God’s Kingdom Is Near—even When the World Feels Broken
This curriculum began with a question. At the beginning of the summer, I asked my high school students what they wanted to learn about. Their answers led us into conversations about community: What makes a community good? What is the world supposed to look like? And what do we do when the world is not what we hoped it would be?
Those conversations led us through the biblical story of the Kingdom of God. We began by imagining the good world God desires. Then we explored how God begins building a different kind of community through covenant, liberation, shared practices, and faithful leadership. Finally, we watched Jesus show us what it means to live in God’s kingdom through healing, welcome, generosity, accountability, and restoration—and considered how we might participate in that work today.
Already Here—and Still Coming
Teaching teenagers about the Kingdom of God can be difficult. For many Christians, it sounds like another name for heaven—a place we hope to go someday. But when Jesus begins his ministry, he announces that the Kingdom of God has come near.
Jesus is not only offering a promise about the future. He is showing us what God’s loving and just way looks like here and now.
We see glimpses of God’s kingdom when people are cherished, relationships experience healing, those who are oppressed find freedom, resources are shared, and people who have been excluded are welcomed. We see it when someone tells the truth about harm, protects a vulnerable neighbor, creates room for another person’s voice, or helps a community move toward justice and repair.
Sometimes it feels like catching a glimpse of heaven here on earth.
It may happen around a table where everyone has enough. It may happen when someone realizes they are not alone. It may happen when a person is seen not as a problem to fix but as someone who is deeply loved and worthy of belonging. In those moments, we experience something like the tender glance of God—and once we have felt it, we begin to recognize it and long for more of it.
Yet the Kingdom of God is not complete. People still suffer. Communities remain divided. Hunger, violence, loneliness, injustice, and exclusion have not disappeared.
Both things are true: God’s kingdom is already here, and we are still praying, waiting, and working for its fullness.
That tension became the heart of The Kingdom Is Near.
Why Invite Teenagers to Participate?
Teenagers know the world is not as it should be. They see division, injustice, anxiety, loneliness, and suffering in their schools, communities, churches, social media feeds, and relationships.
They do not need us to pretend everything is fine. They need language for naming what is broken—and a vision of what is possible.
The Kingdom of God gives them that vision.
Participating in God’s kingdom does not mean asking teenagers to fix the whole world. It means helping them notice where God’s goodness is already becoming visible and consider how they might join what is growing.
They might welcome someone who is standing alone, listen when another person names harm, share responsibility, care for creation, support people already doing good work, or help make their community safer and more generous. These actions may seem small, but Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed and a little yeast. Small beginnings can grow into something much larger.
From Conversation to Curriculum
Those summer conversations became a 12-session youth curriculum organized around three questions:
What kind of world does God imagine?
How does God form a community shaped by freedom, justice, rest, and shared responsibility?
How does Jesus make God’s way visible through healing, welcome, generosity, belonging, accountability, and repair?
The goal is not to give teenagers one perfect definition to memorize. It is to help them notice the Kingdom of God in Scripture, recognize signs of it in the world around them, and consider how they can participate in God’s restoring work.
What I was Reading
Curriculum never grows from one source. It is shaped by Scripture, ministry experiences, conversations, questions, and whatever books happen to be open on the desk.
As this series developed, Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz’s The Home of God and N. T. Wright’s God’s Homecoming helped us think about the biblical story as God coming to dwell with humanity and renew creation—not simply people escaping earth for heaven.
Gregory Boyle’s The Whole Language helped us imagine restoration through tenderness, kinship, mutuality, and communities where no one is treated as a problem to fix or a project to rescue.
These were not the only books that shaped the curriculum. They were simply some of what we happened to be reading at the time. Apparently, we were in a theological “homecoming” season without planning it.
What books have helped you understand the Kingdom of God, restoration, or belonging? Send me your suggestions. Maybe Common Ground Curriculum needs a book club!
The Kingdom Is Near is available now.
What books have helped you understand the Kingdom of God, restoration, belonging, or God’s hope for creation? Send me your recommendations. If the list gets long enough, perhaps Common Ground Curriculum needs a book club!