Below is the article I wrote for this month’s church newsletter.  I really struggled writing it; I just couldn’t put the words together like I wanted to.  Hopefully, it will be coherent enough that people will mildly understand what I was getting at.  As we’re trying to communicate a new way of doing youth ministry to the people in the congregation, I’m trying to come up with ways to explain my non-heiarchical, non-authoritiative, fluid, and organic approach to ministry.  It’s hard to do that in written form with only one page at your disposal.  An anology I used at my last team meeting was like a web, but I would need to include graphics for my article, which I don’t want to have to mess with.  So for this month’s article I used the analogy of a virus.  So, here she is:

It has long been acknowledged among those who practice youth ministry that it is impossible for a youth minister to do all the work on his or her own.  Once you get past about eight teenagers, one person really can’t give each student what they need in order to grow and mature.  So, youth ministries have typically developed adult volunteer “staff” who are also dedicated to teenagers in addition to the youth minister.  These people lead small groups, teach Sunday school, help organize events, etc.  This has leant youth ministry to be conceived of as a top-down sort of structural program.  The youth minister recruits, equips, trains, and releases other adults within the congregation to do a bulk of the ministry with teens.  Of course, getting more adults involved in the lives of our teenagers is better than expected one “hired gun” youth minister to disciple a whole group.  However, while this sort of structure may be beneficial for certain things, I believe it is limited in providing an overarching understanding of how youth ministry should function. 

Instead of thinking of a structured organization with a youth minister in charge of a specific group of adults who minister to teenagers, we should think of youth ministry more like a virus.  “Youth ministry” needs to be an attitude that pervades everything I do.  I value young people, give them opportunities to develop their gifts, and challenge them to make a difference. I take time to listen to them, to share my life with them, to sacrifice for them, to ask them about their relationship with Jesus, and to study the Bible with them.  When I do these things, and have an attitude where these acts will flow out of me naturally, I will “infect” other people around me with this attitude.  Other people will see the value of the young people in our congregation.  My conversations with other adults will be peppered with the things going on in the lives of our teenagers.  As I do this, the “virus” begins to spread to those people, who will spread it to the people in their lives, and so on.  As the “virus” spreads throughout our church our teenagers will not be ministered to only by a small, specific group of adults who are under the “authority” of the youth minister, but our teenagers will begin to be ministered to by the whole congregation.

This is youth ministry.  If you are doing the above things, you are doing youth ministry.  It doesn’t matter that you don’t teach Sunday school.  It doesn’t matter that you are not the youth minister.  It doesn’t matter that you’ve never gone on a mission trip. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the difference between an iPod and a PSP.  It doesn’t matter that you are sixty years old.  You can still be a part of the youth ministry here at Hope. 

In order to begin to radically transform the lives of our adolescents, it takes all of us working together letting them know that they are valued and that we care.  So, next time you see one of the youth around, take time to talk to them, listen to them, and value them.  If you see them doing something good, compliment them.  They say it takes a whole village to raise a child.  Likewise, it takes a whole church to disciple a teenager.  Now that is youth ministry. 

Youth Guy Evan wrote this in response to a previous post:

I’d be curious to know though, who do you think is to blame for youth ministry’s dependency on youth pastors? Culture? Students? Parents? the Church? Ourselves? All of the above?

Difficult to tell… because i think at times all of them are true at one point…

Of course, this is a question worth asking. If we don’t realize how we get ourselves in these messes in the first place, then we’re apt to repeat them.

One clarification though: I want to make a distinction between dependence upon youth pastors and youth ministries. Evan asked why I think we are so dependent upon youth pastors when my post was meant to be more of an indictment upon the general practice of youth ministry today. Maybe I wasn’t clear. So, I’ll give this a two-part response.

Being highly dependent upon a youth pastor (or multiple paid youth ministry staff) is a huge issue. I’ve been at my current youth ministry position for six months now, and one of my goals for the next year or so is to gradually make the ministry less me-dependent. Right now, I’m wearing way too many hats. So, I know how easy it is to fall into a position where we are expected to do it all.

What is at fault for creating this typical dependency? Lots of things.

But before I expound some of them, a rant is in order. I would argue that adolescence is the most crucial time in a person’s whole life in regard to the amount of influence it will have on the rest of life. Patterns, behaviors, and habits are formed in adolescence that will last a lifetime (or the effects of them will, i.e. pregnancy). And to whom do we entrust these tender teenagers during this immensely crucial time? The person on the church staff with the least amount of ministry experience (oftentimes none… oh wait, do summer internships count?), least amount of wisdom (because they are young), and least amount of education (if they even have any theological/ministry training). And then this person, who is oftentimes still in the waning stages of adolescence, gets thrown into a room full of 12-18 year olds, and the church and their parents say “Good luck. Make sure they don’t ruin their (or our) lives in the next seven years.” Talk about a screwed up conception of ministry. Rant complete.

So, who’s at fault for creating this dependence? Everyone, plain and simple. Youth pastors, even though most of us have read and read about how we need to quit the lone ranger bit, still structure things so they are running all of the show. The church is not a community of brothers and sisters, but a collection of individuals who come to “get fed”. They view the church as a distributor of religious goods and services, which necessitates them hiring a professional religious goods and services dispenser for the niche market of teenagers (boy, ecclesiology is showing up all over the place). Other adults in the church are afraid of teenagers, so they hire someone crazy enough to work exclusively with them. Most pastors are busy being a lone ranger for the rest of the congregation, so they don’t have time to really invest into the crazy world of teenagers. And since they are lone rangers, they expect us to be, too.

Simply, everyone is at fault for creating a dependence upon youth pastors.

However, that still doesn’t address the issue I was hoping to get at with the previous post. Lets say we have a ministry that is going well without a youth minister. We’ve got plenty of volunteers and students to fill all the roles we need of teaching, planning, coordinating, executing, etc. The ministry goes on retreats, mission trips, and has Sunday school, small groups, a worship service, etc. It looks like a typical youth group, but without a youth pastor. Are we out of the woods?

Not in my opinion. I still see that model as “outsourcing” youth ministry to certain people within the congregation because the rest of the congregation doesn’t want to have to deal with it. There can still be little to no assimilation into the wider body even without a youth pastor. The idea of having a completely separate operating arena for those 12-18 years old still rubs me the wrong way. Now, I acknowledge that some time is probably needed for teenagers to throw pies in each others’ faces without the participation of the senior citizens’ group. However, we have, for the most part, cut off the youth of our church from the rest of the congregation.

The problem is, that’s how the rest of the church functions as well. We’ve got all these little niche ministries that operate independent of each other. The only time we interact with people outside of our clique is for the mandatory 5-minute hand-shaking time during a Sunday morning service.

We’ve gotten this model from the wider culture at large. Our church structures draw from the wells of corporate America and the public education system more than from a biblical, confessional, live-giving, forgiving community of fallen but redeemed people. And for me, it all goes back to ecclesiology as the root of the problem. We must rethink the way we as a community live out, embody, and incarnate a gospel life. Even if we take all the dependency of youth pastors out of our ministries, I believe we are still a long ways away from a biblical way of living-in-relationship.

Ok , we’re all at fault. We have a weak ecclesiology. But how’d we get here? How do we address the situation? My first guess at this is that we need to liberate our imaginations. I haven’t read much of Walter Brueggemann or any of Stanley Hauerwas, but I believe these two authors, among others, can help us regain our imagination. We all are currently so captivated by the culture at large, and also our Christian culture, that we no longer have the ability to let our minds truly hear the words of scripture and envision a community that is submissive to its call upon our lives. Most of us are simply incapable. We must pray for God to liberate our imaginations from the captivity of American culture.

Only when we have ears to hear can we start to put things aright.