Being a youth leader has never been an easy job. But over recent years, at least in my experience, it’s only become harder.
One major factor in this is how our culture’s ideas around sexuality and gender have shifted. As cultural messaging sounds more and more different from biblical teaching, youth leaders can feel caught between a rock and a hard place.
On the one hand, teaching on sexuality and gender can feel incredibly complicated and difficult. You might still have questions yourself, or be wary of causing major pain and upset with a single poorly phrased comment.
On the other hand, teenagers are learning about sexuality and gender all the time. The media, their peers, their schools, their therapists – everyone is telling them what to think about these things. Yet God has good news for them about sexuality and gender – a story so much better than the messages they’re hearing elsewhere. If we don’t teach it to them, how will they hear it?
If you feel caught between this rock and that hard place - we've got something to help you.
The Emerging Generations team are taking over the Living Out podcast for our next series: Youth Leaders’ Crash Course. Starting with a look at our culture’s views on sexuality, we’ll then talk about the Bible’s worldview and how we can teach it well. We’ll discuss how we can love and support our LGBT youth, spend some time specifically on gender and transgender, and finish with a conversation about mental health. As well as our usual team, we’ll have some new voices in our conversations – several guests with experience in youth work, as well as bonus interviews with leaders of youth movements across the UK and some international voices.
We hope the series will answer your questions, highlight some of your blind spots, and equip you to teach and pastor young people more confidently when it comes to sexuality and gender.
We’d encourage you to engage with this series as a whole team – whether that’s listening to it together, or listening separately and then getting together to discuss it afterwards. We’ll stick some questions at the end of each episode to help you think through how to apply these ideas in your specific context.
And although we're aiming this series primarily at youth leaders, we hope it will be helpful to everyone. All of us will know teenagers, perhaps in our church or in our own family, and all of us have a role to play in helping them to hear about Jesus and follow him.
The first episode lands on 23rd June – so stick the date in your diary, subscribe to the podcast (Spotify; Apple Podcasts; YouTube) to get notified when the first episode drops, and let the rest of your team know it’s coming!
If you haven’t done so already, sign up to the Youth Leader Network for more resources that will equip you to help young people navigate questions of faith and sexuality. Click here to learn more.
