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Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church by [Powell, Kara, Mulder, Jake, Griffin, Brad]

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Kara Powell

Jake Mulder

Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church Kindle Edition

by Kara Powell (Author), Jake Mulder (Author), Brad Griffin (Author)

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Unleashing the Passion of Young People in Your Church Is Possible!

Churches are losing both members and vitality as increasing numbers of young people disengage. Based on groundbreaking research with over 250 of the nation's leading congregations, Growing Young provides a strategy any church can use to involve and retain teenagers and young adults. It profiles innovative churches that are engaging 15- to 29-year-olds and as a result are growing--spiritually, emotionally, missionally, and numerically. Packed with both research and practical ideas, Growing Young shows pastors and ministry leaders how to position their churches to engage younger generations in a way that breathes vitality, life, and energy into the whole church.

Visit www.churchesgrowingyoung.org for more information.

Length: 336 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Page Flip: Enabled	Language: English

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Kara Powell is the executive director of the Fuller Youth Institute and a faculty member at Fuller Theological Seminary. Named by Christianity Today as one of "50 Women to Watch," Kara is the author or coauthor of several books, including Sticky Faith, and a regular speaker at national leadership and youth ministry conferences across the country.

Jake Mulder is the director of strategic initiatives at the Fuller Youth Institute and is pursuing a PhD at Fuller Theological Seminary. He has worked in a variety of ministry and professional roles, including as a youth pastor in the Reformed Church of America, ministry director with Youth for Christ, and missionary with Youth with a Mission (YWAM) in Europe and Asia.

Brad Griffin is director of the Fuller Youth Institute. A speaker, blogger, and youth pastor, Brad is the coauthor of several Sticky Faith resources as well as Can I Ask That? 8 Hard Questions about God and Faith. He speaks nationally at churches, leadership training events, and youth ministry conferences.

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Format: Kindle Edition
File Size: 4550 KB
Print Length: 336 pages
Publisher: Baker Books (20 September 2016)
Sold by: Amazon Australia Services, Inc.
Language: English
ASIN: B01L9IVGCM
Text-to-Speech: Enabled

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Word Wise: Enabled
Screen Reader: Supported

Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled

Customer Reviews: 2 customer reviews
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #47,474 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #15 in Christian Church Growth
- #8 in Church Growth
- #20 in Church Leadership

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Engaging and persuasive

29 December 2016

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

This is an excellent, thoughtful and thought-provoking book. In God we trust...everyone else, bring data! And the authors have done just that, with clear explanations of how they discovered their insights and rigorous research descriptions provided as an appendix. Kara, Jake and Brad offer sound theology AND organisational change theory AND personal stories and analogies and metaphors that beguile the imagination and help people from very different church contexts draw commonalities from the particular cases that they report in this book. As an older lay woman with strong sense of the ministry of all believers, and a leadership role in my parish, this book really hit the mark, resonating strongly with so much going on in my parish that is teetering between growing young and continuing to grow old.

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Tom

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19 December 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Really good, practical ideas for helping the church reach and keep young people. Worth reading.

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Joel

Flawed design undermines findings and erodes confidence in the implications

31 October 2016 - Published on Amazon.com

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This review is a protest vote. I bought it after reading the October 28 interview with Ed Stetzer on his popular CT blog “the Exchange,” and was eager to see the results of the study. The book is one result of the Churches Engaging Young People (CEYP) project by the Fuller Youth Institute, which represented an enormous amount of time and effort. From their research documents: “The goal of the project was to understand how and why exemplary churches are effectively engaging teenagers and emerging adults.” The primary research question was “What congregational practices lead to effective engagement of young people?” However, the research design cannot answer the research question, so the book does not answer the question. That alone is not cause for protest, but I object to the book drawing conclusions and making recommendations that go beyond what the data can support. It’s not right to use “its research!” as evidence of credibility and then sell ancillary materials, assessments, coaching, etc. as if they’re based on solid evidence when the research has serious limitations.

The design is essentially a description of a highly select sample with no comparison group, because they collected information only on successful churches and not unsuccessful churches. Although this does yield a list of common characteristics, there is no basis to assert that these characteristics have anything to do with the success of the churches in working with youth.

To illustrate why the design cannot answer the research question, consider the hypothetical example of identifying common characteristics of winning race horses. Imagine that a sample of recent winners produces these top three characteristics of winning race horses: they’re brown, they’re expensive, and they have big heavy hearts. The first common characteristic (brown) is merely incidental and likely because a lot of horses are brown. There’s no attempt to determine whether winning race horses are more likely to be brown than losing race horses, and there’s nothing about the color of a horse that would suggest that it is in any way responsible for helping the horse win. So “take Jesus’ message seriously” is probably a goal of all evangelical churches, whether or not they are successful with youth. With respect to being expensive, this is an instance of reverse-causality—they’re expensive because they win, and so for example if successful churches are empathizing with young people (another one of the core commitments they identify), this could be due to the large proportion of youth in these churches (e.g., increased opportunity for interaction) and not the other way around. The last characteristic—large heavy hearts—probably plays a causal role in race horses running faster, but “large” implies a comparison group as in “larger than the hearts of the losing race horses.” The CYEP project had no such comparison group, so for example “take Jesus’ message seriously” might be equally present (or even more present) in unsuccessful churches.

So the absence of a comparison group is a serious threat to the conclusions the authors draw because the design can’t answer the research question. We just don’t know if the core convictions they identify actually differentiate between success and failure—as they may be equally present in churches that aren’t doing well with youth. If we don't know that the characteristics identified predict success, then we also don't know if doing these things will lead to success.

Furthermore, correlation does not imply causation—which they acknowledge. In fact, they don’t appear to present any correlations in the book (e.g., “churches with more college students had more service opportunities”). They then deny and ignore this caveat: “However, we’re confident that the CEYP Project has identified six core commitments demonstrably present.” That is just as irresponsible as asserting that although the fact that winning race horses are brown and expensive may not contribute to their success, buyers should look for expensive brown horses if they want to win. I wish they would have included some correlational results. For example, before they started they hypothesized that 8 characteristics would be present, but they never report on whether or not these 8 characteristics were, in fact, present in successful churches.

In my opinion, there was also a specification problem. That is, the research and book leaves out many variables that are probably important. They made little reference to the fact that youth are often in high school or college, which would appear to have implications for the study (e.g., are these churches close to universities? Do these churches have a lot of families with high school students?). There was no talk of attracting Christians (e.g., transfer growth) vs. winning previously unchurched and unbelieving youth (e.g., conversion growth). It would make a big difference to me to learn about churches that reach youth as opposed to being the church where Christians from local universities attend or retaining the children of the church’s parents in their congregations. Given the design of the study, the book could have been strengthened with more theology for the points the authors were trying to make. Unfortunately this was also lacking because the book is based on research, so the authors didn’t spend a lot of time on theology.

So if you want to know what congregational practices lead to effective engagement of young people, the answers provided by this book should be taken with a grain of salt until they are verified with some theology, reasoned argument, or additional research findings.

81 people found this helpful

J. McCain

Lacks depth, appropriate only for beginners in this topic

10 June 2018 - Published on Amazon.com

Verified Purchase

I picked up this book because Sticky Faith was so helpful, but it's a few years old, and so I was thinking this one might continue in the same trajectory (it's the same author). At my church, we are working on a comprehensive plan to make faith stick more in our young people, and I'm reading voraciously to get ideas. After having read Powell's other books, this one was disappointing. It lacks depth. It would probably be appropriate for someone who is just starting to think about young people in church. But, if like me, you've been thinking about this for a long time, save yourself the trouble and don't read this book.

8 people found this helpful

Beach Bum

Must Read, Wish it Covered Accountability More Fully

13 June 2017 - Published on Amazon.com

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Practical, simple to follow with application tips and assessment. Supported by research into successful churches. However, I wish it had a chapter on accountability and how to reboot when things go awry due to younger leaders' missteps. Also that anyone in the chain of leadership can fall to the "superpastor" syndrome or "know it all" syndrome. When that leads to sin in the ranks of upcoming leaders, how does a church set the guidelines for acceptability? Or how does a supervisor hold to biblical standards of behavior and consequences while protecting privacy appropriately? What strategies work for teamwork when the leadership chain has human shortcomings, including hubris? There are hints here, like a paragraph on trust p. 79 and "connect then correct" on p 108, but these issues deserve more attention.
I have found that emphasis on the saving grace of Christ, coupled with clear expectations and consequences is difficult when a church wants young people so badly that it ignores cultural stressors in the lives of immature Christians.

6 people found this helpful

K. B. Dozier

I’m glad we have that in common

20 September 2016 - Published on Amazon.com

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So… you’ve probably found your way to this review because you care about young people. Me too! I’m glad we have that in common. I bet we have another thing in common… the struggle of determining just what exactly to do about it. This field is so full of ‘feelings’ and ‘personal experiences' it is difficult to sort out what is worth listening to and what will work in your context. Here is what Growing Young brings to the table: research based findings.

It’s not common, and I REALLY like it.

What the actual research shows is actually quite different from many of the conclusions myself and others have reached about millennials and what they are looking for spiritually. I don’t think I realized how many preconceived notions I had about millennials (despite the fact that I am one of them)… and most of those notions were discouraging at best. The findings presented in Growing Young are exciting! They are completely in-line with scripture! They give me hope! They are going to change my approach to ministry in many ways!

Despite being based on research, the book presents the findings in a very readable and relatable way. They also do a great job of providing you with tangible ways to make the leap from simply becoming educated on the issues to doing something about them. I don’t care what place you might hold in your church, from upper level leadership to low-person on the totem pole… you CAN have an impact in helping your church ‘grow young’ and in the process become a healthier, better functioning, God-pleasing body of believers. The time and money you spend on this resource will most definitely pay out dividends! In fact, I suspect after reading it you’ll buy another copy to share. I did.

17 people found this helpful

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