Youth Empowered - Hospitality Empower Team

 

This week’s post is a continuation of our previous post, where we are releasing a new chapter of Youth Empowered for free, right here on Focusing on Jesus! Tune in each week to read a new portion of the chapter as we explore Empower Teams through a digital lens.

Hospitality Empower Team

In Youth Empowered, we asserted that the Hospitality Empower Team has the ability to play a large role in creating a safe and open space for students who are searching for a caring community. But how can we invite students to feel the presence of Christ within a digital community? If we were to ask such a question for our in-person side of youth ministry, we would likely find ourselves gravitating toward the practice of engagement. When we meet an individual at their needs and engage in a manner that honors them and celebrates their unique personhood, it lovingly informs them that they belong and that they have a God-given place within the community of believers. With in-person youth ministry, for example, this could look like you and your spouse grabbing some pizzas and inviting the students over to your house to watch a movie and play a few party games. But to live life with each other online, things can be done a little differently. Perhaps the Hospitality Empower Team can moderate a youth ministry Discord channel, where students can be a part of a church gaming community and play alongside their Christian peers. Or maybe the Empower Team can setup a “Homework Club” on Zoom, where students can login and help one another with homework or simply just encourage one another as they study.

Similar to in-person youth ministry, the key to building digital bridges is to engage. While the examples we just mentioned above are “in-the-moment events” that happen between two or more individuals in real time, one of the most powerful ways to build digital bridges on an ongoing basis is to genuinely interact with one another on social media. After all, if the Hospitality Empower Team’s goal is to invite guests to live their lives together with us, it only makes sense that we venture to where a large portion of our students’ time is currently being spent.

Imagine being a teenager in today’s world who is struggling to find their identity or find a community where they can feel safe and understood. By the grace of God, you find your way to a church’s website and their youth ministry’s social media page. After checking it out, you decide to connect with the youth ministry by becoming an online follower. Next, pretend that you receive five to ten follow requests from peers within that church’s youth ministry. This pleasantly surprises you, to be acknowledged by a community that reaches out and makes an effort to connect. And while this by itself is flattering, imagine then what it would be like to notice that the students begin to not only “like” your posts, but also to comment regularly on your content, to provide encouraging remarks when you share your heart on social media, and to even tag you in content that they know you would be interested in. Suddenly, social media is no longer this place where we speak into a void, but instead it becomes a vibrant community where its members genuinely connect and build relationship with each other.

Yet for some teenagers that spend countless hours online, this is easier said than done. “Following” someone on social media can be a big deal in today’s age, for two reasons. First, from the perspective of the public eye, other teens can see this and there’s a chance that they’ll think we are condoning or agreeing with all of the content of this person we are now following. In the “cancel culture” that we live in today, the implications of this reality are weighed heavily (especially by teens who are trying to jockey for position or keep up appearances with one another). Second, from the perspective of the self, this means that we agree to have this individual’s content show up in our feeds. Should we not take a liking to the things that they share, this can be frustrating for us to see such content come across our screens.

However, this conundrum isn’t new. As a matter of fact, this struggle of keeping up one’s image was experienced in Jesus’ day as well! It’s just that in the first century, the Pharisees would keep up their image within the community to show how good they practiced their religion. By associating oneself with the sinners, the lepers, or the sexually immoral, they would be at risk of being branded as one of them (i.e. Mark 2: 13-17, Luke 15:1-2, etc). To prevent any rumor of this from rising up, the Pharisees would simply solve the problem by dodging these outcasts and staying away from them. But Jesus was different. Not only did He go to the lepers and the sinners, He healed them in such a manner that the individuals were able to be welcomed and incorporated back into Jewish culture. If a person’s social media feed has disagreeable content that lacks a Christian essence, do we dodge them out of fear of public opinion, like the Pharisees did to sinners? Or do we lovingly move toward these individuals, minister to them, and introduce them to Jesus so that their hearts are healed and their social media accounts become transformed and begin to share content that is filtered through the lens of Christianity?

To strategically utilize social media for hospitality may be a new concept for our youth, for they have grown accustomed to the idea that social media is for gaining followers and interacting with their followers in such a way that it benefits the self instead of the goal of building up the other. It’s important to emphasize that this isn’t just surface level “friending” online. In a way, this is returning to the good-natured founding principles of social media, circa 2004. Here, we build genuine, ongoing relationships in an intentionally orchestrated effort that engages and interacts with one another through digital means. Looking at hospitable social media use within a student-led youth ministry requires students to think outside the box. However, if the Hospitality Empower Team remains consistent, nonbelievers' perception of the church will improve over time. Because of your students’ willingness to be genuine in their engagement, their friends will inevitably become more intrigued to know who this Jesus is and what their youth ministry movement is doing within the community.