In 2004, 40% of all teens in this country will live in an urban environment. Is today's church equipped to reach them?

Okay. You've heard my story on Oprah a dozen times. Yuppie ad chick gives up glamorous advertising career to devote her life and talents to inner-city ministry. How sweet. Actually, it was more like this: burned out ad writer gives up writing jingles about hemorrhoids and halitosis to talk to inner-city teens about the one message that really matters (that being the message of Christ). Any way you slice it, I traded in my business trips at four star hotels for lock-ins and roach motels.

But one of the reasons that motivated me to urban youth ministry was the trend I witnessed in advertising. With friends working on mega-brands like Gatorade, Nike, and McDonald's, I had hard-core research that the inner-city kid was the coolest creature on the planet. In other words, if you wanted to sell two all-beef patties to two all-American kids, or an athletic shoes to the non-athletic, all you had to do was place that product in the hands of a hip hoppin' urban teen.

Successful teen marketers know that if want to reach kids everywhere, from Toledo to Timbuktu, they must reach the urban teen first. Urban kids are cool and set trends for teens world wide. If you don't believe me, just tune into MTV for a moment. You don't see Charlie Tuna doing his song and dance there.

So you'd think that the church would learn from marketers, and put time and dollars into urban causes. Of course not.

For some quirky reason, creating materials for urban ministry has not been the priority for many Christian publishers. Is it because the church doesn't view urban ministry as a profit center, therefore not a worthy cause? I would like to believe otherwise. Or, do publishers think that the urban teen is the problem not the solution? I'll get back to that point later. Or maybe it's easier for publishers to market materials featuring bright shiny faces instead of a teen with more body piercings than body parts.

If you don't believe me, take time to go to your local Sunday school conference. You'll find oodles of workshops dealing with puppetry and how to make critters out of pipe cleaners and raisins. Granted, you never know when making Larry the Cucumber will come in handy in the hood. But search as you may, you can't find materials dealing with gangs, illiteracy , or kids having kids. And these are the materials urban workers need.

And stop thinking that there's no money in the inner-city. Market research estimates that the ten million urban youth between the ages of 12-24 in our country spent an estimated 70.3 million dollars in 2000 on everything from McNuggets to starter jackets. Wow. I guess it's safe to say they'll have a little change leftover to spend on a teen Bible study guide.

So wake up and smell the salsa. By 2004, 40% of all teens in this country will live in an urban environment, and they have what it takes to lead the spiritual revolution They are bi-lingual, multi-cultural, and multi-talented.

Besides that, they're cooler than the pale-skinned pencil-necked rest of us, me being the chief pale geek. In other words, Heather, Parker, and Tailor are just not hip trendsetters. It's LaShanda, Cisco, and Terrell. They can display the brand-marks of Christ as easily as the brand names of anything else.

Let's equip the church with the right materials to reach urban teens. Until major publishers wake up, you can get Urban Flavor Curriculum right here at TastyFaith, published by America's #1 secular publisher, Kinko's. Hey, I didn't give up writing jingles about process cheese spread for nothing.

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