The Church and MTV

Attention Youth Workers
If there’s anything that’s crucial to those who work with youth, it’s the challenge of remaining relevant. How do you connect with someone ten, twenty, etc years younger who’s barely seen a cassette and certainly never an 8track?

I have been reading an interesting article that deals with the issue of relevancy. The article is titled “Can MTV Stay Cool?” It is primarily a business piece tracking the efforts of the CEO of MTV to ensure the media empire continues to dominate. But her challenge is much like a youth worker’s: discovering what’s important to a young generation, using it to make a connection with them, and then selling an agenda. Her trick: be a voracious media consumer and listen to any creative ideas, regardless of where they come from. That model may or may not work for church youth workers, but it’s interesting to see that someone else recognizes the challenge of remaining relevant too.

Factoid
An excerpt from the article:

"Studies done for Nickelodeon recently found that kids aged 8 to 14 send an average of 14.4 text messages and make 8.8 calls on their cell phones a day."

What does that say about the next generation’s media intake? As much as we debate tv, I hope we realize that media encompasses so much more.

Once and Again
One year ago, Nathan Nicholls proclaimed “Media is the new bus ministry.” It’s unrealistic to think church organizations can keep up with a $7 billion a year monster like MTV, but can we accept the hard facts about media trends and find our own way of using media to connect with youth? Or the masses at large, for that matter.