Summer can be a perplexing time for urban youth ministry.

The right part of your brain tells you to continue youth ministry with bigger and better Bible Studies. Hey, the teens have more time to hit the good Book. With no school, they can be in the youth center 5 days a week! That seems smart.

Then the left part of your brain kicks in. Are you crazy? You need time to to air out your arm pits as well as your youth center. You need three months to recover from the past nine. It's been a hectic year for you. Who cares if teens are bored.

Then reality kicks in. You hear knocking on your youth center door. It's the teen who you thought "made it" and went to college.That's why you haven't seen him in two years. But instead, he tells you how he started hanging with the gangs and never finished high school, and his biggest accomplishment has been scoring 70,000,000 points on a Game Cube.

That's not so smart.

And that sorta changes your summer plans.

True, summer is a great time for you to take a rest from urban youth ministry and reflect on the past year. You deserve it as well as need it. Summer is also a good time to get inner-city teens to reflect on what THEY are doing with their lives. Will they end up in at a state university or a state prison? With a baby carriage before marriage? That's where TastyFaith can help. TastyFaith's Slam! series entitled FUNKIFY YO' FUTURE gets city teens to think about more than their summer vacation. Slam! by the way, stands for Simple Life-changing Applicational messages.

Especially designed for older teens, these non-sugar coated lessons get youth to wake up and smell the gutter. Funkify Yo' Future lessons get youth to think about what will happen five years down the road if they drop out of school now. Or, if they can't afford the price to summer camp, how will they ever pay for a baby? Teen handbooks challenge youth with questions such as, what's more boring: going to high school for 4 years, or having a job that doesn't challenge them for 40?

And the best thing is, all you practically have to do is show up and breathe. You get scripture, a good topic for a lesson, kick-off activity, and gutsy questions.

But if you choose just to hang loose this summer and air out your arm pits, that's cool, too.

As long as no one catches you sniffing them.

What does your youth group do to combat boreDUM in the summer? Slam! Series IV, Funkify Yo Future, will help teens think beyond the summer.