Don (our senior pastor and my boss) asked me to come up with some ideas of what I could talk about at the LEAD class (for more on what LEAD is, go to the end of this post).
I love that we have this class, instead of just assuming that leaders will teach themselves, and I’m excited to get to be a part of teaching it, even if constricting myself to one topic is tough.
So, back to the title question of the post: Of all the things that I wish our elders and other leaders in our church understood about young adults, what do I say?
Here are the four finalist ideas I came up with:
– What are the generational distinctives of the millennial generation? How do these compare with Busters, Boomers, and Gen X’ers?
– What are the perceived strengths and weaknesses of our congregation according to the church survey?
– How does social justice relate to evangelism and evangelicalism? – A historical discussion of our past debates and how they are affecting the conversation about what the gospel is.
– How do we use technology at Grace? – How we use facebook, the church website, newsletters, telephones, twitter, the bulletin, and email to advance the mission.
Don ended up choosing the third option. It’s certainly the most ambitious project of the four (how am I going to be able to explain 200 years of historical theology in 5 minutes?), but a vital one for understanding young adults. I’ll explain why here on the blog in the weeks to come, and might take a shot at the other ideas as well.
*LEAD is a 12 week series taught each spring at our church on Sunday evenings, designed to help equip people in our church for leadership. It’s a mixture of systematic theology (selections from Grudem’s Systematic Theology are assigned) and an explanation of our ministry philosophy. Each of our ministry staff come once and explain our ministry area and a topic pertinent to it.
Bob Wriedt 
Don chose social justice
over technology?
shocking!