Alleviating Poverty through
Biblically Based Business

Disciple: Engaging youth

While many of our churches have a range of ages within them, each working and worshipping together, many more have a distinctly unbalanced congregation, some with very few active members under 50 years of age (my own local church is sadly a case in point).  As a result, they have trouble reaching out to the youth in the communities of which they are part, since they not only lack members of that age, they are often missing an entire generation in between as well.  Invitations to ‘youth groups’ run by ‘fuddy-duddys’ are sadly not that compelling. 

In our own youth group, we have been experimenting with the idea of ‘Entrepreneurship’ as a way of engaging the young in our community who have no relationship with the Church or who it serves.  The idea of learning how to set up your own business appeals to teenagers, particularly when they get the chance to do it for real, with real money, and the explicit scriptural wisdom within Workbook 1 will help them to realise that there is more to this ‘Jesus’ whom they have so readily discounted than meets the eye.

And the counterparts of our youth in the Developing World are crying out for those same skills too.  So our model here is to establish a regular evening meeting once or twice a month, inviting all those teenagers who would like to learn how to set up their own business to attend, on the condition that when they are successful, they use their skills and the first fruits of their harvest to teach the same skills to those in their last year of school in the Developing World. 

As yet we have no results to share on this, but for those who feel that God is nudging them in this direction, Chapter 8 of Workbook 0 may offer a useful start point.

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