A Podcast On The One Conversation...

In this podcast, the team at axis.org is joined by Elliot Campbell. Elliot is on the pastoral advisory board for Alpha Youth USA.  He has collaborated with the Bible Project and various other national leaders for the sake of reaching Gen Z and has a decade in pastoral experience working specifically with students and young adults. Elliot studied comparative religion and philosophy at the University of Virgina and graduated Denver Seminary as a Kern Scholar with his Master of Divinity in 2018.  He and his wife Madison are currently church planting in the Denver Metroplex. Elliot shares about Alpha Youth along with the openness of Gen Z.

Listen to the podcast on axis.org

Who was your first best friend? Maybe it was the girl you used to walk home from school with, or the boy who always met you on the playground. Maybe they’re still your friend, maybe not. Maybe they’re just a warm memory in the back of your mind, a reminder of innocent times and the special sweetness of knowing for the first time that you’ve found your person.

By talking with your teen often, you can encourage them to express not only their own feelings about their friendships, but how they think about friendship as an idea—what makes a good friend, what makes a bad friend, why do they like the friends they have, and how they think they could deepen their friendships.

Model Jesus’ friendship framework by helping your student understand that not everyone has to be their closest friend—that boundaries are safe and okay to establish, and that some friendships require more boundaries than others. Encourage them to choose their best friends carefully, to ask themselves questions like: Will this person support me? Will they tell me the truth, even if I don’t want to hear it? What do this person and I have in common? What are our differences? Why do I want this person as my best friend? What characteristics do they have that will make them a good friend to me? These are the kinds of questions that will help your student think critically about their relationships both now and into their adulthood. Read More

If you were to ask most millennials or Gen Xers if their parents sat them down to talk to them about dating and sex, their answer would be no. Even if their response is yes, the conversation may have gone something like, “Don’t get a girl pregnant,” or “If you lay down with dogs, you’ll wake up with fleas.” These are true stories from many of our friends. In fact, a friend of Axis shared that the only instruction her parents gave her about dating was that she couldn’t date until she was sixteen. She turned sixteen, got her license to drive and date. There was no conversation about character, attraction, boundaries, or appropriate and inappropriate touch. “There were more conversations on how to drive than how to date,” she said.

Many parents of these generations outsourced the conversation about dating and sex, entrusting it to sex education teachers, youth group leaders, and television shows like Family Matters, Step by Step, and 90210. Though this trend has significantly diminished, as current parents have experienced the ill effects of their parents not having “the sex talk” with them, The New York Post reports that over twenty percent of parents still do not plan to talk to their kids about sex. Read More