UM Jeremy is onto something here.

I think I'll blog about this on the big site, later from a youth ministry perspective, but read this post (UM Jeremy's post) when you get a chance. Here's one thing that I really saw that started to get my to think about my grace vs. guilt, or mercy vs. sacrifice posts.

For the Jewish faith at the time of Jesus, Hope was torturous. The Jews were an occupied nation and their leadership focused on ritual purity to protect again creeping Hellenism. Purity became a sun at the top of the prison, always unattainable, always excluding people. Jesus came and taught many radical subjects, mostly to relocate hope from being defined by the brood of vipers to an internal consistency that could also resist the empire. In short, Jesus removed the purity barriers to the divine in ways that honored tradition but also opened the locus of hope from being defined by “what we are not.”

This helps us articulate that:

• an external hope is outwardly defined (by religious leadership) but inwardly focused (on purity)
• an internal hope is inwardly defined (by consistency) but outward focused (on missions)

Do we push the teens into keeping purity that they missing the point of our missions?