More emails!

This is the next email I received... this one from Darin, also a fellow Royal Servant and head over the UK branch of ICY. I sent him the same email I sent Colin a few days ago and this was his response:


Hi Shelley!
Really good to hear from you. I know that Colin emailed you back some answers to your questions so I hope that was helpful. But I also just wanted to say hi as a fellow Royal Servant alum and put a few more thoughts out there. God actually used RS in a big way to get us over here...we worked with churches in Glasgow and saw the total lack of young people in the church. Less than 1% of teenagers in the UK go to church!

I think Colin was right when he said that all the different tracks (Bth, MA and missional leaders) are all practical. A lot of the credit you get for your Bth is earned by doing youth ministry. The way it works is that you sit in on your class lectures for a week every two months...so 6 times/year. Then you are working on reading and essays on your own time. One of cool things with the whole scheme is that you are put into a cluster of trainees...people who are doing the same thing as you in different churches. You meet up weekly and do lots of ministry things together. And this is where you also learn and practice a lot of the basic ministry skills.
I guess I would say the benefit of actually doing the Bth is that you come out with a proper degree...so when you go to get a job people can see that you have taken the time to get the professional training. Plus, it forces you to think through things theologically, ministry and church that you don’t normally force yourself to wrestle with.

The degree is really affordable. It’s about $4400/year and it’s a 3 year degree (all Bachelors degrees in UK/Europe are 3 years). All of your other expenses are covered (food, housing, weekly allowance, ministry expenses) except for your plane ticket to and from here. So you can get a degree without having huge debt...especially if you have saved up for it or your family helps out. And hopefully, in the meantime, God breaks your heart for teenagers in the UK and you want to stay long-term to minister with us!

I wrote this same paragraph to Becca, but I think it’s helpful to start to get a feel for what kinds of ministry things you would be doing...
Most of the churches we work with take on a trainee because they really have a heart to reach young people, but do not have a lot of money to put towards paying someone (youth ministry as a profession is fairly new here) and do not have the expertise to raise somebody up. So most in our ICY family are pioneering youth ministry in churches that do not have a large existing youth group. So if you think missionary to a jungle tribe that hasn’t been reached before it’s probably a lot closer to reality than American church youth pastor...well, without the snakes and strange diseases!
You can do ministry in schools here as a Christian youth worker. So most of the trainees spend a few hours a week in the school, building relationships through outreach groups or mentoring. Then if there are a few teenagers in the church, it’s starting to bring them together to grow in their faith and form a group identity. Usually it’s helping out on a Sunday morning with youth or slightly younger than youth. Then finding ways to start groups for kids from the schools-work to come and hear the gospel and transitioning those who make commitments into small groups that will help them keep growing in their faith.
Our vision is to raise up the next generation of youth ministers who will build youth disciple-making movements...so raising up young people and creating ministries who will make disciples...who make disciples...who make disciples...which should sound pretty familiar from your summer and is the only way the huge population of non-Christian young people here will ever encounter Jesus!


It’s really exciting to talk with RS alumni about this Shelley!! As you can imagine, this is a challenging experience and it’s hard to find people who are cut out for it. We just feel like with fellow RS people, we know who we are getting and we know they have already experienced some key ministry forming things.

Hope this helps and wasn’t too long. Let’s keep talking!

- darin