LITMIR.BIZ

Because of their ever-changing personalities, their high energy, and their emerging ability to think critically, younger adolescents present a special faith formation challenge to the congregations who love them. This book explores an educational strategy of creating biblical dramas with tweens for spiritual formation and increased familiarity with the Christian tradition. The project of creating a drama for presentation to the congregation invites tweens to dig into the history of interpretation of the story, to make connections across the biblical text, and to engage with the characters in relevant ways to their own experiences. Writing and producing a small play in worship allows them to share their learnings with the rest of their faith community. The book helps prepare adult volunteers to better understand the transformations happening in the late elementary and middle school years and to lead tweens through this process with confidence. Five sample plays, all co-written and performed by the tweens of Christ Church United Methodist in Denver, Colorado, are also included. These slightly snarky but fearlessly faithful interpretations model the kind of depth engagement with biblical stories that the Drama Tweens process hopes to create.

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Increasingly, adolescents and young adults in the United States are racially and socioeconomically diverse, while the teaching population remains predominantly white and middle class. Many youth ministry programs that utilize volunteer mentors recruit adults who are ill-equipped to bridge cultural differences and effectively build sustainable relationships with adolescents who come from different backgrounds than their own. College and university campus ministries that are historically white struggle to provide adequate support and mentoring for students who have traditionally not been represented in the college population. Often, mentoring relationships break down over cultural misunderstandings.
As educators who come from backgrounds marked by privilege, Katherine Turpin and Anne Carter Walker draw from their experiences in an intentionally culturally diverse youth ministry program to name the challenges and inadequacies of ministry with young people from marginalized communities. Through engaging case studies and vignettes, the authors re-examine the assumptions about youth agency, vocational development, educational practice, and mentoring.
Offering concrete guidelines and practices for working effectively across lines of difference, Nurturing Different Dreams invites readers to consider their own cultural assumptions and practices for mentoring adolescents, and assists readers in analyzing and transforming their practices of mentoring young people who come from different communities than their own.

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