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Ministry in a Snapchat World

How to help teens navigate an increasingly sexualized culture.

If you work with teens, you have come across the following scenarios in recent years:

A dad discovers his teenage son has been accessing pornography on the smart phone they brought him last Christmas.

A teenage girl meets a boy online and begins "chatting," only to discover the "boy" on the other end of the messages was actually a 40-year-old married man.

A mom learns from another parent that her ninth grade daughter has been using the SnapChat app to send and receive indecent images with a boy in her class. The situation worsens when the boy saves several screen shots of the images and shares them with other students, destroying the girl's reputation.

These are nightmare scenarios. But as someone who works with teenagers, I am encountering them more and more. Maybe you have had to face similar situations. If not, it's only a matter of time.

The idea that we can insulate our kids from a highly sexualized culture is naïve. With apps like SnapChat ...

March
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