By Matt Cleaver

In the book, Folmsbee has different chapters that correspond to different ministry emphases: evangelism, discipleship, student leadership, and education, to name a few.  In the chapters, he describes what it might mean to go from the current way of doing things to a recultured approach.  For example, the “service and outreach” chapter is subtitled, “From Meeting Others’ Needs to Living Amidst Their Need” and provides principles for positioning a youth ministry to take such an approach.

Folmsbee sets his sights on reculturing youth ministers and their jobs as well.  {quotes}Not only do our ministries need to be rethought, so do the way youth leaders do their jobs./quotes}  Making changes to programs or volunteer staff will only be surface-level changes if youth ministers continue doing their jobs and tending to their lives as they always have.

One of the helpful features in the book is sidebars that tell the stories of people, ministries, and churches that are reculturing youth ministry.  For readers who want to see what it really means to do the kind of youth ministry Folmsbee describes, they can visit the websites listed in the sidebars.  Each chapter ends with questions for reflection and discussion to help apply the ideas to your specific context.

Unfortunately, the book contains only one chapter giving tips about how to go through such a wholesale reculturing process.  Folmsbee knows as well as anyone the cost of making such changes to an existing ministry.  He should have spent some more time giving some guidance into the actual process of reculturing.

To sum up, the kind of ministry Folmsbee seeks is authentic (not gimmick-driven), holistic (rather than dualistic—separating things into “sacred and spiritual”) and theological (rather than methodological).  Folmsbee calls this biblical, and I agree with him.  Youth ministers who have not been exposed to this kind of approach to ministry would benefit from spending some time with this book. This book’s strength is in the vision it casts for where youth ministry should be headed.  It is up to those of us in ministry ourselves to implement this new vision in our own environment.  The church will be stronger because of it.