Defining youth

Interesting conversation tonight with Jec in the Philippines. We only met a couple of days ago through some work I'm doing for Edinburgh 2010. Jec is a 25 year old leader of Christian youth networks out there and we were talking (virtually you understand) about how the young people he knows can engage with a rather academic conversation about mission - to which I think they could add a lot.

However part of the conversation was about who are "youth". In Europe most people over 18 (16?) would be unhappy to be excluded from "adult" and spoken about as "the youth" whereas in India you can still be in the youth fellowship at 40! In fact in India, if I understand correctly, it has a lot to do with marital status - unmarried = youth; married = adult. Jec's interesting idea was that it all has to do with dependency. "As long as I am finacially dependent on my family I will be a youth" he said. As someone in his late 50s who is about to become more dependent on friends and family than I have been in the past that was encouraging news - I am about to become a youth once more! Roll on childhood!

Vulnerability in Mission

With a very interesting group of people from around the world, I'm currently working on some research that might see the light of day next year - at the Edinburgh 2010 Mission Conference. The idea is to look at how people get motivated for and caught up in Christian mission - how they go about it. One of the issues we were talking (well, virtual talking) through yesterday was vulnerability in mission. Jesus was quite vulnerable at times (how else did he get crucified?) and Paul has quite a lot to say about vulnerability, and yet Christians often go about mission in quite powerful ways - linked in with colonialisation, globalising materialism, or 'power evangelism'. I had a quite challenging/difficult meeting last week with a Brit. who is absolutely committed to vulnerable mission - living simply, using local resources, speaking the local language, having no more power than any local person - in western Kenya. Jim really works hard at this 'being vulnerable' but its not easy. His skin colour alone manks him out as one who has access to those with financial resources and power even if he does not have them himself. I also found out about him on the internet and met him in Wantage, UK. No one else from his village in Kenya has a web presence or flies to the UK! So what does 'vulnerability' mean in terms of mission? I'm still wrestling with that one.