Dear parents of youth,
Greetings! I hope this email finds you doing well! With the end of the summer now beginning to come into view, I wanted to give you this update on our parent-youth ministry for the coming ministry year.
First, we’ll resume our six14 parent + youth meetings in September. With both a members’ meeting and children’s ministry training occurring near the end of August, it seemed best to wait until September to start back up. For the coming year, I’m generally targeting the third Saturday evening of each month. So for the fall, we’re planning on the following dates for our corporate meetings: Sept. 19, Oct. 17, and Nov. 21.
To pull off our corporate meetings we’re going to need your help and the help of your youth. Our goal is to see as many youth as possible serving in this ministry context as a way of “owning” it – i.e., a way of thinking of this church increasingly as their church and not just their parents’ church. To that end, we have a parent-youth administrative team that organizes our meetings and serves to make them happen. If you and your (high school) youth would like to serve on the admin team, please contact Andrea about that (andrea@sgclife.org) by August 21. We may not be able to accommodate everyone who would like to be on this team, but knowing of your interest would be very helpful to us. Also, if you and your youth (of any age) would like to serve in some capacity during our meetings, know that we could use your help. There are many ways to serve – greeting, set-up, sound, music, etc. – and we’ll be asking for help for those areas very soon.
Second, if you have high school youth, we are also resuming our High School Growth Group in September. This context was a great blessing to me as we, together, engaged with God and his word by studying sound, biblical doctrine together while pursuing growth through the means of the spiritual disciplines. This year we’re going to continue working through chapters of the book Bible Doctrine, in which we’ll study the doctrine of sin, Christ and the atonement. In addition, we will supplement those discussions with the very practical and helpful book Worldliness. If you and your high school youth would like to participate this year, please let Andrea know that also. We meet on a Saturday morning at 8 a.m. once per month, beginning Sept. 19 as well. I will set future dates in our first meeting, since I’d like to hear from those participating as to what dates serve you best. For those who are going to participate in Growth Group, you will need to purchase Bible Doctrine and Worldliness, if you don’t already have them. However, for the September meeting I will email out an article to read for all those who intend to join us.
Third, we will have some Age of Opportunity parents’ meetings as well. My plan is to primarily work through a seminar taught by Greg Somerville on parenting in the middle-school years. I’ll let you know about dates and times for those meetings very soon.
Lastly, let me communicate what a privilege it is to serve you in this capacity. My aim as “youth pastor” is to support you, the parents, in your God-given task of discipleship. We want to do all we can do serve and support you in this holy task of parenting.
Grateful for you,
Tab
