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The 3 Spheres of Youth Ministry

By Matt · Comments (9)

Friday, May 29th, 2009

3 Spheres of Youth Ministry

Luther Seminary continues to put out quality research related to youth ministry. I got to participate in one of the webinars they have just developed to make this research accessible to the average church leader called the Exemplary Youth Ministry Online Seminar. In this one-hour seminar they go over the basics of the Exemplary Youth Ministry Study, which you should be familiar with if you are not already. This study sought to identify key markers and assets in congregations who nurture long-term faith in the lives of their young people.

One of the insights that was brought up during this seminar is that significant faith is developed in three different spheres: the home, the congregation, and age-specific ministry. And here’s the kicker: “Activity in two of the three Spheres results in the development of a ‘Sweet Spot’ promoting greater levels of faith maturity.” And, obviously, activity within all three of the spheres would promote high levels of faith maturity as well.

What doe all this mean? Here’s a few of the implications that I have been thinking through:

“Youth Group” is not enough by itself. Without nurturing faith in the home or participation in the congregation, trying to disciple teens only within the age-specific sphere is an uphill battle. I wonder how many youth ministries need to rewrite and rethink their mission statements. How many youth ministries try to facilitate all of the necessary programs to disciple a young person using only age-specific ministry? To say that an age-specific youth ministry will do something like “produce lifelong disciples of Christ” (or something to that effect) without also taking into account the life at home and contributing to the life of the congregation is short-sighted.
Teenagers can have a growing, vibrant faith without participating in the “youth ministry.” If a teen has an active faith life in the home and is active within the congregation-at-large, they may never set foot in Sunday school or go on a youth mission trip, but still have a growing faith. We need not think that every teenager in a congregation must be involved in youth group to help them grow in faith.
There is hope for youth who come from families whose parents are not nurturing faith in the home. Sometimes grandma will bring a child to church, or a teen brings a friend with them and the friend starts to get involved, but the parents of these youth might not be reinforcing anything at home. In these cases, the age specific ministry combined with activity in the wider congregation can still help to nurture mature faith in teenagers.
We still need the “one-earned Mickey Mouse,” to an extent. After my recent post about the value, at times, of the old one-eared Mickey Mouse model this research seems to suggest that there is still a place for getting teenagers ministering specifically with people in their age range. Obviously, it is not enough by itself, and one person cannot do it by him- or herself, but it is still a vital component of youth ministry that should be kept intact.

What do you think? Does this “Three Spheres” model play out in your experience? Are there other insights to be gleaned from this? [Update: Yes, there are more insights... check out this post]

Comments (9)

Categories : Youth Ministry

Tags : exemplary youth ministry study, EYM, luther seminary

Why Seminaries are Irrelevant: A Postscript

By Matt · Comments (1)

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Seminary

The last two days I wrote a two-part series giving 13 reasons why I think seminaries are becoming irrelevant for training church leaders (read Part 1 and Part 2). However, when reading through the comments, I think I need to make a few clarifications and assertions:

I love academia. This has nothing to do with bad experiences I’ve had in academic settings. I have an undergraduate degree in youth ministry with a minor in Bible. My favorite classes were the theoretical, philosophical, and historical classes: church history, theology classes, general philosophy, Christian philosophy (where we studied Augustine in depth). I have presented two papers at uptight, boring, stereotypical research conferences (and kind of enjoyed it). If I could be a student for the rest of my life, I just might do that. So, this has nothing to do with a personal vendetta against academics.
I love the church more. One of the things that keeps me from seriously considering a fast-track to a Ph.D. is that I do not believe the hope of the world is found in seminaries, but in local churches. Yes, I know that seminaries train church leaders, who in turn serve in local churches. But my ecclesiology and pneumatology put more emphasis on these local bodies than academic factories that decontextualize and depersonalize the learning process.
We still need leaders and they still need to be trained and educated. However, I think that a same or higher quality education can be gained within local networks, without nearly as high of a cost, and while still within a concrete ministry context. By approaching education this way, laypeople are more able to participate in the same kind of educational process as pastors and other leaders without having to leave their careers.
This will take time. I don’t expect seminaries to become obsolete tomorrow. It will take people who do have academic credentials and who do have careers in seminaries to make a break and forge a new path. There has to be a bridge, an intermediate step, that will legitimize a new form of training church leaders. I don’t want our church leaders trained by a bunch of dunces any more than you do.
A new process will place spiritual formation on the same level as academics. In my experience, when a professor in an academic setting tries to integrate spiritual formation into the classroom there is quite a bit of backlash. Students think their time (and money) is being wasted and that the professor is just giving them fluff work, so they don’t take it seriously. That our Christian universities and seminaries are not places who take spiritual formation seriously is a tragedy. But the problem is with the model. As long as professors are judged and rewarded on research, publishing, pedagogy, and academic rigor spiritual formation will always be an afterthought. To train church leaders without serious attention to spiritual formation is to produce spiritually anemic leaders. A new model of training can put spiritual formation back where it belongs.
My approach to education is highly influenced by my current seminary program. As I’ve said before, I am part of Luther Seminary’s Distributed Learning Program. It is a Masters of Arts in Youth and Family Ministry that takes 18 courses to complete, nine classes online and nine on-campus classes in intensive courses (one or two week classes). Without a program structured as this one is, I would not be continuing my education right now. I got into this program out of necessity–I wanted to go to seminary and I thought this was the best program (regardless of denomination) for youth ministry that would allow me to keep my full-time job. But now that I am in such a program I am seeing the high value of a non-traditional program, and it is causing me to totally rethink how we might go about training church leaders in the future.

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Categories : Seminary

Tags : academics, distributed learning, luther seminary

13 Reasons Why (Traditional) Seminaries are Irrelevant (For Church Leaders): Part 2

By Matt · Comments (10)

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Seminary

Read Part 1 with the first six reasons.

The cost is too high. Especially in mainline churches where churches are shrinking, our churches are less financially viable and pastors are coming out of seminary with more and more debt, such a trend is not sustainable. We are bankrupting our churches by making them pay for pastors’ debt burdens.
Seminaries create unhelpful hierarchies in churches. By having degreed, credentialed church leaders a dichotomy is drawn between the haves and the have-nots. Especially as churches are becoming serious about the priesthood of all believers, this division will become increasingly frowned upon.
Seminaries have crossed the line into institutional preservation. Especially now that we are in an economic downturn, many seminaries are in institutional survival mode. Whenever you are in survival mode the continuation of the institution becomes primary, not the mission. Seminaries are thinking less about how to train church leaders and more about how to keep the doors open (Our churches often face the same problem).
Resources are becoming available for little to no cost. The open-source movement is beginning to catch on in areas other than software. Blogs are offering high quality content at no cost. Resources for ministry are offered for free download. Academic journals can be found online for free. This trend will eventually mean that the best scholarship and ministry resources will be published for the world to see for free, making it very difficult to convince someone to pay thousands of dollars for access to cutting-edge thinking and research.
Technology has made brick-and-mortar institutions less important. With the advent of broadband internet and it’s related technologies we are not bound by geography when it comes to learning and training. Workshops, seminars, online conferences, and whole semester-long classes can be done over the internet. Relocating to do such a thing makes less and less sense as time goes on.
You learn too much too quickly. Think about it: you hole yourself up in a classroom for a few years trying to soak in a bunch of information and then you are thrust into a congregation to try and put it all to use. In addition to that, you are used to being able to dedicate yourself to your studies full-time. In a congregation you have bulletins to update, newsletter articles to write, people to visit, events to plan, sermons to write, and more. How are you ever going to find time to keep learning? A program that is concurrent with ministry in a local congregation and spread over a longer period of time has two advantages. One, you can focus on and implement a few ideas at a time without being overwhelmed. Take a class, implement it; take another class, implement it; this is a much more sustainable model. Two, learning to budget yourself to have time for ministry and a learning program will better enable you to become a lifelong learner because you are forced to make yourself do both at the same time. This will set you up for being able to continue learning even after your program is over.
Seminaries usurp the role of the church. This is my biggest problem with seminary programs. Why do we have to go off somewhere for 2-4 years to study theology? What are our churches doing? Shouldn’t the church be the place where people are taught, trained, and released for ministry? The fact that training has been outsourced to the seminaries is a sign of a failure of the church. The future ecclesiology that sees churches as places of equipping their congregations for mission will change this and make seminaries ultimately irrelevant for training church leaders.

Now, the above is quite forward-looking. Maybe seminaries are not completely irrelevant today, but at the very least, seminary is becoming irrelevant, quickly. The seminaries that see this coming and adapt might survive and be able to adjust. But those who stay stuck in a model that is 150 years old are bound to fail.

As I referenced in the last post, Luther Seminary is one of the institutions that is taking innovative steps to adjust to the changing world with their Distributed Learning program and by offering Online Seminars to average church leaders. However, I think they are taking the first baby steps to really helping people rethink what it means to train church leaders. I hope they and others will continue to push the envelope and not get behind the curve of cultural and ecclesiological development.

Lastly, I put in parentheses that seminaries are irrelevant for church leaders. However, it would be a tragedy for there to be no form of Christian scholarship. I hope there are always places for people to get Ph.D.’s in the various fields of study, but I believe that the future of equipping and training people for local congregational ministry has already begun the shift away from the brick-and-mortar institutions towards the local church.

[Update: I have written a postscript on these two posts. Read it here.]

Comments (10)

Categories : Seminary

Tags : distributed learning, luther seminary

13 Reasons Why (Traditional) Seminaries are Irrelevant (For Church Leaders): Part 1

By Matt · Comments (16)

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Seminary

The other day Jake Belder linked to a post about 5 Reasons Seminary is Relevant. As someone who is in seminary and also interested in how to best train and equip church leaders I found this post interesting while at the same time disagreeing profoundly. Below is my response, but first I should qualify that I define traditional seminary programs as full-time residential programs that require someone to relocate themselves to a brick-and-mortar institution for a period of 2-5 years. I believe these programs are becoming increasingly irrelevant and unhelpful.

Also, my limited seminary and professional experience has been in the mainline church, specifically the ELCA. So, some of the following critiques might not apply to evangelical seminaries, but I believe that most will.

With that, here is why I think traditional seminary programs are irrelevant for church leaders:

Seminaries remove people from ministry contexts. The traditional seminary model has certain values that undermine local gatherings and remove people unnecessarily from their faith communities. Yes, I know that your fellow seminarians create a community, but there is a significant difference between a gathering of idealistic budding theologians and the average person in a congregation. Much discourse in academic settings is very pie-in-the-sky and not well grounded in reality.
The process of seminary is no longer effective in preparing for ministry. When the dominant church model was oral proclamation, reasoned argument, and apologetics, perhaps sitting in classrooms studying the minutiae of supralapsarianism, practicing speaking skills, and honing rhetoric was helpful. Today, however, we are moving past such a model and moving towards organic, relational, flat models of ecclesiology and mission, making the seminary model less relevant.
Denominations are becoming a thing of the past. Many seminaries are bastions of denominational conformity and preservation. Unfortunately for them, today’s younger generation could care less about denominations. Denominations did not arise in force until the 1800s. If they haven’t always been, then it is likely they won’t always be. Denominational seminaries might be the first to go.
The future of ecclesiology is the priesthood of all believers. Many future church leaders will be bivocational, making a dedicated graduate degree impossible. Dedicating full-time graduate level study to something that doesn’t pay the bills is not a practical option.
Seminaries are about credentialing as much as training. My school, Luther Seminary, had to (and continues to have to) jump through all sorts of hoops to get the Association of Theological Schools to accredit their innovative Distributive Learning Program, which, to the surprise of the old guard, has been wildly successful in providing church leaders with quality training. We continue to be restricted by ATS from doing certain things that might be helpful in our education. This is all because we are caught up with being accredited, which has nothing to do with the gospel or training church leaders. (I say Luther should consider making the bold move of becoming the first major seminary to break with the ATS in order to do what we need to do to train people for the church. I know it’s complicated and all, but we should at least be considering it.)
The process of seminary is personally damaging. Maybe this is not happening across the board, but Luther Seminary is doing some research into what happens to the spiritual lives of seminarians between the time they enter seminary and the time they graduate. The results are not encouraging (sorry I don’t have a citation because the results are not published). Not only is ministry effectiveness questionable, but at a personal level seminarians are coming out less healthy than when they matriculated. My hypothesis is that seminary asks deep and profound questions that need to be wrestled with in the context of a constant, steady, familiar worshipping community in order to not inflict the damage that it does. The role of the Spirit is diminished by taking people out of their church community.

You can read reasons 7-13 here. I look forward to some lively conversation.

Comments (16)

Categories : Seminary

Tags : association of theological schools, distributed learning, luther seminary

Exemplary Youth Ministry Online Seminar

By Matt · Comments (0)

Friday, April 17th, 2009

I received the following as an email from my seminary and thought I would pass along the information to those who might be interested. The Exemplary Youth Ministry Study is a pretty ground-breaking study in the field of youth ministry. If you are a full-time youth worker and unfamiliar with this study, this might be a good place to start. I also noticed on their website that they are willing to do private seminars for your whole youth ministry team if you want; contact them for more information on that if you are interested.

Exemplary Youth Ministry

Learn in an Online Seminar!

Now you can learn from the results of a ground-breaking study in youth ministry, and hear the personal stories of the congregational leaders involved. The study was led by Roland Martinson, academic dean and Carrie Olson Baalson professor of Children, Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary.

At the Exemplary Youth Ministry seminar you will:

discover how all congregations can be places where the faith of young people is nurtured to maturity.
be exposed to the key aspects of a mature Christian faith.
discover defined assets of congregational youth ministry.
learn about the role of leadership in creating a culture for developing mature Christian young people.
be able to engage and focus your congregation’s mission.
learn the framework for Youth Ministry that your Luther student is learning.

Attend Exemplary Youth Ministry from your home or church. All you need is a broadband Internet connection and a phone. Pastors, youth ministers and youth ministry teams are encouraged to attend. Or contact us to set up a seminar exclusively for your congregation’s youth ministry team. Exemplary Youth Ministry is presented by the Luther Seminary Center for Children, Youth and Family Ministry Team at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minn.

Available Sessions

Registration is limited to six people per session, so sign up for one of these sessions today!
May 5, May 12, May 19 or May 28 at 1-2 p.m. Central Time
May 7, May 14 or May 28 at 10-11 a.m. Central Time

Cost: $39 ($20 for Luther Seminary students)
Three easy ways to register!

Online: www.luthersem.edu/exemplary
Phone: [hidden] Email me if you want it
Email: [hidden] Email me if you want it

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Categories : Youth Ministry

Tags : exemplary youth ministry study, luther seminary