The Lilly Endowment Inc. has awarded the Center for Youth Ministry Training $240,000 to fund its Theology Together program over the next three years. Over the past 20 years, the Lilly Endowment Inc. has awarded nearly $90 million in grants to fund their Youth and Theology Initiative. Theology Together will seek to learn from and build upon previous Youth and Theology projects.
Andrew Zirschky, CYMT’s Academic Director, will serve as the Theology Together project director.
Theology Together seeks to educate youth workers in tandem with the teenagers with whom they minister while changing the climate of congregational youth ministry as they together introduce theological dialogue, vocational discernment, and reflective action into the fabric and flow of youth ministry in the local church.
By creating an environment in which youth are engaged in theological discussion and reflective action with their youth leaders, not only are youth expanded in their theological knowledge and conceptions, but youth leaders are simultaneously trained in the art of engaging young people in theological dialogue. An added benefit is that youth and adults return to the congregational context together to further expand the theological repertoire and engagement of the entire youth ministry.
Every Theology Together immersion experience, then, (a) combines robust theological and vocational exploration for youth in the context of relational service work, (b) equips youth workers to conduct theological discussions with young people, and (c) fosters the development of creative and theologically rich youth ministry practices within congregational youth ministry.
Five objectives will guide the efforts of Theology Together:
Theology Together seeks to appropriate best practices gleaned from high school theology programs and deploy these for transforming congregational youth ministry. We suggest that transforming congregational youth ministry is most likely to occur by bringing youth workers and youth together in educational and transformational experiences, and then equipping, encouraging, and resourcing them to initiate ongoing practices of theological and vocational discernment in their parish youth ministries.
The Theology Together Program has four major components:
The CYMT will begin immediately to identify a date, location, and key leaders for the 2014 Missional Immersion Experience. We will distribute the details of how CYMT partner and alumni churches can participate as soon as they are available.
Olivia Keffer and Makenzie Knowlden have been friends since the beginning of their CYMT graduate residence journey, and this friendship has turned out to be one of the things that helped them make it to graduation day. Their story is one of affirming fellowship between two women who, despite living in different cities, helped each other answer their call to youth ministry.
Classroom: One of CYMT’s 5 Components of a Holistic Ministry Training Experience CYMT values the role of theological education in the life of a youth […]
The Center for Youth Ministry Training (CYMT) recently received a $1.19MM grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., to fund the next phase of the Innovation Laboratory. The grant will enable CYMT to strengthen the Innovation Lab by building on what we learned from our original cohorts and tweaking our process and strategy for greater impact.