Root Theological Turn in Youth Ministry

1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8308-6934-3
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 264 Seiten

Christianity Today Book Award of Merit winner What haunts your youth group? So often we avoid talking about doubts and fears because we feel inadequately equipped to address them in any meaningful way. The crisis of existence can't be answered with pat Sunday school formulas or a few Bible verses, let alone another relay race. The questions our youth have are often the same ones that perplexed the great theologians, driving them to search for God in the places God didn't appear to be--places of brokenness, suffering and confusion. What if we let these questions drive our search for God too? Andrew Root and Kenda Creasy Dean invite you to envision youth ministries full of practical theologians, addressing the deep questions of life with a wonderfully adolescent mix of idealism, cynicism and prophetic intolerance for hypocrisy. Follow them into reflection on your own practice of theology, and learn how to share that theology through rich, compassionate conversation and purposeful experience.

Andrew Root (Ph.D., Princeton Theological Seminary) is in the Baalson Olson Chair as associate professor of youth and family ministry at Luther Seminary. He is the author of The Children of Divorce,The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry and Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Root, Andrew

Leseproben

1

The New Rhetoric of Youth Ministry

Kenda Creasy Dean

While cleaning out my office recently I finally had to face facts: my shelves were bloated with youth ministry books I would never use: tried-but-discarded strategy books, tie-dye cool gospel vernaculars like God Is for Real, Man, outdated youth culture commentaries, game guides and “idea” books that included everything from noncompetitive parachute games to the now-suspect chubby bunny contest.

Equally noticeable were the books that were absent. Almost nothing on ministry with young people outside of suburban, white, middle-class North America. Almost nothing on the globalization of contemporary culture, or on how technology and changing social expectations increasingly challenge the notion of adolescence itself. Despite the throngs of scholars lamenting “problems of American youth,” few mention religion or the church as a possible road to cure.[1] Disturbingly, neither do theologians.

The Literature of Lament:
Youth Ministry’s Rhetoric of Despair

The rhetoric of youth ministry in the late twentieth century, especially among mainline Protestants, was born of slippage: declining church memberships, decreasing moral influence and—save for the religious Right’s brief political apex in the 1980s—evaporating social power. As mainline churches gradually admitted their new marginal status in American society, the rhetoric surrounding their ministry with young people could aptly be described as “a rhetoric of despair.” Denominations bemoaned the loss of young people from their ranks, and ministry analysts launched a new literature of lament that blamed the church’s adolescent hemorrhage on everything from inadequate leadership training, poor educational models and dwindling denominational support to demographic shifts, economic cycles and, of course, the onslaught of secular culture.[2]

Notably absent from these rebukes was any mention of theology. For the most part, churches remained naive to their own complicity in the loss of young people from the pews. Liberal Christians blamed conservatives for promising young people easy answers (sometimes true) and conservative Christians blamed liberals for comforting them with cheap grace (also sometimes true). The fact was that most young people had never been in the pews to begin with, and their fading voices signaled an increasingly toxic culture and a distressingly impotent church. In 1965, the World Council of Churches called for an end to the segregation of young people into isolated “youth programs,” urging congregations to integrate youth into the total mission of the church.[3] Financially strapped denominations responded by amputating costly youth departments—yet, as youth staffs and budgets shriveled, no mechanism emerged to help local churches absorb young people into their larger ministries. The Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development declared the 1980s “an era of massive cuts in youth ministry” in terms of denominational personnel and resource deployment.[4] By the end of the century, young people’s absence, not their presence, had become normative for American Christianity.

Signs of Hope

Surprisingly, despite the litany of crises that ushered in the twenty-first century, the rhetoric of despair that had come to typify the conversation about youth ministry has begun to soften. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, three developments had slowly gathered momentum, setting the stage for a rhetorical change of heart and allowing a “rhetoric of hope” to emerge in the church’s conversation about young people, and about youth ministry in particular.

The first development was the late-twentieth-century’s renaissance in practical theology. Overwhelmed by the information age’s glut of data, modern fractiousness and moral uncertainty, secular scholars and theologians alike welcomed the practical wisdom of local communities as an alternative route to truth, which had the effect of rekindling academic interest in concrete communities of faith. Meanwhile, a new generation of students entered Christian colleges and seminaries—students whose coming of age coincided with the demise of many denominational youth ministry programs, which meant they increasingly traced their faith formation to parachurch youth and mission organizations rather than to traditional catechesis in congregations. As schools found themselves preparing candidates for ministry who had little experience in (or affection for) congregations, youth ministry provided a curricular bridge between students and local churches. For many of these young leaders—whose experiences in life-changing youth groups shaped their expectations for Christian community—youth ministry offered a template for how to “do church” with all age groups, and informed their approach to ecclesiology, mission and ministry as well. As a 1994 report to the Lilly Endowment conceded: “What has become clear . . . is that youth ministry is ultimately about something much more than youth ministry. . . . These [Christian youth] movements are redrawing the ecclesial map of the United States.”[5]

The second development that signaled changing attitudes toward youth ministry was the Lilly Endowment’s decision in the late 1980s to seed youth ministry initiatives in colleges and seminaries. Flush with profits from the “irrational exuberance” of the American stock market, Lilly gave innovative youth ministry the financial encouragement once provided by denominations—with a crucial difference. Lilly tendered this financial support primarily through Christian higher education, not denominations or parachurch groups—a decision that created a new “center of gravity” for innovative youth ministry, not in grass-roots ministries or in church bureaucracies, but in theological institutions whose primary focus was Christian vocation, and especially the education of pastors.[6] Besides spawning curricular changes, the decision to fund youth ministry at the level of theological education gave it new stature as a theological subject, and sent an unmistakable signal to pastors-in-training that their ministries should include young people.

The infusion of Lilly dollars placed youth ministry squarely on the agenda of mainstream Christian colleges and seminaries in the U.S. Before Lilly’s entry into the discussion, youth ministry (widely considered a place to “do time” until a chance for “real”—read: adult—ministry came along) floated on the periphery of the church’s consciousness. Youth ministry classes in higher education, where they were offered at all, were often outsourced to talented pastors instead of taught by regular faculty. Now, however, theological schools actively cultivated youth ministry initiatives in order to qualify for grant support, and churches responded by adding pastoral positions in youth ministry. While evangelicals had been professionalizing youth ministry throughout the late twentieth century, in the 1990s mainline Protestants began to follow suit. A small but influential number of mainline schools (including Emory, Princeton and Duke) launched youth ministry initiatives and added lines for pedigreed professors who brought theological substance to youth-related coursework. By the mid-1990s, the number of professors of youth ministry reached a critical mass, spawning professional guilds and a serious debate about whether youth ministry should constitute a “discipline” of its own.

Meanwhile, a third development contributed to the rhetoric of hope in youth ministry: a rising interest in spirituality among young people themselves, especially outside the U.S. As young people around the globe turned to religion to interpret cultural shifts and resist globalization’s homogenizing juggernaut, scholars and policymakers took note. Sociologists who had predicted the triumph of secularization recanted;[7] social and developmental psychologists, once skittish about religious subjects, began to acknowledge religion’s positive impact on healthy communities and adolescents.[8] Tragedies like the Columbine High School shootings and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, soldered the connection between young people and faith in the public eye, and in this cultural milieu, youth ministry grew bolder, demanding legitimacy as a ministry of the church.

Redefining Church: Themes in the Rhetoric of Hope

In short, just as adolescence itself has expanded to include nine-year-olds entering puberty as well as twenty-nine-year-olds struggling to make adult commitments, the rhetoric of hope has expanded youth ministry’s scope. In some ways, this rhetoric underscores long-accepted themes in Christian youth work—the need for relational methods and radical contextualization, for instance. But the new conversation about youth ministry sounds these themes with a new and almost brazen sense of purpose. Because this rhetoric views young people as capable of theological critique, the new conversation sets out to do more than redefine youth ministry. It aims to redefine the church, with passionate communities of youth playing a central role, on the premise that young people are reliable barometers of the human condition, and their actions may therefore be considered Exhibit A of humanity’s desire for God. At the same time, this rhetoric is intensely local and highly personal, echoing the apostolic community’s emphasis on personal, even mystical, encounters with Jesus Christ. As in the early church,...