Description
The church is experiencing increasingly turbulent, chaotic, complicated, and unpredictable times in the twenty-first century. The culture surrounding the church is inundated with alcohol and drug addiction, sexual immorality, and broken families. The church must respond in some way to the various complexities of urban life. The church has always wrestled with the tension of conforming its social reality to the gospel reality. Because urbanization creates broken families and at-risk youth, there is a gap between the need and the response of the church to these families. It is the church’s responsibility to minister to both the family and the individual youth through biblical counseling and incarnational ministry (Lambert, 2016).
Jonathan Hayashi, M.A., serves on the Pastoral Staff at Troy First Baptist Church in Troy, MO, and is a Doctoral Student at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY. Jonathan earned his B.A. and M.A. from Moody Theological Seminary where his studies focused in the correlation of discipleship and leadership in Church Ministry. His most recent book is Ordinary Radicals: A Return to Christ-Centered Discipleship (Lucid Books, 2018).
