Is Your Youth Ministry Offering Community Where No One Is Looking? And What are the Implications for Worship?

Arguably our youth are more connected than any generation before them. Yet studies report that they claim things like “no one knows me well” or “my relationships are meaningless.” They feel lonely and isolated, as if the people who surround them are not necessarily with them. Our youth are becoming accustomed to knowing absence in the presence of others while also feeling presence with others on social media though they are physically absent from each other. With changing expectations of how and where to find community, as well as what one is willing to give to receive it, how do we create a sense of koinonia, or intergenerational Christian community, in our worship and throughout our ministries?