Youth Ministry Services
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GIFT has created three fun -- and necessary -- properties to enable the spiritual formation and transformation of our youth.
1. Celebrate Our Creator tools and curriculum to reassert God as our creator; to afford Him the praise He's due; and to counter the educational bias against God and creation that many of our children have had to endure.
2. Sheep & Goat Go To The Ice Cream Parlor children's book and merchandise to instill an appreciation for compassionate living as Jesus commands. You can even read a slide show sample of the book!!
3. GLOW teen ministries to encourage youth to shine in the darkness with Godliness, Love, Obedience And Witness (GLOW.) (Still under development.)
Our Youth Desperately Need Us To Help Them Transform!
The unfortunate reality is: we're facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions when it comes to passing our faith onto our youth! It's just not happening.
Therefore, it's essential that ALL Christians invest in helping transform the hearts of our children and teens -- including modeling true Christ-likeness.
GIFT is investing considerable resources to help today's faithful meet this incredible challenge.
If we don't take dramatic steps to stem this spiritual hemorrhaging, this may well be the last Christian generation. Only by educating our youth and modeling selfless, loving, joyful, faith-filled and testimony-rich lives can we hope to address this sad-but-true crisis now facing our youth, families, communities and Churches.
Noted author and pastor, Josh McDowell, actually wrote a book entitled, The Last Christian Generation in regard to this true crisis facing the Church. According to McDowell, Church leaders estimate the percentage of those who leave the Church to be even higher: "between 69% and 94% are leaving the traditional Church after high school, and very few are returning."
McDowell notes, "It is evident that the Church and Christian families are failing to lead them into a transforming experience with God!"
The disturbing fact is that our youth do not have a firm foundation, and as a result, they leave the Church once they leave home: 70% of young adults who attended Church in high school quit attending by age 23 and don't return by the time they reach 30. (LifeWay study.)
Researcher George Barna has noted, "What you believe at age 13 is pretty much what you're going to die believing." His organization, Barna Group, indicates that children between the ages of 5 and 13 have a 32% probability of accepting Jesus Christ as their Savior, but that likelihood drops to just 4% for teenagers between the ages of 14 and 18.