05.13.08 | 
11 Comments | For some reason I took a keen interest in Tim Schmoyer’s post last week regarding the fairly new document produced by Dare 2 Share (D2S) called the “Deep and Wide Youth Ministry Thesis.” I thought I would post my thoughts on the document, but I was hesitant to make the posts for a few reasons:
- Honestly, I’ve never been a fan of D2S, for various reasons. So, I was worried that I would be unnecessarily harsh and negative no matter what the document says.
- I’m afraid that people who read my critique will think I am questioning the intentions of the good people at D2S. I seldom question people’s motives, unless they are just explicit con-artists. D2S is full of people trying to do the best they can for the kingdom. I applaud their motives. But, as I’ve posted before, I don’t believe that motivations mean a whole lot.
- My own “success” in youth ministry has been quite limited according to popular definitions of youth ministry success, so what right do I have to critique a hugely successful organization like D2S? On the other hand, I believe that our definitions of success in youth ministry are terribly culturally-conditioned. So, no, I don’t have a youth group that is growing exponentially, aggressively getting rid of hunger in Dallas, or making progress towards racial reconciliation in our diverse community. But I also think that my own success in ministry (if there even is such a thing) will not be able to be judged until about 15-20 years down the road, so who knows how well I’m doing right now.
Because of that last bullet point, I decided that I’m going to make a series of posts over the next few days examining the Deep and Wide Thesis. I believe that the “little guy” like me should have the freedom to critique a large and (widely accepted as) successful organization like D2S.
Over the next few days, you will be able to see how I do some of my thinking in youth ministry. More specifically, I hope to show what it means to think theologically through youth ministry methods, strategies, and models. Please understand that I do come from a different place theologically than the people at D2S, so there will be some obvious conflicts simply because of that. But in providing my thoughts, I hope to show how it is possible to evaluate a popular (maybe even “hyped-up”) style of ministry that seems like a non-negotiable mandate for how to approach youth ministry.
The first post comes tomorrow morning.
Tags: Dare 2 Share
Sweet! I’m looking forward to your insights!
You mentioned that you have some conflict with D2S simply because of your theological differences, which I respect. However, for the sake of context, would you mind sharing briefly about your theological background just so I can understand your upcoming thoughts from your perspective?
I’m subscribed to your comments here, so if you wanna do it here, that would be fine — no need for a whole new post on it or anything. Thanks! I’m looking forward to your input.
Hey Matt,
i am the Deep and Wide Coach at D2S. I am excited to follow along as a learner during the next couple of days. I am curious as to your take on the thesis and in particular how this tangibly works in the field. I agree that motivation with action has little to no value. So hopefully as we all work towards effective youth ministry strategies, we are moving past motivation towards effective strategies that are seeing students coming to faith and grounded in their faith.
One question from your comments above. If the fruit of our labor can only be seen 15-20 years from now, how do we measure whether or not we are making any improvements in our labor? The youth ministry culture is in desperate need of youth leaders who are doing their best. We have to hope that doing our best is not guess work…
Looking forward to the next couple of days…
Jeremy
I meant to say motivation without action has little to no value….
@Tim: No problem.
I grew up in a conservative evangelical church (which, I would say would be very similar theologically to D2S), but have found my theology being influenced more by emergent and mainline thought.
The main implication that I see for this as it related to soteriology (doctrine of salvation) was best espoused in a comment I heard Scot McNight say. Essentially, McNight was describing the traditional gospel presentation that is given to pre-Christians, and then he made the point that nowhere in that gospel is there a need for the church. The church is just a nice gathering of people where you can gather together to be encouraged in this new faith, but it is not a necessity.
I really have trouble with Way of the Master type evangelism methods. Essentially, their tactic is to set up a logical progression whereby everyone who goes through that progression is a fool if they do not come to the end wanting to escape damnation by accepting Jesus. But the gospel isn’t logical trickery, the gospel is Jesus Christ.
I have also been heavily influenced by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who described the church as “Christ existing in community.” In this understanding of the gospel and the church, the church plays a salvific role, not because of any intrinsic institutional power, but because God has sent his Holy Spirit to the church; you can’t speak of the gospel without speaking about the church. Now, the church does not “grant” salvation or hold a monopoly over it, but the church bears salvation in both its life and its witness. To me, the church should be described as the primary location of God’s revelation and work.
All this means that I tend to be less inclined to black and white delineations of who is “in” and who is “out,” understanding that many may be on their way towards following Christ as they are drawn in by God’s Holy Spirit active in our community. I also tend to be skeptical of understandings of the gospel that are based on modern forms of epistemology, logical arguments, or disembodied facts. So, I don’t share in a lot of the presuppositions that underly the D2S thesis.
As I said in my post, besides being a response to D2S’s thesis, it will also show some of the ways in which I think theologically about youth ministry, which I hope would be helpful to anyone, regardless of their theological stance.
@Jeremy,
Although I’d love for you to read every single one of my blog posts, I’m sure you don’t have the time to do such a thing. If you did, you’d see a lot of my thoughts regarding youth ministry and success. In this post I made the assertion that it is youth ministry’s obsession with success that has led us into a lot of the unsuccessful-ness that is pervading youth ministry. My contention is that we are not called to success, but to faithfulness, which necessitates us taking our role as theologians more seriously.
@Jeremy, I forgot to add something.
I want to reiterate something just to make sure that I am being clear in my speech.
When I say motivations don’t mean a whole lot, I mean more than motivation needs to spur action. In my experience, great motivation has led to highly questionable actions. My contention is that the things that inform our motivation (namely: scripture) should also form our actions.
My observation has been that we use the Bible to show us the goal (i.e. our motivation), but then we figure out on our own how to reach that goal. So, we see things like churches giving away free gas to get people to come to church. While I applaud their motivation for wanting to reach their community, introduce people to Jesus, and grow the Kingdom, I disagree with the actions taken on theological grounds. There are ways to faithfully go about what we are called to do as Christians. More thoughts on this topic can be found in my post here.
Hmm… I don’t think your comment email subscriptions are working. I just came back here to check something and saw that there were a couple more comments here, but I haven’t received any email notifications of them.
But anyway, thanks for sharing your background a little, Matt! That’s really helpful.
@Tim…
Hmmm, that’s not good. I know they’ve worked before, I’ll check into that.
looking forward to it matt. i’m very curious
about your thoughts. i long for the day when we are beyond this emergent questioning time…only for the fact that we may move to actual answers instead of just questioning everything. indeed we need to rethink a lot of what we have done for a long time in american ministry…but to often i see in this questioning, nothing of worth really being discussed to possibly move towards a more holistic, biblical, relevant, Christ centered, kingdom-focused, God fearing, people loving, seeker sensitive, bible preaching, emerging…um progressive…technological…caring loving vision of what God wants His Bride to be (man i got lost in all that sarcasm)
but seriously…looking forward to the next few days
[…] Previous Posts: • Introductory thoughts […]
[…] Introductory Thoughts […]