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Summer 2009 | Volume 67, No. 4
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Platt Urges Student Ministers to be Desperate for God's Spirit
by Keith Collier
Students and student ministers should be desperate for the guidance of God’s Spirit as they attempt to build their ministries, David Platt, pastor of The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Ala., said during Southwestern Seminary’s Youth Ministry Lab (YML), March 6-7.
“I am a part of a religious system that has created a whole host of means and methods for doing church and ministry that, in the end, require little if any help at all from the Holy Spirit of God,” Platt said. “We have made a deadly mistake in our day, mistaking the presence of physical bodies for the existence of spiritual life. You can draw a crowd with anything.”
Platt drew this application from an exposition of Exodus 33:12-18, a passage where God, at first, tells Moses that he and the Israelites may go up to the Promised Land but without His guiding presence. “Moses sees the depth of the call that God has given him to do, and he sees his own resources, and he sees that he doesn’t have what it takes to accomplish this call,” Platt said. Christians, he added, are in danger of becoming self-sufficient if they ignore God’s call or overestimate their resources.
During breakout sessions, Kevin DeYoung, co-author of Why We’re Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be), told student ministers to challenge their youth to read Scripture and theology. “I think they are starving for it,” he said. Also, Sandi Black, LaJuana Ross, and Ivette Derouen—wives to Southwestern’s student ministry professors, Wes Black, Richard Ross and Johnny Derouen—led a ministers’ wives track during the conference.
According to Wes Black, acting dean for the School of Educational Ministries, YML saw its highest attendance in 41 years. Participants came from across the nation, from states as distant as Washington, Wyoming, Michigan, Maryland and Illinois.
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