The 2007 predictions go on....

Along with a handful of other youth focused organizations, international youth ministry Dare 2 Share recently released their top five teen predictions to watch for in 2007. One of the more interesting and notables is that teens are increasingly living a contradictory lifestyle...they're locked up in their rooms while being involved in "community." Obviously they're pointing to MySpace.com, Facebook and others.

We have just one question to ask? Is anyone out there starting to make sense of all these predictions, studies and facts? Sign up for this years SHIFT conference. We're going to hit this kind of stuff head-on together.

A look into 2007

Trendwatching.com released their 2007 trend watch list. We should point out that this is a list that they've compiled from not only their own research, but from the masses of people out there who are making their predictions known. Relatively speaking, to-date, they've been pretty on target. Although you maybe tempted to read through this article and leave it at that, we challenge you to step back and begin asking some deeper questions.

1. If the heart of today's generation is set to become "transsumers" (defined as: An obsession with the here and now, an ever-shorter satisfaction span, and a lust to collect as many experiences and stories as possible, is undermining the perceived value (and thus status) of fixed goods and services.)...
— How does that affect the church? Does that affect the church? Should we care?

2. What is at the true heart of the social network sites? Trendwatching declares "In a post-material world, all that’s left to covet is…. other people? From networking sites to buddy lists to meetup.org to a boom in members-only clubs, social status 2.0 is all about who you connect to and who wants to connect to you, tribal-style."
— Will this change the way you are connecting and communicating with your students?

And finally, we've heard from the older generation that all you need to teach is Jesus and relevancy will line-up. On the flip-side, the younger generation seems to declare that you have to both teach Jesus and find ways to speak to the students that mean something to them. So, we ask the simple question...

Can you disregard "relevancy" and simply focus on the heart, compassion and truth of Jesus? Will that alone, reach our students?