PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
Faith & LeadershipCAN THESE BONES
A Faith & Leadership podcast »
YOUTH & CHILDREN, YOUTH MINISTRY, EDUCATION, HIGHER EDUCATION
Episode 6: Almeda M. Wright on the act of radical listening to young Christians
AUTHOR SAYS THAT, INSTEAD OF FIXING OR TEACHING YOUNG PEOPLE, WE SHOULD LISTEN TO THEM
For the Rev. Dr. Almeda M. Wright, the notion of radical listening changed her ministry and her research into the spiritual lives of young people as a professor at Yale Divinity School. In her conversation with "Can These Bones" co-host Laura Everett, this engineer-turned-pastor-turned-professor talks about how a youth program influenced her as a young African-American woman, how spoken-word poetry is a spiritual practice, and what it means to employ radical improvisational pedagogy. She also reflects on how the learnings from her book on youth spirituality can be employed immediately in many contexts.
In this episode of “Can These Bones,” co-host Laura Everett talks with Almeda M. Wright, Yale Divinity School professor and the author of “The Spiritual Lives of Young African Americans,” about her training and background as an engineer and her work with young people in ministry.
What if, instead of fixing or teaching young people, we listened to them? Really listened? For the Rev. Dr. Almeda M. Wright, the notion of radical listening changed her ministry and her research into the spiritual lives of young people as a professor at Yale Divinity School. In her conversation with “Can These Bones” co-host Laura Everett, this engineer-turned-pastor-turned-professor talks about how a youth program influenced her as a young African-American woman, how spoken-word poetry is a spiritual practice, and what it means to employ radical improvisational pedagogy. She also reflects on how the learnings from her book on youth spirituality can be employed immediately in many contexts.
Listen and subscribe
Listen to all the episodes and learn more about the hosts.
More from Almeda M. Wright
“The Spiritual Lives of Young African Americans”(link is external)
Yale Divinity School course: “Radical Pedagogy(link is external)”
Emory University formation program: Youth Theological Initiative(link is external)
MIT enrichment camp: MITES(link is external)
Transcript
Bill Lamar: From Faith & Leadership, this is “Can These Bones,” a podcast that asks a fresh set of questions about leadership and the future of the church. I’m Bill Lamar.
Laura Everett: And I’m Laura Everett. This is episode 6 of a series of conversations with leaders from the church and other fields. Through this podcast, we want to share with you our hope in the resurrection and perhaps breathe life into leaders struggling in the “valley of dry bones.”Bill Lamar: You spoke with Almeda Wright, an assistant professor of religious education at Yale Divinity School. Almeda shared her own vocational journey with you, and it’s tied to her research into youth and spirituality. Share a little bit with us about that.
Laura Everett: Bill, Almeda is a fascinating human being, and in full disclosure, Almeda is a friend from seminary, and she has been my writing partner for a number of years now. But she’s got this, like, unbelievable background.
She is a pastor and a professor with a degree in electrical engineering from MIT. And there are these amazing parallels between her own life and her research, because she had the experience of being a young scholar who had the opportunity to go to a summer youth program at MIT. And it really helped spark her imagination as a young black woman that she could actually be an engineer.
And so that experience of sort of seeing what your life could be on a college campus is part of what she brought into her work at the Youth Theological Initiative, which is called YTI. It’s at Emory University. At YTI, Almeda and others helped young people discover their own possibility of theological engagement, the possibility that they might be called to be pastors and teachers and scholars and missionaries in service of the church.
That same experience of going on a college campus and seeing people who could mentor you and lead you and give you a model for the kind of vocation you would have in the world -- she got to do that with some budding theologians.
So Almeda took her commitment to youth and formation and brought it to her research. She began to research her new book, “The Spiritual Lives of Young African Americans.”
Now, Bill, I don’t regularly work with adolescents, but Almeda has really convinced me that the radical act of listening is necessary for everyone in Christian community. I think we can all find some wisdom in this interview.
Bill Lamar: Laura, I -- at Metropolitan, we are really trying our best to help form young folks, and so I’m excited about your conversation. Let’s listen.
Laura Everett: Hi, this is Laura Everett, and it is a great delight today to get to talk with a dear friend of mine. The Rev. Dr. Almeda M. Wright is an assistant professor of religious education at Yale Divinity School. She’s also an ordained pastor in the American Baptist Churches.
The Rev. Dr. Wright has a bachelor of science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master of arts in teaching from Simmons, a master of divinity from Harvard, a Ph.D. from Emory, and if she were not a dear friend, I would be mightily intimidated by all of these degrees.
Miss Almeda, it is good to be with you.
Almeda Wright: It is great to be with you guys this morning.
Laura Everett: Thanks for joining us. So all of these degrees and all of these possibilities in front of you -- why would you devote yourself and your scholarship to the church?
Almeda Wright: Well, that’s a great question, one that my parents probably are still wrestling with now. But the truth be told, it’s been an interesting and amazing journey to get from engineering to studying young people, and to think about the life of faith writ large for a lot of folk.
But it started out for me -- I grew up in a very religious home, and there was never a time when we were not religious or never a time when we were not involved in faith. However, I never saw that as a career path for myself. I thought it was something that others did, primarily because I grew up in a small, rural black Baptist church where there weren’t that many women in ministry or women in leadership.
It was when I got to college, when I was studying engineering, that I actually got exposed to more women doing ministry full time as a profession. And so that kind of started the shift and started the journey toward not just being a practitioner of faith but wanting to help people develop and grow in their faith on their own.
Laura Everett: It’s not just that you went to MIT; you had a vision of your life as an electrical engineer. How did you know that that was something you could be good at?
Almeda Wright: Well, electrical engineering actually came from a sixth-grade teacher, because I was very good at math and very good at science and actually had a pretty good sense of wanting to fix things and/or blow things up.
[Laughter]
Well, a general sense of experimentation. I’d been taking apart clock radios since I was 3 and 4 and building things with circuits. And so I was the kid who -- nerd camp was built for me; science camp was built for me. I ate it up; I loved it.
And it was only in sixth grade that I determined -- I had a teacher, and she was like, “Well, maybe you should be an engineer.” And I was like, “Oh, OK, so this actually has a name; it’s not just something fun that I could do.” And so from then on, I was like, “I’m going to go and be the best engineer I can be.”
And I didn’t even know where MIT was. I couldn’t tell you if it was in Maine or Michigan or Massachusetts until about the 11th grade. And so I went and did a summer enrichment camp called MITES that’s still going on to this day on campus at MIT in Boston.
And it was amazing. And so that started the journey. But even while I was an undergraduate at MIT, I was leading campus fellowship. I was part of the gospel choir; I was leading Black Christian Fellowship.
And so my life of faith was always a part of it; it never, ever stopped. And it was somewhere around junior year, I think I was 19 years old, where I really sensed a call to ministry but didn’t know what to do with that, had no idea what that was going to look like, what that would mean, because all I had been preparing for at this point was to be an engineer.
And so I went and I lived abroad, I studied abroad in Spain, and that was the first time probably in 13 years that I’d done something that wasn’t math- or science-oriented and could begin to kind of breathe and think, “Wait a minute, there might be something else out there that I could do.”
Laura Everett: So I want to go back to that campus program. Because for you, the experience of being on a college campus, in the lab, working in an environment, helped you envision yourself in a role. Because let’s be clear: as a black woman, the models for becoming an electrical engineer when you grow up were probably not readily present to you, right?
Almeda Wright: Nonexistent.
Laura Everett: Right.
Almeda Wright: Yes. So in some ways, MIT, because of just the fact that it was all focused on science and engineering, was the first place that I’d actually encountered other black women who were interested in science -- and in some ways, other black people.
Now, my dad worked as a quality assurance engineer, so I at least had some access to other people who were doing engineering before I got there, but there were no other black women in my high school or in any of the places that I frequented as a teenager that were thinking about engineering and science.
And so it became a great opportunity to be on campus, and the MITES program was for African-Americans, for Native Americans, for Latinos. I remember the one thing that we were charged to do was to design a robot to play soccer. We had this major competition, and we got a box of scrap materials and a motor, and they told us to go at it.
And I remember, I had a team -- it was all women on my team -- and we did fairly well. But it was one of those empowerment moments where you were -- it felt like you finally could find other people who are of like mind and like skills and like interest to really just kind of go full steam ahead.
One of the things that we were doing at Emory with the Youth Theological Initiative, or YTI, is that we were inviting some of the best and the brightest of young people from around the country to spend about three or four weeks on campus learning theology, rubbing elbows with some of the best professors at Emory and in Atlanta, but also living in community.
One of the things at YTI was that we could not plan for the types of relationships that they would develop. We could plan the service projects; we could plan the theological reflection. But the most transformative part of that program was what was happening in the dorms, and the late-night conversations when they were sitting in the cafeteria together and just actually getting to know each other.
Laura Everett: It’s so clear how the investment that other people made in taking you seriously as a young person is something that you continue to do with the young people in your life. As long as I’ve known you, you’ve carried this deep commitment that youth and young adults are already capable of deep theological reflection.
But I know you’ve come up against times in local congregations where the church doesn’t act like youth are capable of deep theological reflection. Tell me, how did you notice that gap between what we profess and what we practice?
Almeda Wright: Well, for me, it was because I was working as a middle school math and science teacher for a couple of years, and at the same time, I was volunteering at my local congregation teaching youth Sunday school.
And Monday through Friday, I would teach critical thinking and higher-level math and algebra and have young people doing projects on, like, AIDS and HIV in sub-Saharan Africa -- in a sixth- and fifth-grade classroom.
And then I would go and teach seventh- and eighth-graders in the basement of a church, and all we expected them to do was to regurgitate Scripture and/or to create simplistic art projects out of it, and not actually ever critically engage.
And part of -- it was a moment of, “What the heck?” Because it didn’t make any sense to me that I expected kids in a school setting, a public school setting, to be able to be critical engagers, critical interlocutors.
And then on Sundays, I expected them just to tell me exactly what was in the text and not challenge it at all. I didn’t feel good about myself as a teacher in the church setting. And so I went looking for other ways or other models of engaging in religious education so that young people could use the totality of who they are as learners and thinkers and humans to engage their faith as well.
Often, and this is one of the things that both I encountered as a teenager but also that I see in young people that I work with even till today, 20-some years later -- it’s always interesting when young people say, “No one’s ever really listened to me.” Not, and this is the difference, they don’t ever say, “I didn’t have anything to say”; they’re like, “No one’s really taking the time to listen.”
And so one of the biggest gifts that I try to give to young people, and one of the biggest pedagogical pieces that I try to push, is really active listening, and to take seriously not just what we might do with young people or with kids but also what we will learn from them.
One of the things that has transformed my way of doing research, my way of doing ministry, is walking with young people and actually just taking time to get to know them, not have an agenda, but to say, “I know that you are coming into this community and into this conversation as an equal partner, and I respect that.”
And that’s one of the things that young people are searching for, in a lot of ways. But also when they’re given that opportunity, they share stuff that blows your mind.
For example, there’s this one young woman, Kira, who really helped me to start thinking differently about how I was approaching or thinking about violence and African-American youth, and even just how it connected with their spiritual lives. I didn’t think it did connect with their spiritual lives.
And she reminded me, she’s like, “No, I mean, I have to remind myself to pray whenever I hear that someone has been shot in my community, or remind myself to witness.” And I was like, “What do you mean, ‘witness’?”
And part of her narrative, and what it taught me with listening to her carefully, is she’s like, “No, I want to tell other young people that they are loved, that I love them, that God loves them, that they are respected.”
And she’s like, “I need them to know this, because if they’re going to die tomorrow, I need them to know today that somebody loves them.”
And it blew my mind. It took me to a place of not [just] trying to figure out what’s the best programming or what’s the best kind of, like, conflict resolution thing but also, out of the depth and the core of her faith, she was like, “I’ve got to share love.” And I was like, “OK, you are so right.”
Laura Everett: How has that changed how you think of yourself as a pastor?
Almeda Wright: Well, it changes a lot, partly because I am a doer. I am a fixer.
Laura Everett: [Laughter] You’re an engineer!
Almeda Wright: Right, I am. And not that those things aren’t good or necessary, but they probably shouldn’t be first.
And so it has made me shift, sometimes, the way I move, or the way I operate. And it has caused me to really re-prioritize, re-valueize the time that I can spend just being in conversation. And not to say that that’s a means to an end, because often I would say, “OK, I’m going to listen a little bit, and I’m only listening so that we can get to the strategies.” But it’s pushed me to listen for listening’s sake.
Laura Everett: It’s changed you as a researcher, right, this radical act of listening?
Almeda Wright: It really has. It’s changed both what some of the questions and themes [are] that come up in my analysis, but it’s definitely most clearly changed my methodologies.
So often, we want to do research, especially with young people and children, with interventions in mind. Where you think, “Well, what are the places where I can fix something or teach them something?”
Whereas, for the most part, this last research project that I’ve been finishing really had to push me to think about, “How do I give them a platform to teach the world? How do I amplify their voices, and not necessarily think about how we teach young people, but what young people teach us?”
Because often, young African-Americans are doing a dance where they are definitely committed to their spiritual formation, whether it looks like formal attendance in church and worship or community practices of spiritual belief and formation, but they’re also definitely trying to be about a life of justice, committed to social transformation.
And the traditional church, African-American or not, has not always been a place that’s encouraged that type of critical engagement and reflection, as quiet as it’s kept. It’s not always been the major support system.
In some ways, [spiritual formation] was about just homing in on respectability or “Do this” and “Do the other,” giving young people a lot of things to do or not to. And so as a result, young African-Americans have been doing a dance of trying to hold on to their spiritual lives, and to respect that, but also trying to push beyond it and to take their real passion and a real sense of call to transform the society around them.
A couple of young people have written directly to me, saying, “Thank you for reminding us that we’re doing this dance. And sometimes the tension is an easy one and sometimes it’s not, and thank you for helping other people to see the ways that we’re not complacent or nihilistic or anything like that, but we’re actually critically thinking about and negotiating all these different areas of our lives.”
Laura Everett: That core concept you’re working with around the fragmented spirituality -- that sometimes it’s a strategy for self-preservation, it’s a way of making sense of the world and both the church’s drive to a personal relationship with Jesus and an awareness of just the larger cultural problems and struggles of growing up as a young African-American -- do you think the goal is an integrated spirituality? Or has your sense of, like -- what you’re hoping for has changed?
Almeda Wright: Well, and I play with words here, and so I say my goal is an integrating spirituality. And part of it -- I’ve changed, probably over the seven or eight years that I’ve been doing this research, from just integrated, because that felt too fixed.
And I don’t actually think that the goal of having a unified or completely coherent spirituality -- I think that’s impossible, both because of postmodernity but also just the way life kind of ebbs and flows and how as humans we evolve and life circumstances change.
But for me, an integrating spirituality, as I kind of define it in the book, is one that actually allows you to continue the cycle of bringing these things back into conversation. So it’s never, ever fixed or rigid, but it’s one that is really giving you tools or resources to think about, “How do I make sense, in an ongoing, daily, continual way, of all the different parts of my life?”
Laura Everett: It’s a helpful concept, that integrating spirituality. It strikes me that at the end of the day, your book, “The Spiritual Lives of Young African Americans,” doesn’t prescribe a shiny new youth program to get to integrating spirituality or 12 easy steps to grow your youth group.
How would you hope that this concept of an integrating spirituality might inform youth pastors, pastors of churches, parents and peers?
Almeda Wright: Well, and that’s one thing that’s interesting. Now, there are a few practical things in the back of the book. But you’re right; it’s not going to give you these programmatic things.
And what the practical parts of -- or just even the questions that it raises at the end -- it’s really trying to help people to roll up their sleeves and do the hard work.
And part of what I mean by that is that because I see that this is an ongoing daily struggle, I also see that the types of programmatic changes are going to have to be ongoing and open to evolution or open to, like, the way that people will need to grow as they go through the cycles of life, as they go through the cycle of faith.
And so what I hope that they will get out, or what I hope the legs that this concept of an integrating spirituality will have, is one in which we actually take stock of the fact that we will need to attend to personal relationships with the divine, but we will also need to attend to systemic and communal issues of injustice.
And we don’t get to pick one or the other, but we have to think about how they all are working together.
And one of the things that I try to point to at the end of the book is also the reminder that there are practices that communities of faith, and particularly my tradition, the African-American Christian community, have done for years that should not be lost.
So I talk about the prayer tradition. I talk about the tradition of singing together. I talk about the tradition of critical reflection and prophetic voice. All of these are part of a historical Christian tradition that should be in conversation with some of the innovations and new things that young people will want to do.
So for me, it’s not an either/or -- that we get rid of older traditions and only listen to what young people are bringing -- but that we invite young people into these age-old traditions and be open to the way that their lives and their narratives also continue to shape them or transform them.
It’s integrating the best of the tradition with the best of the critiques and the best of the reflection so that something new and amazing emerges.
One of the major things that I loved about doing this book is that I got to hang out with a lot of spoken-word poets, and to listen to the way that they were doing theological reflection in poetry that I only used to see, say, in sermons or in hymns.
And so there’s an innovation and a way that they’re taking a genre that is their own. And it connects with -- or at least I see connections with -- traditional themes within African-American churches. And some of the ways that this looks on a congregational level are for us to be open to different genres, even if they’re having similar themes.
And to kind of parse out the ways that young people are thinking about the symbols that we’ve given them.
For example, one young woman writes a poem about suicide and death and heaven and how heaven may not be something that she wants to go to, if all we know about heaven is that it’s white and the streets are paved with gold and it’s beautiful. And she’s like, “So racism and racial divides and colorism still happen in heaven?”
She unpacks it in a way that I was like, “Oh, I never thought about that.” She’s, like -- she’s pushing back against some of the symbol systems that Christianity has offered and saying, “Let’s rethink what this looks like.”
And let’s also make it clear that in the world as it is, in the world that we’re living in currently, we’re going to have to do a lot more than give people pie in the sky or images that might be somewhat anesthetized and distant from the realities that young people are encountering right now.
Laura Everett: I am so grateful for your work in this area, Almeda. The radical act of listening, not to solve a problem, but as, it sounds to me like, as a commitment to the dignity and the spiritual wisdom of the young people you’re encountering is something that need not have a budget line item, or need not have a program or a designated pastor, but it is something that every community of faith can practice.
Almeda Wright: And that’s one of the things that I’m trying to get people to see, that this is complicated, but pretty simple as well, and something that we can commit to doing right now pretty easily.
Laura Everett: So I want to shift just a bit and ask about some of your teaching. Clearly, you think carefully about how people learn, how young adults learn, how youth learn. You have a degree in teaching, and you teach one of my favorite-titled courses, called “Radical Pedagogy.”
So I want to know from you, what makes pedagogy radical?
Almeda Wright: Well, in that particular class, I always make the joke that “Radical Pedagogy,” the course, is what would emerge if a community organizer and a religious educator had a baby. It would be this course.
[Laughter]
And so it’s an interesting wedding of the best of what I consider the social justice thread of religious education and the faith-based community organizing. And there is a tradition of critical, or radical, pedagogy that looks at thinkers like Freire, Paulo Freire, or bell hooks or Henry Giroux. And I build on some of those traditions. But we also start with thinkers like King and Dorothy Day and Heschel.
It’s an interesting thing to do this kind of radical pedagogy and to think about it in terms of religious education or religious formation. Because many of the young people or the students, divinity students, who come and take this course have never, ever thought about religious education being connected to social transformation.
And it boggles my mind, because I’m like, “That’s what I’m about; that’s all I do.” But that’s the reality, that often in their congregations, or even in their personal experiences, they think Sunday school is where you learn, you know, Scriptures, and you recite particular creeds. But you don’t actually see that it has feet or that it has legs that take you into the street to do something with it.
And so the gift of this particular type of class is that we are thinking through social change movements, but we’re also thinking through theological visions and how they get operationalized, or how people are able to be inspired by the convictions of their character or the convictions of their faith to work and to operate in the world.
But what’s also interesting is that every week in that class, I start with a segment where I put up a figure from contemporary news, and I ask them each week, “Is this person radical? Is this an example of radical pedagogy?”
And so as we go through the semester, we are building theoretically our visions, or our understanding, of what it means to be a radical leader, a radical pedagogue. And the students come out in different places, because some also come thinking, “Well, ‘radical’ is a negative thing; like, the only time we hear ‘radical’ is as a modifier for, say, ‘radical Islam.’”
But others come out and say, “Well, I thought I was a radical, but maybe I haven’t really gone far enough.”
So it’s interesting to see how they construct different visions of what radical pedagogy and radical social transformation looks like as we go through the semester.
Laura Everett: I long for the sort of artistry and intentionality that you’re engendering in your students.
Almeda Wright: You have to be very skillful as a teacher; you have to know your stuff. But you also have to kind of hold what you know loosely, so that if it doesn’t work, you let it go and you try something else that’s new.
And that’s one of the other gifts of learning and really thinking about how do we teach in community and how do we teach both religious truths but force transformation -- you’ve got to figure out that what worked last time may not work this time. And you have to be OK as that moves forward.
Laura Everett: I’m going to borrow that, the radical improvisational pedagogy.
Almeda Wright: Yes, it’s the major bumper sticker, I guess. I should make T-shirts: “Try some stuff; see if it works.” Because that’s the core idea.
[Laughter]
Laura Everett: Wait, wait, wait! So the tagline for your Yale Divinity School course on radical pedagogy is “Try some stuff; see if it works”?
Almeda Wright: Exactly. I think that’s the way forward.
Laura Everett: I could imagine in an academic environment that is invested in excellence that cultivating a community to try and risk would be hard. How do you encourage people to take risks -- to fail -- in your courses?
Almeda Wright: Well, that’s one thing that is kind of interesting. It’s a philosophy that I didn’t actually originate. I’ve borrowed it from great teachers that I’ve had. I am there with a few cute pictures and slides, but it takes on an organic life of its own. The first two classes are the hardest, because [the students] don’t actually believe you, that that’s actually what you want.
Laura Everett: They don’t trust you yet.
Almeda Wright: Or that is what a professor really is looking for. And I remember the first couple of classes, where they would volley back and forth and come back and say, “Well, wait a minute, I’m trying to talk to you.” And I’m like, “I’m not going to call on you. You’ve got to talk to your colleague, and you’ve got to figure out if you’ve spoken too much or too little, or if you’ve given them a fair chance, because this is on you.”
Because these are skills that you have, and they are skills that most adults, most students have, and empowering them to bring them into the classroom is interesting to watch -- how it transforms the learning environment.
Laura Everett: I’m so grateful that you do this work.
Almeda Wright: It’s risky, but it’s so rewarding. [Laughter] No, seriously, every semester I’m like, “Oh my God, maybe I should just lecture. I could control it better.”
But no, it actually -- every semester, every time I teach this course, every time I teach every course, I learn so much, and I never, ever can anticipate all that I’m going to learn from the students and from what they bring. Because every one of my students has a rich history, a rich set of experiences and expertise. And only by getting out of the way do we all get to learn from those things.
Laura Everett: So, Almeda Wright, the title of this podcast is called “Can These Bones.” And I know, being a sufficiently good Baptist, you could cite me chapter and verse on where this comes from.
But this is our big question, right? Like, is there life in the bones of these institutions? And I’m curious, as you think about the formation of spiritual lives, of young African-Americans, of young people in the church, do you think there’s life in these bones?
Almeda Wright: I have always been accused of hoping too much or expecting too much out of churches and institutions. But the reality is I don’t feel the need to give up on that hope yet. So yes, there is life.
And one of the things that continue to remind me that there is life is whenever I encounter a young person who finds a church or community or religious group that is supporting them or is affirming of some of the passion and the commitments that they have.
There’s one woman in particular I remember. She broke into tears at a national youth conference because she was, like, “I didn’t know this kind of church existed.”
And what it said to me was that she was looking for that kind of church -- a church where her voice could be heard, a church that was going to teach her and encourage her to do justice work, a church that was going to teach her and encourage her to do her own self-care and spiritual formation and to really kind of push and support her.
And the fact that there are still young people looking tells me that there is still work and there’s still life and there’s still a call and a commission for us. So for me, it’s always a sense of urgency to make sure that we be the best and be the church that the world and society and young people need.
Laura Everett: Well, you are part of the community of learners that I need -- to be the kind of pastor, and frankly to be the kind of Christian, that I think God longs for me [to be]. I am so grateful to be in conversation with you. Thank you so much for your time today.
Almeda Wright: Thank you.
Bill Lamar: That was my co-host Laura Everett’s conversation with Almeda Wright, an assistant professor at Yale Divinity School.
What I find fascinating about Almeda, beyond the fact that she likes math and science, is the fact that she is trying to help the church to understand that young people are not becoming leaders; they are leaders.
That we should not prompt them to share easy stuff but prompt them to share their deepest longings, and understand them as human beings who already have theological wisdom to share.
Laura, say more about that, because I think that that gives you as much energy as it gives me.
Laura Everett: Oh, it gives me a ton of hope -- and not just for young people. Almeda’s process of active listening is something that every pastor knows and we are really bad at practicing. I know that I have that struggle, that I want to listen with an end goal in mind and listen in a way that I’m already filtering the conversation.
Almeda’s practice of listening to young people is radical, because she’s not fixing them or trying to push them in a direction; she’s taking them on their own terms. And especially for young people, especially for young African-Americans, that act of listening is the kind of attentiveness that I think God offers creation. Right?
Like, that what she is doing with that act of listening, hopeful listening, attentive listening, is memetic of who God is. I find so much that I can learn from how carefully she is experiencing the wisdom of what youth in her presence can teach her and not just what she can offer them.
Bill Lamar: I think, too, Laura, reflecting as a black man in America, a person of African descent here -- these voices of young black women and black men, from the time of the encounter in the American space, these are voices that have been told to be quiet, and dreams that really, to borrow from Langston Hughes, that should have been left to rot and explode.
But to offer space, which the black church has traditionally done for these persons, to share their theological imagination and their humanity -- it’s nothing short of a profound spiritual necessity, especially in today’s culture.
And I think one of the things that we learn beautifully from Almeda’s work is that we have to hold things together that folks would want us to pull apart. We have to do that as individuals, and we have to do that as churches and institutions.
People want to pull young people away from deep discussions around who God is, around what it means to live a bodily existence, around what it means to have a vision for peace or for justice -- all of these kinds of things, we want to wait until they have gotten to a certain age.
But I think Almeda’s work says offer the space for them to give the fullness of who they are as soon as they’re ready to disclose it.
How can we do a better job, Laura, as individuals and in our work, of holding together the things that people want to pull apart? Because that pulling apart makes our work as leaders and servants all the more difficult.
Laura Everett: Bill, I think one of the things that Almeda does so well is notice the spaces where people are making meaning, where the youth are making theological sense of their lives. Certainly, church is one of those spaces, but a lot of her research happens in looking at spoken-word poetry. Right?
So we tend to parse spaces as sacred and secular, as religious and nonreligious. And she certainly is doing primary research in studying Sunday school curricula and studying youth group programming, but she goes to what is perceived as a secular space to study the spoken-word poetry of these youth, and the massive theological claims and commitments they are making there.
And so part of the lesson that I extract from this is to not presume I know that a space is either sacred or secular. Certainly, there are times when language is clearly expressing theological convictions. But what Almeda does so beautifully is trust that the spirit of God is at work in places like spoken-word poetry and that that is a place where the youth she is encountering are making sense of their world.
It’s this concept, right, of an integrating spirituality, that we keep coming back again and again, that our spiritual lives are not just one thing that is fixed and rigid, but again and again the youth that she is studying are re-integrating their experiences in the church, beyond the church, back into their lives.
And to ask people -- I think the practice that I want to take from this is to ask people open and generous questions about how they understand themselves in the world and, when appropriate, how they see God at work.
Bill, do you have ideas about how you want to hold together the things that would otherwise be pulled apart?
Bill Lamar: I think [through] good conversations with partners who are struggling to keep things together. One of the things that I believe I wrestle with at Metropolitan is that we are a church with a grand tradition -- and I absolutely love that. I am drawn into it rapturously every Sunday and every day I enter that beautiful space.
But holding together that tradition with fresh expressions of what it means to worship God, fresh liturgical innovation, fresh theological wisdom around who God is and who we are as God’s people. I have surrounded myself with persons who understand the value of our tradition -- I mean, we cannot destroy that and diminish that -- but we must marry that with the innovation that is going on all around us.
And one of the things that I learned from your interview, Laura, is Almeda seems to be bent on listening and not fixing. So one of the issues is when we go into spaces -- churches, institutions -- we don’t go to fix but we go to listen and to learn and to discern and cast a shared vision to move the institutions forward. One of my sources of humility, and I know anybody that says they have humility may not have it, but something that keeps me, I guess for lack of a better word, really in a space of humility is understanding how much larger Metropolitan is as a church and how much larger the African Methodist Episcopal Church is as a denomination than I am.
And so I see myself as a temporary steward of these riches. And part of my vocation, also, is to help to discern who the next temporary stewards are. So we are not here to fix something, but we are here to listen and to learn and to help that institution or that church live into its vocation in the contemporary moment.
As the hymn says, “to serve the present age, our calling to fulfill.” It does not say we fixbut we serve the present age. And I really feel like Almeda’s work is pointing us toward how we serve the present age, keeping those who are at the vanguard of this generation -- the younger brothers and sisters -- in the midst of the conversation, not casting them to the outskirts to some young-people ghetto in the church, but allowing them to sit in the center and to teach as well as learn.
Laura Everett: Oh, Bill, I had a good dose of that humility thrown at me. Part of my ministry with the [Massachusetts] Council of Churches is to go around and visit churches, and I like to imagine that I’m listening when I’m there.
I went to visit a church that once had a sanctuary that could seat 1,000. They were worshipping 20 in a chapel. The big business, the big industry that had been in the town had left, and there were like four or five churches in this small community.
And I walked the building with the interim pastor and the chair of the board of deacons, and they have this giant fellowship hall. And up along the top were these old Sunday school rooms that were filled with clutter, and we were dreaming and scheming and talking and asking what the community needed. And it’s a pretty rural place, and a bunch of folks telecommute.
And I, like, thought I had found the solution and said, “You need to be a telecommuting center and get -- I know a strong wireless signal has been a problem in this rural community -- set up a hub here, and all of those Sunday school classrooms can be office spaces you can rent out by the hour.”
And the deacon turned to me, Bill, and said, “You and your big-city ideas.” And I was so humbled. I was so ashamed. I had come in with like -- you know, my sense of what would work, and I wasn’t really carefully listening to the community. I was just -- I was fixing. I was doing what Almeda had warned against, fixing. Not because it was a bad idea necessarily, but because it wasn’t a shared vision, and they weren’t at a place of doing that.
But, man, I got my ego handed to me by that deacon.
[Laughter]
Bill Lamar: Yes, it’s good to have things handed to you sometimes; it can help you.
Laura Everett: Oh, that one was handed so clearly. I didn’t think I had “big-city ideas” before that.
Bill Lamar: Well, I think it’s interesting to listen, because then we learn the things about ourselves that we often deceive ourselves about, and ...
Laura Everett: Oh, and the truth is not in us.
Bill Lamar: Oh, God, yes, you know ...
Laura Everett: I want to reflect on that sort of pitifully low expectation of Sunday school that Almeda talked about. The juxtaposition of teaching her sixth-graders higher level math and then going into Sunday school and making popsicle crosses.
She really had a lived experience of the intellectual curiosity her students had Monday through Friday and the sort of regurgitation model that was offered on Sunday morning.
I also sometimes feel like there’s sort of a creeping clericalism that has low expectations of our lay leaders. And I’ve heard the conversations among my colleagues, and I know I’ve done it, too, where it becomes something like, “How do I convince them of doing X -- of removing the pews, of turning the Sunday school classrooms into telecommuting centers?” instead of a shared experience of, “How do I as the pastor or I as the executive director create a setting where we can listen together for what our community needs, what this institution needs, and what we think God might be up to in this space?”
Has that been your experience, Bill?
Bill Lamar: It has been my profound experience that if we offer an opportunity for people to fly, they will fly, intellectually, theologically, relationally.
But if we cage them -- so, for example, to go directly to the popsicle crosses and the high-level math, I walked into a church school class recently and one of our bright young ladies was asking a question. I hate walking into this class, because they’re either talking about something that is highly theological or they are talking about sex or politics; it’s never easy stuff.
So she asked the question, “How could Moses write about his own death?” And I said, “OK, how nerdy would you like for me to be?”
Because one of the things that I’m clear about is you do not douse that intellectual and theological flame. You find ways to help them to continue to ask the questions that will help them to see the largeness of God, and the largeness of God’s vision -- not only for them, but for the world.
And I believe that this is this amazing pedagogy that Almeda offers to us, which is essentially, you know, “Let’s try and see what works. If what we’re doing is not captivating, let’s try some new stuff; let’s see if it works.”
And that, my friend, is how this institutional life continues to be both crazy and beautiful and something well worth giving our lives to.
Laura Everett: Listeners, we want you to have permission to practice some of your own radical improvisational pedagogy. Try some stuff and see if it works and know that we go with you.
Bill, thanks for the conversation today.
Bill Lamar: Thank you.
Laura Everett: Thank you for listening to “Can These Bones.” I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as we did. There’s more about Almeda Wright, including a link to her new book, “The Spiritual Lives of Young African Americans,” at www.canthesebones.com.(link is external)
This episode marks the halfway point in the first season of “Can These Bones.” We’ll be back after a break with six more episodes. We’ll be talking with church leaders and people outside the church world about everything from fiction writing to airlines to teaching. We hope you’ll stay with us and join us for these next episodes.
So Bill, who will you be talking to when we resume?
Bill Lamar: Laura, I’m thrilled about my conversation with Daniel Black, a writer and scholar and the author of one of my favorite books, “The Coming.”
Laura Everett: Oh Bill, I’m really looking forward to that.
Bill Lamar: “Can These Bones” is brought to you by Faith & Leadership, a learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. It’s produced by Sally Hicks, Kelly Ryan Gilmer and Dave Odom. Our theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions. And Almeda Wright’s interview was recorded at Yale University. Funding is provided by Lilly Endowment Inc.
Listeners, we’d love to hear from you. Please share your thoughts about this podcast on social media. I’m on Twitter @WilliamHLamarIV(link is external), and you can reach Laura on Twitter @RevEverett.(link is external) You can also find us on our website, www.canthesebones.com(link is external).
I’m Bill Lamar, and this is “Can These Bones.”
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Read or listen to this podcast »
How do I listen to a podcast? »
IDEAS THAT IMPACT: YOUTH MINISTRY
Church for the Under-Forty Crowd: Attracting Younger Adults to Congregational Life
Church for the under-forty crowd: Attracting younger adults to congregational life
What does it take for a church to be attractive to a younger adult? In this article from the Alban archive, we are introduced to First Congregational Church - Cambridge, a church that shows us how to be (1) flexible while honoring the importance of commitment, (2) welcoming but not desperate-sounding, and (3) overt about theology while making room for doubt.
On the cubicle where she works all day, Abby has pinned a picture of a church. Where many would keep a photo of family members or beloved pets, Abby has an image of a brownstone building on the Cambridge Common, and she looks at it whenever she feels anxious or unmoored. At twenty-five, Abby has seen more life than the average young adult. She moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts from the West Coast when her high-school-sweetheart husband had an opportunity to pursue a graduate degree there. Not long after they relocated, however, the marriage fell apart, leaving Abby in a city with no stable job, no friends, and no family. What she did have, however, was First Church in Cambridge (FCC), a church she had first found with her husband and that later helped her through the transition to singlehood. She now views the church as her anchor, and as she considers options for graduate school for herself she is seriously considering staying in Cambridge so that she does not have to leave the church behind.
FCC is, in many ways, a typical United Church of Christ congregation. The music is usually classical, the liturgy rooted in Christian history and decidedly traditional. Boards and committees make many of the church’s decisions through a conventional governance structure. The ministry staff includes a senior pastor, an interim associate pastor, and a lay minister of religious education. The community where the church is located is highly educated and liberal, and the church’s stance on social issues reflects this environment. What makes the church truly different from many of its peers is not just that it is growing—many churches do that—but the demographic category within its membership that is growing most quickly: postcollegiate adults in their twenties and thirties. At one new-member Sunday in early 2008, out of thirty new members, twenty-seven were under the age of thirty-five.
What is FCC’s secret?
There is no easy answer to that question. But many religious leaders would like to have at least an inkling as to how this mainline Protestant church has been able to attract a critical mass of new members from such a fluid and complex population. Among the leaders who are curious about this trend are ministers and lay leaders at FCC.
In 2007–2008, FCC designed and implemented a church-wide program on Christian “faith practices” for all of its members, offering them the opportunity to explore the ways in which they were living out their faith through Christian practices such as hospitality, keeping Sabbath, and testimony. They used Dorothy Bass’s Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People1 as a text and guide in this inquiry as the congregation together sought to understand what it means to be Christian and part of a faith community. Building on this study, in 2008–2009 FCC initiated a second faith practices program focusing on younger adults. They deployed seminarians toward the purpose of reaching out to the younger adults who had found their way, through various means, to FCC.
This second program for younger adults worked this way: Senior minister Dan Smith approached the seminarians the church had “in care” (the seminary and divinity school students the church was supporting through the UCC ordination process). He invited them to consider creating short, focused outreach programs meant to connect with younger adults in the congregation. Each program was to focus on a particular faith practice, either one from Bass’s anthology or another related Christian practice. The church gave each seminarian a small stipend and some program planning funds to get the outreach effort off the ground. Ultimately, five seminarians submitted proposals for outreach programs. The faith practices they chose included parenting, service, personal stewardship, fasting, and discernment. Each seminarian designed a program, implemented the plan, and then reported back to each other and church leaders about what they did and what they learned.
I participated in this initiative first through helping the seminarians to design their projects and later as a researcher. Hoping to learn more about how younger adults approach faith communities and how they engage faith practices, I interviewed all of the program leaders and seven participants. As expected, the project generated a great deal of learning about the faith issues of young adults and what these particular participants sought (and did not seek) in a church. None of the findings of the study gave obvious instruction for churches that seek to connect with those between twenty and forty years of age, but some of the tensions the interviews surfaced give helpful food for thought to those who seek to engage younger adults.
Tension 1: Flexibility, But with High Expectations
One of the basic questions one must ask when considering the faith lives of younger adults is who, exactly, is in this demographic category? The program FCC sponsored through the leadership of seminarians identified younger adults who had finished college but had not necessarily put down roots. They saw their lives as transitory, not just because they had moved a lot (although they had), but because they had not yet made long-term commitments to a neighborhood, a vocation, or in many cases a life partner. Those who had children had young children; those who were married were not yet established in coupledom. Although some participants argued that the differences between single, coupled, and parenting young adults merited further slicing and dicing of the demographic, they all described the population into which they fall as one that is in flux and not yet peacefully ensconced in a way of life. As one participant put it, “I think you’re just living in a sort of roller-coaster of events that unfolds, and there isn’t a lot of stability in your life, and there’s a lot of looking forward to ‘ok, what’s the next thing?’ It’s a unique stage in your life, where you’re coming into your own, finding out who you are, finding out what your responsibilities are, and what you want to do with the time you have.”
The young adults included in this study spoke of a sense of yearning for meaning and community that they thought they could find in a church. They described having arrived at what one might call a younger adult plateau, where “you’ve done all your ‘firsts’ and you feel a little settled and willing to grow.”
They also spoke of a sense of busyness—even beleaguerment—that made conventional church participation difficult for them. The seminarian who created a program on parenting for younger adult parents bemoaned the fact that many potential participants simply could not make the time to participate. “It seemed to me that people were sincere in their desire, and yet the hurdles were also very real.”
After the seminarians’ focused programs came to an end, the group of program planners came together with the church’s clergy and me to talk about what they had learned. All agreed that some form of a “ladder” approach to program planning had been essential, where there were different levels of involvement from which participants could choose.
For example, the fasting program included two didactic sessions on the meaning and history of fasting at the beginning of Lent and a feast right after Easter. In between those two bookends, the program leader hosted a Google group where participants posted what they were learning and experiencing through fasting. The program leader was surprised when she learned that some people who never participated in the Google discussion were actually reading posts every day and reported gaining a great deal of strength for their own fasts through doing so.
“I think that being able to plug into the group whenever and wherever you are was really helpful for people,” this program leader reported. “Some of these people who were fasting at work would go on the group during their lunch break, which if we only met Wednesdays at 7 pm they couldn’t have done.”
It is easy for program leaders to criticize and judge those who participate at a low level as lacking commitment. These young adults’ experiences remind leaders that even those who do not give high levels of input can garner important lessons from the most tangential of participation.
And yet not all agreed that this flexibility, which was essential to the success of the groups, was a good thing for the participants or the church. One group leader pointed out that younger adults have high expectations for how much their experiences will engage them; passive participation is not something to which they are drawn. And yet, at the same time, another group leader pointed out, they have an understanding of “joining” that does not even necessarily involve showing up: they can join a Facebook cause and never meet any of their fellow revolutionaries.
Ultimately, program leaders concurred that they had to, as one put it, “be intentional about offering diverse ways of plugging in,” but some wondered whether offering high levels of flexibility was necessarily a healthy paradigm. As one seminarian remarked, “If they came looking for community, [and] they’re going to get more intensive community if they put more into the community, then are we selling people short by not challenging them to really take responsibility?” Said another, “This is a big conundrum in the life of any community: how do you allow different people to be in different places at different times in the life of a community? Because that’s what people need, and I’m not sure what it will look like for people when our generation is running the church.”
Much of the criticism one hears about the different participation patterns of younger adults in churches stems from anxiety that a low level of commitment means the church of the future will lack leadership. Yet the fluid nature of younger adulthood mirrors this participation pattern, suggesting that less fluid times will lead to more consistent participation, and therefore leadership, for younger adults who remain engaged in faith communities throughout their adulthood.
Tension 2: Welcoming, But Not Desperate
All interview participants and program leaders at some point spoke about the hospitality they found at FCC. They described having needed, in a tumultuous or tenuous time in life, to have a place where they felt they belonged and where the community was glad they were there. Yet the nature of the welcome they received had a particular flavor to it that many found essential to their comfort in the church: the welcome did not feel needy.
As one interview participant said, “It’s hard to sort of quantify, because you want a church to be welcoming. You don’t want them to ignore newcomers—strangers—but then, on the other hand, you don’t want there to be this feeling of desperation. My experience at First Church has just been extremely positive that way—that people are welcoming, people introduce themselves, but it’s in a very nonthreatening way. It’s sort of just saying, ‘This is who we are here at First Church, and we welcome you to come and join us if you want to.’”
Several participants juxtaposed this sense of welcome with what they had found in other churches: a phenomenon I came to call the “Carol Anne Syndrome.” In the 1980s film Poltergeist, a home built on top of a relocated graveyard becomes haunted by spirits that do not wish to be dead. Those spirits steal away a small, vital child (named Carol Anne) because she reminds them of the joy of living. In a similar way, when younger adults enter a church that is dying, they often feel as though the welcome they receive seeks to tap into their resources without any regard to the spiritual needs the younger adult might have; they fear becoming that church’s Carol Anne. One program leader talked about being invited to join a church committee on her very first visit to a new church. These kinds of welcomes led younger adults to feel overwhelmed and more needed than welcomed.
The following comments sum up many of the feelings expressed: “As opposed to being part of something that is going to nurture me and be nurtured by me [my] being there would be solely to try and help the community. It wouldn’t be that kind of reciprocity of support. I would be coming back with them out of feelings of guilt or obligation rather than for me,” said one interviewee. “I felt really sorry for them,” said another, “and so that made it feel like to continue going there would be sort of out of pity, or like an act of charity, and that was not appealing.”
Many program participants reported that one of the things that drew them to FCC was the presence of others in their age group. Some pointed out the chicken/egg irony, where a church needs to have younger members to attract younger members. This said, the underlying emotion set related to that sense of comfort seems to have been a way in which FCC set the hospitality thermostat to just the right temperature to help a younger adult feel welcome without feeling pressure. By appearing joyful themselves and also happy to welcome newcomers, FCC members caused younger adults to feel embraced out of a sense of abundance rather than one of scarcity.
Tension 3: Believing, But Not Dogmatic
Many participants in this study described a sense of comfort they derived at FCC from knowing where the church was coming from theologically. Though one might conjecture that younger adults, often fresh out of secular colleges, would feel most at home in a setting where the Christian message was watered down, the younger adults I interviewed appreciated that the church knows who and whose it is. This comfort seemed to have many layers to it.
First, the younger adults I interviewed appreciated the church’s honesty about its Christian worldview and would not have cottoned to a cloaked message. Said one participant, “I feel like young adults are extremely media savvy, very sophisticated consumers of advertising and marketing. Learning to be really sophisticated in consuming information, I think that when you come into a place where you feel like ‘I can kind of relax a little bit. They’re going to try and sell me something, it’s Jesus; they said that, it’s pretty clear.’”
Second, they commented on the integrity of the church’s purported vision and how it was reflected in the way church members behaved toward them. Tying back to the example of the welcome they received, several indicated that the church’s intentional vision—which was generated out of a great deal of work on the part of the church’s leaders and members—is a way of hospitality (see http://www.firstchurchcambridge.org/pages/about/vision/). The younger adults interviewed understood that the welcome they received was part of the church’s effort to live out its stated vision. This congruence between what the church did and what it said was highly attractive to what one participant called “cynical Gen-X types.”
They also, however, appreciated the way in which the church welcomed their doubts and questions. One described her decision to join FCC this way: “I got sucked in by a sermon.” She went on to describe a sermon that questioned whether a just God would have crushed Pharoah’s army in the Red Sea. She had never heard a minister openly question the Bible, and she found this freeing. “When I started coming to First Church,” she said, “I was definitely a questioner. I didn’t really lose faith per se, between the faith that I had as a child and then coming back as an adult, but it definitely changed dramatically.”
This participant’s comments reflect what those who study faith development might consider common knowledge: younger adults redefine the faiths of their childhoods as they formulate their adult belief systems. Perhaps because of its relatively highly educated population, this permission to question seemed particularly important at FCC. Participants indicated that they could not have felt comfortable in a church that required them to withhold questions and forego critical thinking.
Conclusion
What does it take for a church to be attractive to a younger adult? The initiative at FCC brings to light that churches should consider how they might be (1) flexible while honoring the importance of commitment, (2) welcoming but not desperate-sounding, and (3) overt about theology while making room for doubt. Clearly, these tensions present more questions than they do answers. But as many churches are led to believe that following fads—such as audio-visual technology or “theology on tap”—is the only way to reach younger adults, these tensions present opportunities for a more nuanced conversation. Younger adults are savvy when someone is trying to sign them up for something, draw them into something, or sell them something. May they also be savvy to how much they have to gain, and how much is at stake for them, as they seek to join with a community to find meaning in their lives.
Sarah Drummond is the author of Holy Clarity: The Practice of Planning and Evaluation. To learn more about this book or to place an order, see https://rowman.com/Action/Search/RL/alban%20books.
_____________
NOTE
1. Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People, edited by Dorothy C. Bass, Second Revised Edition (Jossey-Bass, 2010). For more information, see On Our Way: Christian Practices for Living a Whole Life, edited by Dorothy C. Bass and Susan R. Briehl (Upper Room, 2010) and www.practicingourfaith.org.
_________________________
Questions for Reflection
A Church for Our Grandchildren
What does it take for a church to be attractive to a younger adult? In this article from the Alban archive, we are introduced to First Congregational Church - Cambridge, a church that shows us how to be (1) flexible while honoring the importance of commitment, (2) welcoming but not desperate-sounding, and (3) overt about theology while making room for doubt.
On the cubicle where she works all day, Abby has pinned a picture of a church. Where many would keep a photo of family members or beloved pets, Abby has an image of a brownstone building on the Cambridge Common, and she looks at it whenever she feels anxious or unmoored. At twenty-five, Abby has seen more life than the average young adult. She moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts from the West Coast when her high-school-sweetheart husband had an opportunity to pursue a graduate degree there. Not long after they relocated, however, the marriage fell apart, leaving Abby in a city with no stable job, no friends, and no family. What she did have, however, was First Church in Cambridge (FCC), a church she had first found with her husband and that later helped her through the transition to singlehood. She now views the church as her anchor, and as she considers options for graduate school for herself she is seriously considering staying in Cambridge so that she does not have to leave the church behind.
FCC is, in many ways, a typical United Church of Christ congregation. The music is usually classical, the liturgy rooted in Christian history and decidedly traditional. Boards and committees make many of the church’s decisions through a conventional governance structure. The ministry staff includes a senior pastor, an interim associate pastor, and a lay minister of religious education. The community where the church is located is highly educated and liberal, and the church’s stance on social issues reflects this environment. What makes the church truly different from many of its peers is not just that it is growing—many churches do that—but the demographic category within its membership that is growing most quickly: postcollegiate adults in their twenties and thirties. At one new-member Sunday in early 2008, out of thirty new members, twenty-seven were under the age of thirty-five.
What is FCC’s secret?
There is no easy answer to that question. But many religious leaders would like to have at least an inkling as to how this mainline Protestant church has been able to attract a critical mass of new members from such a fluid and complex population. Among the leaders who are curious about this trend are ministers and lay leaders at FCC.
In 2007–2008, FCC designed and implemented a church-wide program on Christian “faith practices” for all of its members, offering them the opportunity to explore the ways in which they were living out their faith through Christian practices such as hospitality, keeping Sabbath, and testimony. They used Dorothy Bass’s Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People1 as a text and guide in this inquiry as the congregation together sought to understand what it means to be Christian and part of a faith community. Building on this study, in 2008–2009 FCC initiated a second faith practices program focusing on younger adults. They deployed seminarians toward the purpose of reaching out to the younger adults who had found their way, through various means, to FCC.
This second program for younger adults worked this way: Senior minister Dan Smith approached the seminarians the church had “in care” (the seminary and divinity school students the church was supporting through the UCC ordination process). He invited them to consider creating short, focused outreach programs meant to connect with younger adults in the congregation. Each program was to focus on a particular faith practice, either one from Bass’s anthology or another related Christian practice. The church gave each seminarian a small stipend and some program planning funds to get the outreach effort off the ground. Ultimately, five seminarians submitted proposals for outreach programs. The faith practices they chose included parenting, service, personal stewardship, fasting, and discernment. Each seminarian designed a program, implemented the plan, and then reported back to each other and church leaders about what they did and what they learned.
I participated in this initiative first through helping the seminarians to design their projects and later as a researcher. Hoping to learn more about how younger adults approach faith communities and how they engage faith practices, I interviewed all of the program leaders and seven participants. As expected, the project generated a great deal of learning about the faith issues of young adults and what these particular participants sought (and did not seek) in a church. None of the findings of the study gave obvious instruction for churches that seek to connect with those between twenty and forty years of age, but some of the tensions the interviews surfaced give helpful food for thought to those who seek to engage younger adults.
Tension 1: Flexibility, But with High Expectations
One of the basic questions one must ask when considering the faith lives of younger adults is who, exactly, is in this demographic category? The program FCC sponsored through the leadership of seminarians identified younger adults who had finished college but had not necessarily put down roots. They saw their lives as transitory, not just because they had moved a lot (although they had), but because they had not yet made long-term commitments to a neighborhood, a vocation, or in many cases a life partner. Those who had children had young children; those who were married were not yet established in coupledom. Although some participants argued that the differences between single, coupled, and parenting young adults merited further slicing and dicing of the demographic, they all described the population into which they fall as one that is in flux and not yet peacefully ensconced in a way of life. As one participant put it, “I think you’re just living in a sort of roller-coaster of events that unfolds, and there isn’t a lot of stability in your life, and there’s a lot of looking forward to ‘ok, what’s the next thing?’ It’s a unique stage in your life, where you’re coming into your own, finding out who you are, finding out what your responsibilities are, and what you want to do with the time you have.”
The young adults included in this study spoke of a sense of yearning for meaning and community that they thought they could find in a church. They described having arrived at what one might call a younger adult plateau, where “you’ve done all your ‘firsts’ and you feel a little settled and willing to grow.”
They also spoke of a sense of busyness—even beleaguerment—that made conventional church participation difficult for them. The seminarian who created a program on parenting for younger adult parents bemoaned the fact that many potential participants simply could not make the time to participate. “It seemed to me that people were sincere in their desire, and yet the hurdles were also very real.”
After the seminarians’ focused programs came to an end, the group of program planners came together with the church’s clergy and me to talk about what they had learned. All agreed that some form of a “ladder” approach to program planning had been essential, where there were different levels of involvement from which participants could choose.
For example, the fasting program included two didactic sessions on the meaning and history of fasting at the beginning of Lent and a feast right after Easter. In between those two bookends, the program leader hosted a Google group where participants posted what they were learning and experiencing through fasting. The program leader was surprised when she learned that some people who never participated in the Google discussion were actually reading posts every day and reported gaining a great deal of strength for their own fasts through doing so.
“I think that being able to plug into the group whenever and wherever you are was really helpful for people,” this program leader reported. “Some of these people who were fasting at work would go on the group during their lunch break, which if we only met Wednesdays at 7 pm they couldn’t have done.”
It is easy for program leaders to criticize and judge those who participate at a low level as lacking commitment. These young adults’ experiences remind leaders that even those who do not give high levels of input can garner important lessons from the most tangential of participation.
And yet not all agreed that this flexibility, which was essential to the success of the groups, was a good thing for the participants or the church. One group leader pointed out that younger adults have high expectations for how much their experiences will engage them; passive participation is not something to which they are drawn. And yet, at the same time, another group leader pointed out, they have an understanding of “joining” that does not even necessarily involve showing up: they can join a Facebook cause and never meet any of their fellow revolutionaries.
Ultimately, program leaders concurred that they had to, as one put it, “be intentional about offering diverse ways of plugging in,” but some wondered whether offering high levels of flexibility was necessarily a healthy paradigm. As one seminarian remarked, “If they came looking for community, [and] they’re going to get more intensive community if they put more into the community, then are we selling people short by not challenging them to really take responsibility?” Said another, “This is a big conundrum in the life of any community: how do you allow different people to be in different places at different times in the life of a community? Because that’s what people need, and I’m not sure what it will look like for people when our generation is running the church.”
Much of the criticism one hears about the different participation patterns of younger adults in churches stems from anxiety that a low level of commitment means the church of the future will lack leadership. Yet the fluid nature of younger adulthood mirrors this participation pattern, suggesting that less fluid times will lead to more consistent participation, and therefore leadership, for younger adults who remain engaged in faith communities throughout their adulthood.
Tension 2: Welcoming, But Not Desperate
All interview participants and program leaders at some point spoke about the hospitality they found at FCC. They described having needed, in a tumultuous or tenuous time in life, to have a place where they felt they belonged and where the community was glad they were there. Yet the nature of the welcome they received had a particular flavor to it that many found essential to their comfort in the church: the welcome did not feel needy.
As one interview participant said, “It’s hard to sort of quantify, because you want a church to be welcoming. You don’t want them to ignore newcomers—strangers—but then, on the other hand, you don’t want there to be this feeling of desperation. My experience at First Church has just been extremely positive that way—that people are welcoming, people introduce themselves, but it’s in a very nonthreatening way. It’s sort of just saying, ‘This is who we are here at First Church, and we welcome you to come and join us if you want to.’”
Several participants juxtaposed this sense of welcome with what they had found in other churches: a phenomenon I came to call the “Carol Anne Syndrome.” In the 1980s film Poltergeist, a home built on top of a relocated graveyard becomes haunted by spirits that do not wish to be dead. Those spirits steal away a small, vital child (named Carol Anne) because she reminds them of the joy of living. In a similar way, when younger adults enter a church that is dying, they often feel as though the welcome they receive seeks to tap into their resources without any regard to the spiritual needs the younger adult might have; they fear becoming that church’s Carol Anne. One program leader talked about being invited to join a church committee on her very first visit to a new church. These kinds of welcomes led younger adults to feel overwhelmed and more needed than welcomed.
The following comments sum up many of the feelings expressed: “As opposed to being part of something that is going to nurture me and be nurtured by me [my] being there would be solely to try and help the community. It wouldn’t be that kind of reciprocity of support. I would be coming back with them out of feelings of guilt or obligation rather than for me,” said one interviewee. “I felt really sorry for them,” said another, “and so that made it feel like to continue going there would be sort of out of pity, or like an act of charity, and that was not appealing.”
Many program participants reported that one of the things that drew them to FCC was the presence of others in their age group. Some pointed out the chicken/egg irony, where a church needs to have younger members to attract younger members. This said, the underlying emotion set related to that sense of comfort seems to have been a way in which FCC set the hospitality thermostat to just the right temperature to help a younger adult feel welcome without feeling pressure. By appearing joyful themselves and also happy to welcome newcomers, FCC members caused younger adults to feel embraced out of a sense of abundance rather than one of scarcity.
Tension 3: Believing, But Not Dogmatic
Many participants in this study described a sense of comfort they derived at FCC from knowing where the church was coming from theologically. Though one might conjecture that younger adults, often fresh out of secular colleges, would feel most at home in a setting where the Christian message was watered down, the younger adults I interviewed appreciated that the church knows who and whose it is. This comfort seemed to have many layers to it.
First, the younger adults I interviewed appreciated the church’s honesty about its Christian worldview and would not have cottoned to a cloaked message. Said one participant, “I feel like young adults are extremely media savvy, very sophisticated consumers of advertising and marketing. Learning to be really sophisticated in consuming information, I think that when you come into a place where you feel like ‘I can kind of relax a little bit. They’re going to try and sell me something, it’s Jesus; they said that, it’s pretty clear.’”
Second, they commented on the integrity of the church’s purported vision and how it was reflected in the way church members behaved toward them. Tying back to the example of the welcome they received, several indicated that the church’s intentional vision—which was generated out of a great deal of work on the part of the church’s leaders and members—is a way of hospitality (see http://www.firstchurchcambridge.org/pages/about/vision/). The younger adults interviewed understood that the welcome they received was part of the church’s effort to live out its stated vision. This congruence between what the church did and what it said was highly attractive to what one participant called “cynical Gen-X types.”
They also, however, appreciated the way in which the church welcomed their doubts and questions. One described her decision to join FCC this way: “I got sucked in by a sermon.” She went on to describe a sermon that questioned whether a just God would have crushed Pharoah’s army in the Red Sea. She had never heard a minister openly question the Bible, and she found this freeing. “When I started coming to First Church,” she said, “I was definitely a questioner. I didn’t really lose faith per se, between the faith that I had as a child and then coming back as an adult, but it definitely changed dramatically.”
This participant’s comments reflect what those who study faith development might consider common knowledge: younger adults redefine the faiths of their childhoods as they formulate their adult belief systems. Perhaps because of its relatively highly educated population, this permission to question seemed particularly important at FCC. Participants indicated that they could not have felt comfortable in a church that required them to withhold questions and forego critical thinking.
Conclusion
What does it take for a church to be attractive to a younger adult? The initiative at FCC brings to light that churches should consider how they might be (1) flexible while honoring the importance of commitment, (2) welcoming but not desperate-sounding, and (3) overt about theology while making room for doubt. Clearly, these tensions present more questions than they do answers. But as many churches are led to believe that following fads—such as audio-visual technology or “theology on tap”—is the only way to reach younger adults, these tensions present opportunities for a more nuanced conversation. Younger adults are savvy when someone is trying to sign them up for something, draw them into something, or sell them something. May they also be savvy to how much they have to gain, and how much is at stake for them, as they seek to join with a community to find meaning in their lives.
Sarah Drummond is the author of Holy Clarity: The Practice of Planning and Evaluation. To learn more about this book or to place an order, see https://rowman.com/Action/Search/RL/alban%20books.
_____________
NOTE
1. Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People, edited by Dorothy C. Bass, Second Revised Edition (Jossey-Bass, 2010). For more information, see On Our Way: Christian Practices for Living a Whole Life, edited by Dorothy C. Bass and Susan R. Briehl (Upper Room, 2010) and www.practicingourfaith.org.
_________________________
Questions for Reflection
- If you are not currently a younger adult, but are further along in life, what do you remember about your church participation patterns when you were between twenty and forty years old? How might patterns be different or similar today?
- Consider your own faith community. What areas of tension do you feel you have addressed? Is your church flexible about program participation while also honoring the importance of commitment? Welcoming but not needy? Celebrating belief without dogmatically enforcing a particular worldview?
- What areas of tension do you believe present challenges for your church’s way of doing business?
- Consider a younger adult you know. What might she or he seek by way of community, support, and meaning-making? How might a church address those hungers?
A Church for Our Grandchildren
A church for our grandchildren
What kind of church will we hand over to our children and grandchildren? The answer will largely depend upon the kind of leaders we train for the church in our time. And chief among those leaders are the pastors who will serve and guide our churches.
What kind of church will we hand over to our children and grandchildren? The answer will largely depend upon the kind of leaders we train for the church in our time. And chief among those leaders are the pastors who will serve and guide our churches.
New developments come about to address crises that arise. One such crisis has been the experience of young ministers within their first five years in the parish after leaving seminary. Loneliness often accompanies a young minister who is either a solo pastor in a church or much younger than other staff. Feelings of inadequacy and frustration with the church can emerge from criticism of lay people that may or may not be warranted. Congregational ministry demands a level of skill that seminaries cannot adequately refine, and such areas as finances, budgets, personnel management, and vocational identity are also not well suited to seminary study. Faced with these challenges, some young ministers begin to question their call, and too many drop out of ministry altogether.
Everyone—from the church to the seminary to the minister himself—has a vested interest in helping young pastors get off to a good start. The foundation for a lifetime of ministry is laid in the first few years, for good or ill. The Church needs to this time spiritually generative and vocationally healthy.
Among the new ways churches are taking up this work is through the creation of pastoral residency programs: a congregation invites one or more young ministers to join the pastoral staff for two or three years, and then the church sends them out to their first full-time call in another congregation. Pastoral residency provides a period of transition during which seminary graduates can begin the work of ministry under the supervision of an experienced pastoral team, with the support of key lay leaders and the collegiality of peers.
The residency period allows young ministers the opportunity to hone such skills as preaching, teaching, pastoral care, and administration in a nurturing culture that will strengthen the young minister’s confidence and competence in serving the church. Residents are treated as pastors, albeit fledgling ones. The church helps them to accept the pastoral life and the habits of ministry that make it up.
These are interesting times for the church. The oft-heard cry that the church is dying, evidenced by membership and attendance declines in some quarters, fails to account for the resilient hope Christians live by. The church is Christ’s body, and Christ’s body is ever dying and rising again. We only have to widen our vision or shift our gaze to see signs of new life in the church. Protestant and Pentecostal churches to the south and east—that is, in Central and South America, in Africa, and in South Korea and China, for instance—are much chronicled for their gains in number and vitality. The entrepreneurial emerging church movement in North America taps into the hunger for relevance and authenticity many young people experience, adapting to and adopting the more casual and technologically savvy lifestyle that is reshaping daily life.
Signs of new life are appearing also among more traditional Mainline Protestant and Catholic churches that remain committed to carrying forward and passing on ancient practices, tested liturgy, and sturdy structures for communal faith. Churches like these play their own important role in the larger body of Christ. While some churches innovate by focusing on particular theological approaches, targeted demographic strategies, or contemporary worship styles to reach people otherwise uncommitted or uninvolved, established churches are designed for the ages—all ages, that is, and from age to age.
All churches know things they don’t even know they know— things that have been passed on to them and that they can pass on to the next generation—if only they will become aware enough of what they know in order to teach it. Our churches need to teach what we know to those who will teach others as we have taught them. Wisdom resides in pew and pulpit alike. Clergy and laity are important to this work of training leaders for the church from generation to generation.
Successful clergy training programs require teaching congregations that will become, at the same time, learning communities of shared reflective practices.1Teaching congregations take a special interest in communicating the whys and wherefores, as well as the how and how-comes, to those who do the work of ministry. Pastors pastor, but at the same time they help young ministers become pastors, too. Laypersons don’t just listen to sermons and teach preschoolers and serve in the food pantry; they say what they are hearing to those who are preaching, they bring others alongside them as they teach and show them how to do it, and they help others catch a vision for mission by encouraging their service. Teaching congregations adapt. They learn from what they do and become better at it either by repetition or by changing their approach. But teaching congregations have a special interest in passing on the church to the next generation. One slice of that concern—the training of tomorrow’s clergy—is where pastoral residency comes in.
As the church sets out to do one thing—train effective clergy—it will discover a surprising byproduct: it will become more alive on both sides of the Communion rail. What’s more, it will become more effective at training lay leaders. Like a spider web, touch it at any place and it will affect every other place on the web.
Gifted and capable leaders—clergy and lay both—give churches energy and direction. Each depends upon the other in the work of building strong churches for their own time and place and for the work of the church beyond their time and in other places.
Over the last decade a few dozen churches, employing various models unique to their own church cultures, have been pioneering and experimenting with the practice of training clergy. Other models sponsored by denominations or local judicatories have used congregations in different but similar ways to foster better transitions into ministry for young clergy. Some of their stories will be told here as a way of encouraging others to undertake this work.
These programs have shaped the young ministers being trained and at the same time renewed the churches doing the training. In the process of mentoring the young ministers, senior pastors, permanent staff, and key lay leaders have found new joy in their own ministries. While this work takes place in local churches and energizes those churches in the process, its larger effect on the wider church is only now beginning to be seen, as these well-formed young pastors find their places in the congregations that call them to serve.
Adapted from Preparing the Pastors We Need: Reclaiming the Congregation’s Role in Training Clergy, copyright © 2012 by the Alban Institute. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2013, the Alban Institute. All rights reserved. We encourage you to share Alban Weekly articles with your congregation. We gladly allow permission to reprint articles from the Alban Weekly for one-time use by congregations and their leaders when the material is offered free of charge. All we ask is that you write to us at alban@div.duke.edu and let us know how Alban Weekly is making an impact in your congregation. If you would like to use any other Alban material, or if your intended use of Alban Weekly does not fall within this scope, please submit our reprint permission request form.
_______________________________________
What kind of church will we hand over to our children and grandchildren? The answer will largely depend upon the kind of leaders we train for the church in our time. And chief among those leaders are the pastors who will serve and guide our churches.
New developments come about to address crises that arise. One such crisis has been the experience of young ministers within their first five years in the parish after leaving seminary. Loneliness often accompanies a young minister who is either a solo pastor in a church or much younger than other staff. Feelings of inadequacy and frustration with the church can emerge from criticism of lay people that may or may not be warranted. Congregational ministry demands a level of skill that seminaries cannot adequately refine, and such areas as finances, budgets, personnel management, and vocational identity are also not well suited to seminary study. Faced with these challenges, some young ministers begin to question their call, and too many drop out of ministry altogether.
Everyone—from the church to the seminary to the minister himself—has a vested interest in helping young pastors get off to a good start. The foundation for a lifetime of ministry is laid in the first few years, for good or ill. The Church needs to this time spiritually generative and vocationally healthy.
Among the new ways churches are taking up this work is through the creation of pastoral residency programs: a congregation invites one or more young ministers to join the pastoral staff for two or three years, and then the church sends them out to their first full-time call in another congregation. Pastoral residency provides a period of transition during which seminary graduates can begin the work of ministry under the supervision of an experienced pastoral team, with the support of key lay leaders and the collegiality of peers.
The residency period allows young ministers the opportunity to hone such skills as preaching, teaching, pastoral care, and administration in a nurturing culture that will strengthen the young minister’s confidence and competence in serving the church. Residents are treated as pastors, albeit fledgling ones. The church helps them to accept the pastoral life and the habits of ministry that make it up.
These are interesting times for the church. The oft-heard cry that the church is dying, evidenced by membership and attendance declines in some quarters, fails to account for the resilient hope Christians live by. The church is Christ’s body, and Christ’s body is ever dying and rising again. We only have to widen our vision or shift our gaze to see signs of new life in the church. Protestant and Pentecostal churches to the south and east—that is, in Central and South America, in Africa, and in South Korea and China, for instance—are much chronicled for their gains in number and vitality. The entrepreneurial emerging church movement in North America taps into the hunger for relevance and authenticity many young people experience, adapting to and adopting the more casual and technologically savvy lifestyle that is reshaping daily life.
Signs of new life are appearing also among more traditional Mainline Protestant and Catholic churches that remain committed to carrying forward and passing on ancient practices, tested liturgy, and sturdy structures for communal faith. Churches like these play their own important role in the larger body of Christ. While some churches innovate by focusing on particular theological approaches, targeted demographic strategies, or contemporary worship styles to reach people otherwise uncommitted or uninvolved, established churches are designed for the ages—all ages, that is, and from age to age.
All churches know things they don’t even know they know— things that have been passed on to them and that they can pass on to the next generation—if only they will become aware enough of what they know in order to teach it. Our churches need to teach what we know to those who will teach others as we have taught them. Wisdom resides in pew and pulpit alike. Clergy and laity are important to this work of training leaders for the church from generation to generation.
Successful clergy training programs require teaching congregations that will become, at the same time, learning communities of shared reflective practices.1Teaching congregations take a special interest in communicating the whys and wherefores, as well as the how and how-comes, to those who do the work of ministry. Pastors pastor, but at the same time they help young ministers become pastors, too. Laypersons don’t just listen to sermons and teach preschoolers and serve in the food pantry; they say what they are hearing to those who are preaching, they bring others alongside them as they teach and show them how to do it, and they help others catch a vision for mission by encouraging their service. Teaching congregations adapt. They learn from what they do and become better at it either by repetition or by changing their approach. But teaching congregations have a special interest in passing on the church to the next generation. One slice of that concern—the training of tomorrow’s clergy—is where pastoral residency comes in.
As the church sets out to do one thing—train effective clergy—it will discover a surprising byproduct: it will become more alive on both sides of the Communion rail. What’s more, it will become more effective at training lay leaders. Like a spider web, touch it at any place and it will affect every other place on the web.
Gifted and capable leaders—clergy and lay both—give churches energy and direction. Each depends upon the other in the work of building strong churches for their own time and place and for the work of the church beyond their time and in other places.
Over the last decade a few dozen churches, employing various models unique to their own church cultures, have been pioneering and experimenting with the practice of training clergy. Other models sponsored by denominations or local judicatories have used congregations in different but similar ways to foster better transitions into ministry for young clergy. Some of their stories will be told here as a way of encouraging others to undertake this work.
These programs have shaped the young ministers being trained and at the same time renewed the churches doing the training. In the process of mentoring the young ministers, senior pastors, permanent staff, and key lay leaders have found new joy in their own ministries. While this work takes place in local churches and energizes those churches in the process, its larger effect on the wider church is only now beginning to be seen, as these well-formed young pastors find their places in the congregations that call them to serve.
Adapted from Preparing the Pastors We Need: Reclaiming the Congregation’s Role in Training Clergy, copyright © 2012 by the Alban Institute. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2013, the Alban Institute. All rights reserved. We encourage you to share Alban Weekly articles with your congregation. We gladly allow permission to reprint articles from the Alban Weekly for one-time use by congregations and their leaders when the material is offered free of charge. All we ask is that you write to us at alban@div.duke.edu and let us know how Alban Weekly is making an impact in your congregation. If you would like to use any other Alban material, or if your intended use of Alban Weekly does not fall within this scope, please submit our reprint permission request form.
_______________________________________
Preparing the Pastors We Need: Reclaiming the Congregation’s Role in Training Clergy George Mason
Amid the widespread discussion about “the future of the church,” an important point is sometimes overlooked: tomorrow’s church will depend to a great extent on the new pastors of today who will serve and guide our churches in the years ahead. George Mason’s Preparing the Pastors We Need: Reclaiming the Congregation’s Role in Training Clergy makes a timely intervention, asking us to redefine pastoral leadership by analyzing how, in fact, pastors are made in the first place.
Starting with Spirit: Nurturing Your Call to Pastoral Leadership
Bruce G. Epperly
Starting with Spirit is a spiritual and professional resource for new pastors, their family members, and congregations, as well as ministers in every season of ministry who seek to grow in vitality and skill in the ongoing adventure of ministry.
Bruce G. Epperly
Starting with Spirit is a spiritual and professional resource for new pastors, their family members, and congregations, as well as ministers in every season of ministry who seek to grow in vitality and skill in the ongoing adventure of ministry.
Becoming the Pastor You Hope to Be: Four Practices for Improving MinistryBarbara J. Blodgett
Becoming the Pastor You Hope to Be unapologetically urges clergy readers to develop practices that will help them become more excellent ministers. A long-time field educator, now serving as a denominational staff person responsible for ministerial formation, Barbara Blodgett believes excellence is a matter of doing simple things with care and consistency. Ministers who commit themselves to excellence will grow and flourish, and even become happier in ministry.
Pursuing Pastoral Excellence: Pathways to Fruitful LeadershipPaul Hopkins
In Pursuing Pastoral Excellence, pastoral counselor and educator Paul Hopkins aims to help pastoral leaders make a lasting and positive difference in the lives of the people and communities they serve.
Read more from George Mason »
Proclaiming Passion: The Theological Challenge of Youth Ministry in the 21st Century
Proclaiming passion: The theological challenge of youth ministry in the 21st century
Youth ministry is ministry with people who are searching for something, for someone, "to die for," to use Erik Erikson's haunting phrase. They are looking for a troth worthy of their suffering, a love worthy of a lifetime and not just a Sunday night. Helping them find it is our responsibility.
Teenagers are heat-seeking missiles. They’re drawn to fire. They yearn for experiences that will channel their passions. And by and large they are not detecting many signs of life in the church.
—Cuyler Black, youth pastor, in Fellowship Magazine, June 20011
Someone once told me that every adult is a junior high kid with wrinkles. If that is true—and so far I’d say it’s a pretty fair assessment—then youth ministry is never really just about “ministry with youth.” It is about ministry, about being the church in which young people are called to play an irreplaceable and irrepressible part both now and throughout their adulthood.
Youth ministry—ministry by, with, and for people who hover between the onset of puberty and the enduring commitments of adulthood—is ministry with people who are searching for something, for someone, “to die for,” to use developmental theorist Erik Erikson’s haunting phrase.2 They are looking for a troth worthy of their suffering, a love worthy of a lifetime and not just a Sunday night. In short, they are searching for passion, even (maybe especially) in church. Young people will not seek a God who settles for less. If we’re honest, neither will we.
Dying for Something to Live For
Following the Littleton shootings, where Cassie Bernall was killed after reportedly confessing her belief in God, a stark question flooded Internet chat rooms and bulletin boards: “Would you die for your faith?” A Florida girl’s response on an Internet bulletin board typified hundreds of others: “I haven’t totally pledged all of my being to God. When I heard [Cassie Bernall’s] story I realized she gave up everything. She DIED for Him . . . Would I have done the same?”3
The Columbine story took place at the nexus of passion: the twisted passions of two lonely boys who perceived they had nothing to live for, but also the holy passion of faith—the virtue of fidelity, “a disciplined devotion,”4 as Erikson called it, the strength of having something “to die for.” When young people ask, “Would you die for your faith?” what they really want to know is, “Is Christianity worth it? Is it worth staking a life on, and not just a Sunday night? Because if it’s not—if God isn’t worth dying for—I’m outta here.”
But listen closely. Behind these youthful ultimatums is a plea: “Please, please tell me it’s true. True love is always worth dying for. Please tell me I’m worth dying for. Please tell me someone loves me this much—that God won’t let go, even if the Titanic sinks, even if the library explodes, even if the towers fall, even if the world ends. Please show me a God who loves me passionately—and who is worth loving passionately in return. Because if Jesus isn’t worth dying for, then he’s not worth living for either.”
The Heresy of Wholesomeness
Meanwhile, back in the church basement, youth groups play games like this:
SPARROW FLIGHT
Players crouch down and grab their ankles, remaining in this hunched position throughout the game. If they let go of their ankles, they’re eliminated. Participants hop around holding their ankles and moving their elbows (wings) like a bird. The goal is to knock over other players without losing their balance. If they’re knocked over, they’re eliminated. The last person “standing” is the winner. . . . This is a fun game to watch as well as to play.5
This game appeared in a youth ministry magazine I received the week of September 11, 2001—the week that made every silly game we had ever played in the name of youth ministry look laughably out of touch. Even gifted teachers—the ones who can root metaphors out of silly games like truffles, evoking an intuitive grasp of a larger truth—tread a fine line between the trite and true in youth ministry. Fun is good; triviality is deadly. The word “fun” originates in the word “fool”—but, for Christians, this means rejoicing in the “foolishness” of a God (I Corinthians 1:25) who took human form, lived as a poor man, and died as a criminal—and then, with the wink that saved the world, rose again, vanquishing death forever.
It’s a far cry from “Sparrow Flight.” No wonder intense interest in spirituality fails to translate into a vibrant church life for most adolescents. In Protestant traditions that practice confirmation, more than half of those confirmed as adolescents leave the church by age 17. Girls tend to exit congregational life around 14 or 15, boys somewhat sooner. Today, about half of North American adolescents say they attend religious services weekly. (Only two in five adults say the same.) Some denominations flatly cite their “inability to retain young people” as a chief factor in their decline. Meanwhile, youth pastors practice disappearing acts of their own. Over one-third of full-time youth ministers stay in ministry one year or less.
By now, the adolescent exodus from churches across a broad theological spectrum has become normative in American church life. We scatter blame on everything from budget cuts to training deficits to demographic cycles, yet beneath these issues lies a more disturbing question, the question of theological credibility: Does the church placate adolescents with pizza and youth groups, or do we offer a God worthy of their passion, a God who satisfies their deepest longings and delivers them from their most profound dreads? Does the church anesthetize young people (and their parents) with wholesome activities, or do we challenge them to a holy ministry? Can any of us tell the difference?
Complicating Factors in Contemporary Youth Ministry
Two issues exacerbate the tendency to focus youth ministry on psychology or sociology rather than on theology. The first is the blurry nature of adolescence itself. Whereas postwar America invented the term “teenager” to designate semi-grownups who, as columnist Walter Kirn put it, live “in a developmental buffer zone somewhere between childish innocence and adult experience,” adolescence today extends significantly beyond these parameters. Social scientists traditionally demarcate adolescence as the period between the onset of puberty and financial independence—that is, until the Internet made millionaires out of teenage day-traders and business prodigies who proved that financial independence and maturity possess no inherent link. Outside the U.S., the term “youth” commonly applies to anyone under thirty; in some cultures, the term applies to all unmarried persons, regardless of age. In 2003, the National Opinion Research Center reported that most Americans believe that the average age at which one becomes fully adult is 26. Meanwhile, the age of menarche in girls continues to plummet. In a 1997 Pediatrics study, the average age was 9.7 for Caucasian girls, and 8.1 for African-American girls. Most of these girls are in third grade.
With this prolonged adolescence—which now comes in three stages: early, middle, and late—came a broadened role for youth ministry. Campus and young adult ministries, for example, now fall under the adolescent rubric, as do “tween” ministries (for older elementary school students, 10 and 11 years old). As churches now address issues related to identity formation later and later in the life cycle, they can no longer afford to exile young people to one corner (usually the basement) of the congregation. In short, prolonged adolescence requires a more nuanced—and more intentionally and theologically trained—ministry with young people, since “adolescence” so defined now constitutes a substantial portion of the congregation with pastoral needs.
A further hurdle is learning to navigate the shifting sands of culture, as the tectonic plates of modernity give way to a postmodern landscape. Young people have always served as barometers of the human condition, “acting out,” acutely, what it means to be human in their particular moment in history. As one educator put it, there are no so-called “youth problems” that are not, in fact, human problems found among all age groups, “now come to roost among the young.” As a result, the signature assumptions of global culture—radical pluralism, a heightened awareness of risk, and a view of life as a journey in which the self is continually “under construction”—are writ large across the experience of contemporary youth. As one young person told me, “Adolescence is, like, you know, the human condition on steroids.”
At the same time, the human condition confronting postmodern teenagers rests on different assumptions than it did 50 years ago. Postmodern young people tend to value casual relationships over programs, communities over institutions, mystery and fluidity more than certainty, particularity over universality, and personal experience over external authority. While churches vary in the degree of their ability—or willingness—to acknowledge these changing assumptions, adolescents tend to view postmodernity as friendly to spiritual interests as the line between the sacred and profane becomes increasingly blurred.
Worshiping at the Church of Benign Positive Regard
What is at issue for youth ministry in this increasingly complex landscape is not conversion; young people convert as a matter of course, with or without the church. What is at stake is discernment: To what, or to whom, will adolescents be converted? The problem with youth ministry in a postmodern culture is that young people are inundated with opportunities to convert, but have few theological tools to discern among them. Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela won passionate followers, but so did Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden. Clearly, adolescent passion can be co-opted by evil as well as won by God—and by any number of deities in between. Despite the grim statistics on church involvement, the results of a 1999 Gallup poll suggest that a staggering 95 percent of American adolescents believe in God—they just don’t believe God matters. According to the 2004 National Study of Youth and Religion, far from being hostile toward religion, these teenagers mirror to a high degree their parents’ attitudes toward faith, which the study characterized as “benign positive regard.”6
Perhaps that is the root of the problem. Parents pass on to their children their passions, not “benign positive regard.” In a world overwhelmed by choices, the smiling detachment of “benign positive regard” is understandable, but spiritually irresponsible. “Benign positive regard” provides the basis for neither identity nor faith. Erikson, for example, believed identity formation requires young people’s commitment to an “ideology,” a word Erikson used for a governing belief system that gives a meaningful framework to our disparate experience. The Church of “Benign Positive Regard,” on the other hand, is too timid to offer such a framework. It suggests assent rather than inspires commitment. As one teenager, extremely active in her Presbyterian youth group and a regular church attendee, told the interviewer for the National Study of Youth and Religion, “God is nice, but doesn’t really do anything.”
Replacing Positive Regard with Passion
Incredibly, in spite of our unenviable track record with teenagers, something often goes right in youth ministry, and legions of clergy, professional church staff, and Christian activists point to the encouraging presence of a youth minister during their teenage years as a decisive factor in their faith and vocational choices. Over time, this has proved significant. As these young people became adults they carried their youthful ecclesial imaginations with them. They did not simply imagine youth ministry, they imagined the church—and in so doing they subtly expanded the reach of youth ministry beyond teenagers themselves. By the late 20th century it had become evident that teenagers were capable of conceiving ministry in ways that extended far beyond the youth room. When young people gathered for worship and ministry with their peers, often in settings segregated from the congregation at large, they self-consciously “did church” differently than their elders. As a result, youth ministry consistently challenged dominant ecclesiologies in American Protestantism by embodying alternative images of the church.
For example, many visible leaders of today’s “alternative” congregations—where pastors intentionally refashion styles of worship, patterns of polity, and forms of nurture to attract baby boomers and their progeny—admit strong roots in youth ministry. A quick scan through their proliferating publications shows that, by and large, these leaders simply adapted their visions (and methods) of youth ministry to address the adults these youth inevitably became. 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.”7 And they are redrawing it to include churches where young people like to worship.
A New Map for Youth Ministry
The effect of this new “ecclesial map” has yet to be evaluated. On the one hand, it promises a new sense of vocation for youth ministry, and a theological sense of direction as youth ministry becomes more than a platform for placating teenagers. Indeed, youth ministry’s great potential may lie in its ability to reimagine the church on behalf of the wider Christian community, in which God has called young people to play an irrepressible and irreplaceable part.
On the other hand, treating youth ministry as a laboratory for the future church has risks, not the least of which is hubris and the possibility that it promises more than it can deliver. Will adolescents be able to reimagine the church in ways that are any less jaded than adults? Or will youth ministry’s expanded vocation on behalf of the church lead to a loss of focus—an abandonment of the church’s mission with young people themselves, returning youth ministry to the “stepping stone” status it has so earnestly tried to shake? The verdict will be for another generation to decide. What we can ascertain is that youth ministry is no longer just about youth—for if the predicament of adolescents is intimately linked to the predicament of the church, then the transformation of one implies the transformation of both.
—————
NOTES
1. Cuyler Black, “Jesus, Britney and Thermodynamics,” Fellowship Magazine, June 2001, n.p. Black is a youth minister in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
2. Erik H. Erikson, Youth Identity and Crisis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968), 233.
3. David van Biema, “A Surge of Teen Spirit,” Time, May 31, 1999, 58. Cassie’s “yes” actually may have belonged to classmate Valeen Schnurr, who escaped the shootings alive. But all of this was quickly beside the point; adolescents themselves circulated “The Cassie Bernall story” by e-mail, making it urban myth within hours, long before the media (who were presumably busy checking sources) reported it.
4. Erik H. Erikson, Youth Identity and Crisis, 233.
5. Les Christie, “Hot Games,” Group (September 10, 2001), 27.
Let me detour long enough to insert a caveat to that last line: If a game is fun to watch as well as to play, the fun had better not depend on standing by and laughing at a few unwitting people made to look ridiculous. Every youth group is full of phantom members who came—and left—when they realized the group’s “fun” quotient depended on being laughed at. Most self-respect
ing teenagers observe these antics and ask themselves two questions we ought to ask as well: (1) If they made that person look ridiculous this week, will I be next? and (2) What does this have to do with Jesus?
6. The findings of this study are still tentative; the project will be reported in full by Christian Smith, principal investigator, in a book later this year.
7. Ronald White, “History of Youth Ministry Project” (unpublished mid-project report submitted to Lilly Endowment, Indianapolis, Indiana, August 20, 1994), 7.
Read more from Kenda Creasy Dean »
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
Preparing the Pastors We Need: Reclaiming the Congregation's Role in Training Clergyby George MasonAmid the widespread discussion about 'the future of the church,' an important point is sometimes overlooked: tomorrow's church will depend to a great extent on the new pastors of today who will serve and guide our churches in the years ahead.
George Mason's Preparing the Pastors We Need: Reclaiming the Congregation's Role in Training Clergy makes a timely intervention, asking us to redefine pastoral leadership by analyzing how, in fact, pastors are made in the first place. The book highlights an exciting development in the training of pastors: pastoral residency programs and mentoring. Mason demonstrates that these programs work best when the congregations themselves, not just leadership or staff, are an active participant in the training. In this way, churches begin to reclaim their rightful role in the formation of the ministers that will serve them. And, at the same time, they become healthier and more effective churches.
Mason gives us the analogy of physician training. Medical school produces graduates with extensive knowledge of the body, but a practicing doctor will require several more years of internship and residency. Similarly, our seminaries and divinity schools produce men and women with good biblical knowledge, but they might not prepare a graduate for the task of helping a bereaved parishioner cope with the sudden loss of a loved one. Moreover, such areas as finances, budgets, personnel management, and vocational identity are also not well suited to seminary study. Mason shows that congregation-based mentoring and residency are excellent ways to bridge this gap.
Learn more and order the book »
Follow us on social media:
Copyright © 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Alban at Duke Divinity School
No comments:
Post a Comment