YOUTH SPECIALTIES

Models, Mentors, and Messages: Blueprints of Urban Ministry

Copyright 2009 by René Rochester

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EPub Edition © June 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-57690-7

Youth Specialties resources, 300 S. Pierce St., El Cajon, CA 92020 are published by Zondervan, 5300 Patterson Ave. SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49530.

ISBN 978-0-310-28467-3

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, Today’s New International Version™. TNIV®. Copyright 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

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CONTENTS

Cover

Copyright

Introduction: If You’re about Urban Youth Ministry, This Book Is for You

Chapter 1–Sonship and Daughterhood: The Human Model

Chapter 2–Family Models: Providing the First Models, Mentors, and Messages

Chapter 3–Models in the Synagogue: Leaders in the Neighborhood

Chapter 4–On-the-Job Training: Lessons From the Leaders

Chapter 5–Observance and Obedience: Learning to Live Out What We’Ve Been Told

Chapter 6–The Effectiveness of Rituals and Relationships: Strengthened by the Power of Belief

Chapter 7–Models of Intercession: Who Has Your Back?

Chapter 8–Nations in the Neighborhood

Chapter 9–Designed for World Impact: Created in God’s Image to Change the Planet

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

About the Publisher

Share Your Thoughts

INTRODUCTION

The year was 1959. In a community hospital on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, René Darlene Rochester was born to her proud parents, Frederick Douglas Rochester and Bernice Bryant Rochester.

Both of my parents were hard workers. My mother was a nurse at Children’s Hospital in Boston. My father, a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, was an accomplished musician and a part-time instructor in voice and piano in the Fine Arts departments at both Boston University and Northeastern University. To support his family, he also worked evenings, playing dinner music at Hugo’s Lighthouse Restaurant (now known as Atlantica) in Cohasset, Massachusetts.

My birth certificate looks like those of other children born that same year in our community: It contains the handwritten word colored in the space provided for race. I was born approximately five years after the historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling. On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth ...