Collection › LCMS Convention Workbook (St. Louis, Missouri) › 1969 · 48th Convention › Page 349
LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 1969, Page 349

Scan: The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod
Transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

PARISH EDUCATION AND SERVICES 349

3. Youth Ministry

According to synodical resolution the Board of Parish
Education has been assigned the task of developing
appropriate religious materials for the church’s youth.
In developing these materials the Synod has asked that
special attention be given to actively involving youth
in the church's mission to the world.

The Board of Parish Education has attempted to carry
out the Synod’s wishes by producing a variety of instruc-
tional materials for youth in Bible classes, informal
groups, and Lutheran community high schools.

The board exercises care to avoid overlap with the
program of the Synod’s Board for Young People’s Work.
To avoid overlap, the Parish Education Board requested
its youth editors to meet with representatives of the
Board for Young People’s Work on a continuing basis.
Through such meetings both boards have been able to
know and understand the other’s activities as well as
plan for joint approaches to the church’s youth.

The result has been an emphasis on the production
of materials which support and enrich the church’s
youth program. This has helped the local parish as it
attempts to maintain a clear, single-minded, viable
approach to its youth.

4. Adult Education

The purpose of these brief paragraphs is first to hint
at some of the circumstances our Christian men and
women face as they attempt to teach the Gospel of Jesus
Christ within their own adult community setting. Then
we will venture some tentative plans on how to do this
teaching more effectively.

a. Issues

The issues we face are the situations in which Chris-
tian adults live out their daily lives. Christian adult edu-
cators must recognize these situations. The overriding
question is this: “How can Christian adults communicate
to each other and to their community the meaning of their
faith in Jesus Christ in such a way that they make a
difference in the style of life there?”’

1) Adults Are Individual Men and Women. Perhaps
the first breakthrough occurs when we recognize that
adults are individual men and women. Too often in the
church we have thought of the men as husbands and
fathers, and of the women only as wives and mothers.
Men and women are more than parents. First, they are
men and women. They possess personal hopes and fears.
They are capable of personal sins as well as noble per-
sonal action. As Christians they want to discover new and
deeper personal meaning in life. They hope their con-
gregations will accept them as individuals and help them
toward a fuller personal ministry. They want and need
to be considered as persons, not simply as contributors
to a family unit or a congregation family.

2) Modern Technology Is Rough on Middle-Aged
Adults. Another facet of adult life is illustrated by the
fact that many who are over 40 years of age are bewil-
dered by the sharp increase in the number of business,

industry, and community leaders who are under 35.
Many must retrain in order to hold any job at all. Anxious
and insecure, they wonder whether they can serve any
useful purpose again, especially if their new jobs are
part-time or do not provide a sense of fulfillment. In a
society that still honors work as something good, these
adults are treated with less respect by a younger genera-
tion of producers. But older adults continue to seek that
respect as a signal of their worth and usefulness.

3) Relating Faith to Decisions. When Christian men
and women are on the job —and they are for most of their
waking day—they encounter increasing difficulty in
relating their faith in Jesus Christ to the decisions they
must make. What happens when a Christian on the job is
asked to do something that goes counter to his training
and conscience? Can he stand up to the system? He is
not likely to. He will more likely violate his conscience
and carry out the order given him because he is expected
to react favorably toward duly constituted authority. He
rationalizes that the system puts him outside the decision-
making process and therefore he is required to obey the
memo and implement the policy, not judge its moral
validity. What could he do to change it anyway?

4) Multiple Situations. Space prevents picturing the
variety of other situations in which Christian men and
women live. We cannot mention all the circumstances
they meet when they try to be God’s men and women,
sharing their Christian faith with people wherever they
are. And we have not even begun to mention those issues
that grow specifically out of the life of the organized
church; for example, clerical versus lay leadership, the
role of the pastor as the congregation’s chief teacher of
adults, and the relationship between preaching and
teaching, worship and education. Yet identifying these
conditions as issues is basic to planning the continuing
education of men and women in the mission of Jesus
Christ.

b. Solutions

How do we go about resolving the issues that confront
us in Christian adult education? First, no new technique
or tactic will suffice. It’s not a new method we need.
Rather we must recover for ourselves meaningful mem-
bership in the body of Jesus Christ, relying on Him to
motivate and sustain us. He wants to give us His own
mind so that we might be like Him, servants of the
heavenly Father for our time and our world. He wants
to give us His own Spirit so that He can guide us to know
His purposes and grant the energy to be faithful to them.

The goal of continuing education among Christians is
to enable men and women to know what Christ expects
of them as His modern disciples and to yield themselves
more fully to the claim He has on them because He re-
deemed them for service to God the Father. They are no
longer their own. They belong to Him. Now they can
nurture each other in His forgiveness and put them-
selves at His disposal.

c. Experimental Programs
Over the past biennium several experimental pro-