Review of the Book, Outbreak: Creating a Contagious Youth Ministry through Viral Evangelism

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Greg Stier is the executive director, president, and originator of Dare 2 Share Ministries International as of 1991. Stier has instructed over 30,000 Christian adolescents around North America in how to live out their faith in confidence and with boldness. In 1997 he was the guest speaker at the Youth for Christ’s DC/LA events, and he revisited that speakership at Y2K the Fellowship of Christian Athletes forum. “Youth ministry became his full-time focus on April 20, 1999, due to the Columbine High School massacre.” Stier has written such published works as ‘You're Next!’ and ‘Dare 2 Share: A Guide to Sharing the Faith (Focus on the Family)’ as well as several curricula on evangelism preparation. According to Stier, “[he doesn’t] come from a church going… religious family. His was a tough urban family filled with bodybuilding, tobacco chewing, and beer drinking thugs. He recounts how seeming through a lifetime (although not quite that long a time), his tough and thuggish family was led to Christ in one way or another. The impact that Jesus had on his extended family, that from the time he was 11 years of age, he just knew that he was going to be a preacher!” He and his wife Debbie have two children, and currently reside in the Denver area.

Content Summary

What if an outbreak was about all which was positive instead of filled with the usual negative connotations? What if the outbreak began with change toward a positive direction in the churches’ youth groups, and entered into the local communities in which the churches exist? If the outbreak occurs in this manner, is it not possible that the world might become affected by the outbreak as well? This is the model presented by Steir, and he wants to see just such outbreaks as desc...

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...s is a concept which should resonate with the teenage mind. The title of the book is the same title of a movie a few years old, yet he applies it to a plan which was set forth within the early church. To quote Steir, the outbreak, “spreads like an epidemic. It infected the general populace so quickly that no one was safe.” With a few emendations of word choices and phraseology, this is indeed a unique way of viewing and considering how to do youth ministry.

Bibliography

Draper, Electra. "Rough Youth was a Path to Teen Ministry." The Denver Post. November 25, 2007. http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_7550860 (accessed April 4, 2011).

Stier, Greg. "My Story." Greg Stier. April 3, 2006. http://www.gregstier.org/mystory/ (accessed April 4, 2011).

—. Outbreak: Creating a Contagious Youth Ministry through Viral Evangelism. Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2006.

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