Dr. David Livermore and Dr. Terry Linhart’s latest book, What Can We Do? released last month. This text aims to provide youth ministers with practical ways they can get their teens putting their faith into action. Fostering a global conscience has come to permeate the ethos of evangelical youth ministry in the past few years. A timely release, What Can We Do? follows the authors’ Global Youth Ministry (YS Academic) book, which contains stories of youth workers reaching youth around the world.
In What Can We Do?, the authors advocate for churches to be at the forefront of offering solution-oriented responses to how youth can make a difference today. Packed with case studies, you read real-life scenarios from youth around the world as the authors weave the stories into their teaching contained in each chapter. See, Learn, and Serve are the 3 sections of this text as the authors remind us how “twenty years ago, most North American Christians spent very little time talking about subjects such as poverty, HIV/AIDS, immigration, and the need for clean water” (p. 25). As I read this text, glimpses of Livermore’s Cultural Intelligence work shine through. Resources and websites show up throughout the text as well.
In an age where it’s rare to find a youth group that has not crossed an international border, Livermore & Linhart break down the 7 billion-person population of the world into a Global Village. Clearly the highlight of this text, the authors provide a snap shot of 100 people representing the world. Of those one hundred: fifty are malnourished, 1 has a college education, and 1 has HIV. The other statistics are tangible, and yet, heart-wrenching – you have to read them for yourself.
After doing youth ministry for the past 8 years, I think back to how I have thought about the teenagers I am addressing. Here’s how it’s been: I would stand in front of youth groups and camps and conventions and I would pray and believe and preach, saying that the next great evangelist might be in the room. I’d believe that there were some in the room who would be missionaries someday. I’d believe there were some who would go on to be pastors. Some who would go on to be youth pastors. Those are all nice and good thoughts, are they not? But here’s the reality that I have recently come to through spending time with this text: The current teens within youth groups across this country will “over the next decade…be raising their own families, slogging it out in the workplace, and serving in the local church” (p. 155). The authors reminded me that a student with a business career has the ability to impact his field to forge a new way of partnering with migrant farm workers. Future filmmakers, authors, and teachers also sit in our youth groups and will someday have global audiences. The definition of the presence of Christ in them now is critical to the person they will one day become.
If alleviating poverty, going green, doing short-term mission projects, justice, immigration, prejudice, racism, globalization, or sex-trafficking, are topics you want to address/discuss in your youth group, this book is a great starting place for you. Finally, if you have youth in your group that have big dreams of changing the world and you are scared of how to help/encourage them, Chapter 13, “Fifteen Year Olds Changing the World” is surely for you.
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