1) You've got the Message wrong. When I got my first staff position as a youth director, I honestly didn't give a whole lot of thought to the Message. I was a relative new believer with no formal theological training. Sure, I taught about Jesus, and I know that by God's grace lives were transformed during my time there. But I'm also sure that there were many things I taught that were more out of my own head rather than out of the Bible, and the church I served wasn't all that interested in monitoring what I was teaching.
When we find a clever movie clip and throw in a Bible verse that relates to it, we're not teaching, we're faking. What are you teaching about who Jesus is? What are you teaching about suffering? What are you teaching about how Jesus portrays discipleship? Doctrine shouldn't be a dirty word in youth ministry. We need to make sure we have the Message straight. And we need to do this out of humility, realizing that we have no knowledge that hasn't come to us through God's grace. When we teach out of a boastful, prideful desire to be right, we dishonor God. We're not right; God is.
I have found it odd that for all the chatter on youth ministry blogs, the collective youth ministry community talks very little about the Message. Why is that? Sure, we won't agree on everything, but that just shows that we are finite human beings with an incomplete understanding of God and his Word. What we believe matters. What we teach matters. How we portray God (in word AND in action) matters. I think if we gave a lot more attention to the Message and a lot less attention to the methods, we'd be a lot better off.
2) The methods do not communicate the Message. I covered most of this in Part 2, so I won't go into much detail here, only to reiterate that our methods should be an outpouring of our desire to see teenagers "get" the Message and fall madly in love with Jesus. If you say you're about teenagers knowing Jesus but your methods don't communicate that, there's a problem. If we really believe that teenagers need Jesus, then lets give them Jesus and nothing less.
