I have been conscious recently of how easy it is to be busy in ministry and to not give enough time over to God, to study and to general thinking. The following quote that I discovered in This Way to Youth Ministry by Duffy Robbins sums it up well:
“Most often youth workers – and especially youth pastors – are very pragmatic and oriented to the program: fun and games, Bible studies, camps, retreats, social activities, and such things. It is a little difficult to talk about philosophy and theology with youth workers in the morning when they know they are taking care of fiften junior highers that same evening. Further, youth workers have a reputation not of being “thinkers” but doers, being more interested in how to do youth ministry than in the reasons and basis of it.
But this is the problem. The tyranny of the immediate forces many to neglect the weightier matters of youth ministry.”
John Dettoni, Introduction to Youth Ministry, (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1993), p. 17 cited in
This Way to Youth Ministry (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2004), p. 16
