple youth groups within a youth ministry. The communional thought is based around teens desires for a more ancient expression of our faith applied to a more contemporary format. There is also the idea that youth ministries might be better suited to having multiple meetings that draw from affinities within the ministry. Either way, the book is a more vague idea of where we might be headed. Some people will no doubt be frustrated by the lack of concrete direction in the book, but that really isn’t what it is trying to accomplish.

This would be a great book for a youth pastor to get his senior pastor so that he understood why the ministry wasn’t like it was 10 or 20 years ago. This would also be a great book for a veteran who is trying to re-imagine what they do or try new things. It would also be a great book for someone new to ministry who is just trying to figure the whole thing out. I guess it would be a great book for lots of people.

What I like:
— The Cover (just looks good, unlike a lot of youth ministry books designed by ADD graphic artists)
— Quotes from people in the trenches ( a lot of good sound bytes)
— The examples from the past are really great in showing how really wrong some of the stuff we used was and yet how well it worked.
— The last two chapters I would say that everyone in youth ministry need to have in their face almost every day they plan anything in youth ministry.
— It’s short, so almost anybody can finish it in a day. No beating around the bush.
— It has a Facebook site already up to discuss it. Seriously could be something cool if people are willing to be honest.

What I didn’t like:
Not much, but…
— It was short (I know, I liked that it was short, but I really want to flesh this whole book out some more)
— I think the possibilities pointed to could be fleshed out more. There could be more options than what is offered for the preferred future (though I don’t think it could necessarily be done by one guy, even if it is Mark).
— I was thinking more and more about individual guys and how their gifting fits into where youth ministry will go in the future. I would love to hear more about that, though again, that might be beyond the scope of this book.

In a nutshell, I think this is an important book for youth ministry. I put it in the same category as Jim Burn’s The Youth Builder and Walt Mueller’s Engaging the Soul of Youth Culture, both of which I recommend to anyone in youth ministry who hasn’t read them. Way to go Mark, now let’s get some ideas flying and hear some stories of attempts in 3.0.

Get Youth Ministry 3.0: A Manifesto of Where Weve Been, Where We Are & Where We Need to Go from Amazon