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IN SEARCH OF A THEOLOGICAL FOUNDATION FOR YOUTH MINISTRY

Let us assume that you do not need any more ideas for Sunday night’s youth group meeting. Maybe you are the senior pastor, or the only pastor, or the associate pastor or educator or seminarian whose portfolio includes young people, and you have been to enough continuing education events on the subject to recite the presenters’ schtick along with them. Let us assume that you have been thinking lately about what all this is for, these lock-ins and fundraisers and mission trips and Bible studies and Jell-O relays. Maybe it has occurred to you that most of the youth in your congregation are not “in” the youth ministry program in the first place (although some do worship and participate in other ways); or maybe the profile of your community suggests that there many more adolescents outside the church building than in it.

Maybe you have noticed all the crucifixes at the mall, that the poster behind Agent Muldaur’s door in “The X-Files” reads, “I WANT TO BELIEVE,” and that religious imagery is the hottest visual on MTV and VH-1. While we might question popular culture’s hermeneutic, we cannot deny that Madonna, Tori Amos, Jewel, Alanis Morrisette and others are acting like high priestesses these days, whose spiritual themes win converts (and record contracts) in ways the church can only envy. Maybe it has even dawned on you that within your own congregation, where youth are nurtured and confirmed into the adult vows of church membership, adolescents and parents alike tend to view this rite not as passage into the Christian community, but as graduation out of it.

If you have ever thought about these things, and most of us have, then you know that the answer to building a sustainable ministry with young people that has both authenticity and theological chutzpah is not GROUP Magazine, helpful as such resources may be week-to-week. And you also know that, whatever the “problems” associated with youth ministry, they inevitably reflect and refract the “problems” of adults as well, and maybe those of the adult church in particular.

If youth ministry teaches us anything, it teaches us how to be the church—not the church of tomorrow, but the church of today, not just with adolescents, but with all people. The needs of adolescence are simply the needs of being human, acted out in acute ways as we try to nail down the fundamental questions of being a self: Who am I? Who are my people? Where do I belong? Why am I here? In other words, youth ministry is less about youth than it is about ministry. Jesus calls youth into mission in their own right, to take part in the divine plan to restore people to what it means to be fully human, people whose “identities” are not found, nor earned, nor made, but given.

Because identity is the focal point of adolescence, youth ministry must take seriously how the Holy Spirit works through communities of faith whose practices mark us and shape us into people whose lives bear a “family resemblance” to Jesus Christ. The most important aspect of Christianity is not “what” but “who,” which means that the same must be said for youth ministry. The panicked but oft-uttered question, What am I going to do with the youth this week?, places youth ministry on the wrong theological axis. The question that must govern ministry is not what we do with adolescents, but who we are with them, and to Whom we point in the process.

This understanding of the church’s ministry during adolescence—a psychosocial period in the lifecycle that, in postmodernity, increasingly describes a persistent condition rather than a transitional lifestage—literally shifts the ground on which a century of youth ministry literature has been based. Those of us who self-consciously pastor from a Wesleyan perspective should view this shift toward relationship-driven, rather than program-based, youth ministry as a welcome return to “practical divinity” rather than a “new” ecclesiology easily co-opted by consumerism’s ceaseless attempts at relevance. Indeed, nothing is more “relevant” than the transformation offered by Jesus Christ, who confronts us, woos us, and transforms us in the ancient practices of Christian communities. For postmodern youth and their families, people for whom identity is increasingly elusive, the “soul-shaping” available in Christian practice stands at the heart of ministry with adolescents—and maybe with the rest of us as well.

The books I include here are among those helping to establish a theological foundation for youth ministry by recognizing it as “practical divinity” par excellence. Most youth ministry “literature” still falls into the genre of curriculum and self-help manuals, and much of this literature tags youth as objects to be “snagged” for the church rather than as people to be invited into ministry. Even if we narrow our discussion to what little conceptual literature exists in this field, it is sometimes necessary to pair resources in order to provide the theory/praxis balance necessary to practical theology. 

Apart from the fact that the most significant resources for youth ministry may not deal with youth at all—youth ministry is, after all, ministry, not an alien ecclesiastical life form—two weaknesses accompany my decision to focus on texts that regard youth ministry, implicitly or explicitly, as practical theology. The first weakness is that it forces the omission of important books on specific practices themselves. Counseling, mentoring, teaching, and preaching resources for youth (to name a few) also belong on the professional church leader’s bookshelf. If youth ministry is a full-blown form of practical theology and not just a sub-area of Christian education, then all the practices of faith—and not education alone—comprise our ministry with adolescents. What is more, youth ministry engages youth in these practices, for youth are called to be agents of ministry, not objects of it.

The second weakness in combining books on theory and practice to approximate a practical theology for youth ministry is that Wesley never understood “theory” and “praxis” as separate moments in the theological enterprise—and neither, I should emphasize, do youth. In fact, peer groups, the media, gangs, the entertainment industry, chat rooms, and the Internet often “ring true” for adolescents in ways the church does not because these communities operationalize theology in their practices (read: they “walk the talk”) better than we do. Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” video incensed many Christian adults, but spoke volumes on behalf of countless young MTV-viewers who recognized a spiritual desire for otherness in their sexual practices. “The Truth Is Out There” is an affirmation of faith lost on most congregations, but not on the millions of young people who watch “The X-Files” on Sunday nights. Ministry with adolescents always eavesdrops for the sake of the gospel, baptizing bar tunes or other cultural artifacts that will help reveal the “unknown god” postmodern adolescents unabashedly seek.

Unfortunately, the first book I want to mention, D. Ng’s Youth in the Community of Disciples (Judson, 1984), is out of print, though very much worth the trip to the library. This book showed us what a theological foundation for youth ministry in the late-twentieth century could look like. Ng, whose untimely death in 1997 ended an educational career focused largely on young people and the church, used this book to recast Bonhoeffer’s Life Together in terms of ministry with youth. In so doing, Ng ejected youth from the church basement and deposited them squarely in the middle of the life and mission of the total congregation. Although Ng is sometimes accused of abandoning “playfulness” in youth ministry, his real goal was to abandon the trivialization of youth in the Christian community.

My second choice is a book-set: Augustine, The Confessions; T. Beaudoin, Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X (Jossey Bass, 1998); and P. Hersch, A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence (Fawcett Columbine, 1998). Augustine offers the world’s most timeless theological portrait of the adolescent psyche, but Beaudoin and Hersch are savvy interpreters of—and apologists for—adolescence just this side of the millenium. Beaudoin’s project describes the spirituality implicit in popular culture and its profound effect on adolescents. He limits his discussion to “Generation X”—which is too bad, since he really describes the condition of postmodernity, not just of Generation X. Still, he takes a thoughtful theological gander at the hermeneutic of popular culture and how the spirituality of working-to-middle class young people in their twenties has been shaped by it. Beaudoin’s unspoken assumption that all youth, regardless of culture or class differences, share this “spirituality” thanks to an omnipresent media is overly simplistic, but he offers sympathetic counsel for the church’s efforts to reach spiritual, but thoroughly anti-institutional, youth.

For people who want to meet some real, live adolescents in their native habitat, Hersch’s intimate portrait is the next best thing to spending a semester in high school. Both encouraging and sobering, Hersch’s ethnographic study of “good kids”—the kind who attend church, whose families basically care for them, who are not adequately described by statistics about youth “at risk”—sounds a wake-up call for adults who have increasingly disappeared from the lives of these adolescents. In a strange twist of the developmental norm, before youth have a chance to distance themselves from adults, late-twentieth century adults pull away from youth, and in unprecedented ways. Hersch demonstrates how youth left unto themselves create “a tribe apart,” a peer community whose rituals and practices shape them without adult input or interference. Neither Beaudoin nor Hersch deal with the developmental impact of cultural change on adolescence, but they expose us as a society in which traditional institutions—including the church—have unwittingly practiced child-sacrifice, offering up our young on a pyre of advertising.

Third, led me draw your attention to D.C. Bass, ed., Practicing Our Faith (Jossey Bass, 1997); and K.C. Dean and R. Foster, The Godbearing Life: The Art of Soul-Tending for Youth Ministry (Upper Room, 1998). The emphasis on practices of faith in Christian communities is gaining a new hearing, despite the fact that, as a strategy for ministry, it pre-dates Paul. Although Bass’s book does not address youth ministry per se, and while the practices represented in this volume say more about community than they do about doctrine or Jesus Christ, the twelve seasoned practical theologians represented in this volume reflect thoughtfully on practices that readily translate into a rich curriculum for ministry with youth. 

Much of this translation has already been accomplished by Dean and Foster, whose spiritual primer recharts a direction for youth ministry (and for ministry generally) through the classic spiritual disciplines, or practices, of the church. Calling families, congregations, and mentor relationships the “holy ground” where faith catches fire, Dean and Foster describe six families of practices that constitute a curriculum for youth ministry focusing on holiness, not just wholesomeness. While practices do not determine identity, say Dean and Foster, practices do shape who we are, which means that ministry with anyone in the throes of identity formation should take seriously the practices of the Christian community. Unapologetic about placing sanctification at the center of youth ministry, Dean and Foster argue that God uses these historic disciplines to transform youth—and all of us—into people capable of ministry. In this way we become “Godbearers,” people through whom Christ comes into the world again and again. 

Finally, a trilogy of books: M. DeVries, Family-Based Youth Ministry: Reaching the Been-There, Done-That Generation (InterVarsity, 1996); B. Freudenberg with R. Lawrence, The Family Friendly Church (Vital, 1998); and M. Thompson, Family: The Forming Center (Upper Room, 1996). The research is unanimous: The most powerful influence on faith formation, by far, is the family. This trilogy has such a natural (if accidental) fit that it is difficult to discuss them singly. Taken together these three spare books pack a wallop against individualistic notions of adolescence. Although Thompson set out the theological parameters for family ministry more than a decade ago (the book above is in its second edition), it was DeVries who gave Protestants the language to discuss—and dismiss—program-based youth ministry in favor of ministry that self-consciously takes place within the family system. This shift makes parents the primary “youth ministers” in a young person’s life, and congregations the “extended family” that help teenagers mediate the transition between childhood and adulthood.

Although DeVries limits his critique and his proposals to “corporate” models of youth ministry, his analysis releases congregations from the bondage of equating the youth group with youth ministry. Instead, DeVries argues that the church’s most important youth ministry comes in the form of strengthening families as crucibles for fledgling faith. Freudenberg has examined this assumption at length, and The Family-Friendly Church is the intensely practical fruit of this reflection. Like Thompson and DeVries, Freudenberg believes congregations should support the ministry of the family, instead of the other way around. Freudenberg’s book “puts wheels on” the other two, offering pastors concrete steps for implementing (and surviving) a paradigm shift that locates ministry primarily in families, supported by caring congregations.

By Kenda Creasy Dean, John Wesley Fellow, UM Elder in the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference, and Assistant Professor of Youth, Church and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary.