SPEAKERS AND ARTISTS

Creating a Theology of Cultural Engagement

(Seminar Series #4)

Nov 2 1:30 PM-3:00 PM

Pittsburgh

As you know, the Open Source Seminar format is a new thing at NYWC this year. I’m excited to be a part of the trail-blazing team on such a crucial and timely topic for youth ministry as cultural engagement. Our ministries will stand or fall based on the approach we take to this topic in the course of our daily interactions with kids. Now we get to work together on shaping how we’ll spend our (all-too-short) 90 minutes together. At this point my goal is to challenge each attendee to think through the spectrum of contemporary approaches to faith and culture, while evaluating not only where they do fall on the spectrum, but also where they should fall. Then, I’d like to look at some basic skills for cultural engagement, along with practical examples and perhaps some practice of each. Since 90 minutes is a very short time to address any topic with much depth, I’d like to use our ability to social network together after the convention to do some stuff individually that we can then process together. This could include some short directed readings and interaction with each other on what we’ve read, tackling a single or a variety of cultural expressions (films, TV shows, books, magazines, and so on) and then interacting on each while discovering ways the cultural piece informs or can be used in our ministries, and so on. In other words, our time of interaction won’t end at the 90-minute mark!