By Tim Littleford
Posted in Faith
We love donuts and we love our mums. ‘Love’ has such diverse meanings that it can be confusing. One thing is for sure, we are all looking for it. The real thing. Love that won't let us down. But can we find it?
Of course we can. Jesus said that there is no greater love than for a person to lay down their life for their friends, and then Jesus showed us that love by giving up his life on the cross for us, his friends. It’s Jesus’ love that teaches us what real love looks like.
Young people today want to know what real love actually looks like. The world they live in is sex-obsessed and saturated with counterfeit love. They are so formed by social media, forums and pornography that it is very difficult for our young people to understand why they believe what they believe and that there might be a better story out there for them. One that does not connect your ‘love-ableness’ with your perceived wealth, status, following on social media or whether or not you are in a romantic relationship.
Love is a tornado of swirling conversation for young people today. They are talking about this. How often do they get a chance to intersect that conversation with their faith?
SYC 2024, what we are calling ‘What is Love?’ is going to give young people that opportunity. Our dynamic and highly respected keynote speaker, ‘Dubsy’ Want, will speak to the love of God, displayed in the sacrificial love of Jesus. The love of God is the final word on our ‘love-ableness’ and the only kind of love that is ultimately fulfilling and completing. Dubsy will show how that same love through the power of the Holy Spirit empowers us to love the world and to spend our lives for its good, through acts of justice and the proclamation of the Good News.
When you talk about love with teenagers, there's very good odds that sex and relationships will become conversation partners. We have identified that conversations about sex and relationships (platonic and otherwise) are being had everywhere in a teenager’s life, but very rarely in the Church. We are hearing from youth pastors that these conversations are vital for the holistic growth and wellbeing of their young people and yet they feel ill-equipped to engage with the depth of complexity in a helpful, respectful and nuanced way. The diversity of theological approaches to the topic of sex and relationships in our church makes meeting this need complex, but we have found solid gold in Big Kids’ Table (BKT) https://bkt.org.au/.
BKT are based in Melbourne and lead faith-based sex education and conversation. They exist to be an informative, loving perspective and to create safe, honest conversations about faith identity and sexuality for youth and young adults of faith. They intentionally do not hold a position on matters of gender and sexuality and neither will the State Youth Conference (SYC).
BKT uses a worldview exploration method in all of their workshops, exploring worldviews about sex and relationships and then tasking young people to work out what they believe. They do not teach, pressure or force a perspective, they generate conversations.
We have enlisted BKT’s involvement as a way to externally and independently meet this need amongst our young people and we will intentionally position youth within their own youth ministries or churches at BKT’s workshops to ensure a church may engage with and debrief these conversations with their own youth.
The workshops BKT will offer at SYC are:
Workshop 1: Sex and God/ Christian Identity and Worthiness/ Friendship
Workshop 2: Body Image/ Singleness.
Sex and God will be a 90-minute elective (taking up both sessions) because of the complexity of the topic.
There are many different theological perspectives in our Synod around sex and relationships, consistent with the Assembly’s agreed doctrines. We have looked to find a way to hold our diversity in tension while not depriving our young people of the opportunity to have a safe, explorative, faith-based conversation about topics that might be stressful and confusing for them. While the fact that this is happening at all might be concerning for some people around the Synod, our hope is that our Synod can be mature enough to realise that our young people miss out when we deprive them of the opportunity to connect their faith to conversations that they are already having everywhere else.
So that this event will be safe, respectful and ultimately beneficial for young people, regardless of where they come from:
A team of diverse theological positions have worked on this event in depth and feel that what we have in SYC is a safe, kind and gentle model that seeks to prioritise and help our Uniting Church teenagers to navigate a confusing and complex time of their lives, with grace. Moreover, SYC seeks to raise up a generation who embody and are empowered by the sacrificial love of God, and to invite those young people who are not yet followers of Jesus to come, pick up their cross and follow him.
Registrations for SYC are currently open at this link: SYC 2024 | What is Love? (eventzilla.net).
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