Well I have finished both The Purpose Driven Youth Ministry and The Purpose and Mission of the Church. Both books were insightful in learning to understand how to both grow a youth ministry and understand the mission of a Church as a whole. Here are some more of my thoughts regarding both books....

The Purpose Driven Youth Ministry
As a whole I really liked this book. Doug Fields is definately on to something when he writes about youth ministry and the importance of its purpose and mission. I like how much weight he puts into the clarity of the youth ministry. I think that this is important today because it helps to be able to understand what the youth want and need and then remain at that same place of wanting to be able to give them all that they need. I like the emphasis on this book about there needing to be an idea or mission if you want to call it that of raising up leaders in your youth group. I think that all to often the youth ministries become about the leaders and not as much about the kids. By remaining with your goal on raising up disciples or leaders the whole purpose of the church moves from yourself to the church as a body of believers.

This idea ties in with The Purpose and Mission of the Church because it is in this book that the idea of the church and its whole purpose is defined. There are different definitions that are looked at in this book of what the Church could look like. But in the end it is basically said that the purpose of the church is to love God and then go out and serve our neighbors. I think that this can be tied into the Doug Fields The Purpose Driven Youth Ministry because to raise up leaders and disciples the first thing that they need to be taught is simply to love God. This is going to be the foundation on which to build. Just as Neighbur used this model to show how a good and healthy church could work so Doug Fields too decided that this would be a good idea. It makes sense. You raise up youth to first know and experiance the love of God. From this all else flows and you cannot have the love of God without being able to love a neighbot and vice versa. Its only from becoming a desciples and learning about the love of God and what that means to them and to us becomes the only way in which we can be disciples and also be able to love from the true love of God that we found.

Its only when we truly love God and have found that love that we can be able to love other people.