Missionary Renegade: Alban Weekly of Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina, United States for Monday, 23 May 2016 PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS - "A New Model for Youth Ministry: MOWTOWN TEEN LAWN CARE REACHES TEENS ONE YARD AT A TIME"

Monday, May 30, 2016

Alban Weekly of Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina, United States for Monday, 23 May 2016 PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS - "A New Model for Youth Ministry: MOWTOWN TEEN LAWN CARE REACHES TEENS ONE YARD AT A TIME"

Alban Weekly of Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina, United States for Monday, 23 May 2016 PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS - "A New Model for Youth Ministry: MOWTOWN TEEN LAWN CARE REACHES TEENS ONE YARD AT A TIME"

PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS - "A New Model for Youth Ministry: MOWTOWN TEEN LAWN CARE REACHES TEENS ONE YARD AT A TIME"

On most Saturday mornings, the Rev. Matt Overton, owner of Mowtown Teen Lawn Care, is up before dawn. He hooks up his landscaping trailer and loads it with mowers, shovels, chain saws, buckets, garbage cans, rakes and other tools, readying himself for another day of youth ministry.
Landscaping and pastoral work might sound like a strange mix, but the two fields aren't as incongruous as one might think.
Overton serves full time as associate pastor of youth and family ministries at Columbia Presbyterian Church in Vancouver, Washington. Mowtown is the business arm of Columbia Teen Enterprises, a new youth ministry and jobs program Overton founded with the help of church members.
The high-school-age crew works on Saturdays, earning fair market wages as part of Mowtown's business model. But the jobs aren't separate from the ministry -- working for Overton involves much more than earning a few extra bucks raking leaves.
With the blessing of his congregation, Overton hopes to use the landscaping business to reboot the way his church reaches out to Generation Z: youths and young adults born at the turn of the 21st century.
"In youth ministry, we attract kids all the time with Cheetos, couches and games," he said. "Why not attract them with jobs and work and life skills?"
The Rev. Matt Overton clips bushes while Ethyn McLaughlin mows a lawn on a Saturday morning as part of Mowtown Teen Lawn Care's work. Photos by Adam Guggenheim
Jobs, skills and mentoring are just some of the benefits of this lawn care business, operated under the auspices of a Presbyterian church in Vancouver, Washington.
On most Saturday mornings, the Rev. Matt Overton, owner of Mowtown Teen Lawn Care, is up before dawn. He hooks up his landscaping trailer and loads it with mowers, shovels, chain saws, buckets, garbage cans, rakes and other tools, readying himself for another day of youth ministry.
Landscaping and pastoral work might sound like a strange mix, but the two fields aren’t as incongruous as one might think.
Overton serves full time as associate pastor of youth and family ministries at Columbia Presbyterian Church in Vancouver, Washington. Mowtown is the business arm of Columbia Teen Enterprises(link is external), a new youth ministry and jobs program Overton founded with the help of church members.
The high-school-age crew works on Saturdays, earning fair market wages as part of Mowtown’s business model. But the jobs aren’t separate from the ministry -- working for Overton involves much more than earning a few extra bucks raking leaves.
With the blessing of his congregation, Overton hopes to use the landscaping business to reboot the way his church reaches out to Generation Z: youths and young adults born at the turn of the 21st century.
“In youth ministry, we attract kids all the time with Cheetos, couches and games,” he said. “Why not attract them with jobs and work and life skills?”
Using gifts for social good
The idea for Mowtown emerged during the renovation of Overton’s house.
The Overton family’s move to the Pacific Northwest was preceded by the loss of their home in Northern California, one of the hardest-hit regions during the Great Recession. So when Overton and his wife, Anne, were eventually able to buy a home in Camas, Washington, three years ago, the house they could afford was a fixer-upper.
Many of Overton’s church members turned out to help work on the renovations, including a number of teens he knew from his ministry.
Before long, he noticed that interactions with his students on the job site were better than those he had in church youth group gatherings. The collaborative project was almost like an extended mission trip; teens were more open and relaxed there than in church settings.
A number of adults from his church also showed up on Saturdays to help. Some of these adults didn’t come to church regularly or volunteer for youth groups or any other church teams, yet here they were, many bringing their own tools and lumber and expertise.
Overton was gratified to see his dilapidated house transformed, but he also was intrigued by why this interaction was happening among the people involved.
“The answer was that I had provided people an outlet to use their natural gifts and talents for a greater social good,” he said. “It was social entrepreneurship in a nutshell.”
Adults could see a link between their work and the church’s mission to help others. For teens, it was a rare opportunity to contribute and be treated as responsible young adults. And the job site provided a place for all of them to engage with each other.

Tools to thrive
The insight about his home renovation meshed with other observations Overton had made about the ways the American church practices youth ministry.
In his view, the standard “sit and receive on Sunday night” ministry doesn’t help teens tap into their God-given gifts, much less discover or hone them.
Upper-middle-class assumptions built into youth programs are flawed as well. They don’t address the needs of teens whose families struggle with poverty or domestic abuse, and a “zero tolerance” society leaves little in the way of grace for teens who need the chance to fail, to solve problems and to learn through correction from trusted mentors.
How might skill-building and mentoring ministries meet the needs of young people across social classes in your community?
With these thoughts in mind, Overton assembled a team of church members to explore ways to bring about his vision of combining a jobs program with his work in youth ministry.
After taking teen labor laws into account, the team determined that landscaping would be a better (and safer) fit than the remodeling business Overton had first envisioned. During monthly meetings with church colleagues, local business owners and parents, they honed a vision for the program and developed a business plan.
“What the team realized early on is that just throwing kids into jobs wasn’t really our goal,” said Rachel Grice, one of seven church members who worked with Overton to define, refine and implement his new idea. “Giving them tools to thrive in work, life and faith was what we wanted to do,” she said.
Another team member, former hardware store owner Bryan Ableidinger, had volunteered with the Columbia Presbyterian youth group for many years. Working with high schoolers on mission service trips each summer, he had observed how unprepared many students are for getting and holding down jobs. A major factor, he realized, is their busy school and extracurricular schedules.
“In my generation, we worked during school, but that’s not always the case now,” he said. “They aren’t learning what life and work require of them. We are trying to help them with both of these issues.”
Drawing from their own professional and life experiences, the team planned a series of training modules in professionalism (What do employers expect of me?), goal setting (Where am I going, and when will I get there?), personality and life gifts (What am I good at?), and personal finance (What do I do with money?).
The training would be required of all Mowtown employees but also would be open to any interested teens and families in the Vancouver and Camas area. Sessions would be conducted by members of Mowtown’s planning team, including Grice on professionalism and Ableidinger on goals training.
When the time came to pitch the idea to Columbia Presbyterian’s elders and lead pastor, the Rev. Fitz Neal, Overton stood ready to defend his proposal against the inevitable pushback -- which never materialized. He still can barely believe it.
“A lot of church elders who had business experience reacted with, ‘Finally, something in the church makes sense to me!’” Overton said. “After hearing the business plan and addressing concerns about funding and liability, they told me, ‘It sounds good. Go for it.’”
An arrangement was made allowing Overton to devote 4 to 8 hours of church time per week to Mowtown over an initial six-month period.
Neal said the congregation’s enthusiasm for this innovative idea came from a “culture of honoring vision and risk openness” that they had carefully been building for years.
What practices might you employ to create a culture that honors vision and is open to risk?
“So when Matt’s idea came along, the leaders could all see immediately how it was attached to a picture of our future that was already in their hearts and minds. That made it easy to make a decision right away, instead of killing it with a study or a committee,” Neal said.
The first teens to complete training were ready to go to work in June 2015.
Teens and college-age adults were recruited through Columbia Presbyterian and surrounding high schools; the program is open to anyone regardless of faith or economic status.
‘Windshield time’ with youth
On a recent Saturday, Overton picked up student-employee Alex Neal at Columbia Presbyterian. They drove to a nearby apartment complex to pick up Bryant Flores, rounding out the day’s crew, and traveled several miles to a home in the heights of Vancouver.
Both Alex and Bryant are 15 and have family connections to Columbia Presbyterian. This is their first formal job experience, and both are eager to help their families and explore where their talents may lead them.
Alex and Bryant carried folders, along with sunglasses, iPhones, gloves, drinks and lunches.
“[The folders are] part of their training,” Overton said. “They keep track of things they’re thankful for over the last year, things they’ve accomplished, things they’ve failed at and the things they want to accomplish in the next year.”
Driving together to clients’ homes provides “windshield time,” a chance to talk individually about their progress and concerns.
“We’re trying to develop a list of ‘windshield’ questions that correspond to the trainings we do during the year,” Overton said. “We can send crew bosses out with those questions to bounce off the kids as they’re going. Quite often, there’s plenty to talk about just naturally, and we’d almost prefer to do it that way.”
At the job site, they pile out and set to work unloading tools, pulling on gloves and surveying their canvas: an early 1970s residence with established trees, shrubs and extensive landscaping, all in need of a trim after a record-setting wet winter.
Overton hands Alex and Bryant pruners and hand clippers and demonstrates how to trim conifers and shrubs to the proper shape, and soon the teens settle into a quiet, methodical rhythm as Overton takes his power trimmer to camellia trees in the backyard.
Before long he’s back, coaching gently but still giving them space: “My dad always says, ‘Only God and another tree can make more wood.’ Just be careful of what you cut on these conifers!”
He next works alongside Bryant, and conversation flows freely. Job-related instructions and exchanges lead smoothly to topics of home life, school and more.
“You doing OK with that assignment?” Overton asks. “Did you have a good reason for turning it in late? No? Did you admit that to your teacher? Just go in and own it -- you gotta have that conversation.”
How does Overton’s understanding of mentoring challenge traditional conceptions?
These are the moments when the job site offers better mentoring opportunities than a youth group -- and better spiritual outcomes, Overton says, because of what he calls the “dignity principle.”
“What I’m offering is a process that [invites] them to engage fully, in a way that treats them equally, gives them more dignity,” he said.
“I want kids and young adults to leave Mowtown knowing what their gifts and talents are, how to hold down a job, and knowing what they’re good at,” he said. “Maybe they’ll respond in faith, or maybe not, but at least I’ve blessed those teens’ lives with the ability to sustain themselves. The culture around us values security and job experience for their kids, and I want to provide an environment where we do that with grace and love.”
A new model for youth ministry
Most passers-by would have no idea this isn’t just a typical landscaping operation. And in one respect, Mowtown is exactly like other landscaping outfits: it’s a for-profit business.
One reason Overton set it up as a business was that a for-profit structure was easier than a nonprofit, with no financial or liability risk for the church. Seed money came from Overton’s own pocket -- his initial investment of $10,000 has grown to nearly $25,000. He has purchased tools, trailers, liability insurance and a work vehicle.
The program functions as a business, yet it is not completely cut off from church oversight; every six months, a team reviews Mowtown’s financials, and other youth workers make sure the enterprise is still advancing the mission of the church.
There were also philosophical reasons for structuring the program as a business, Overton said. He is concerned about the long-term financial sustainability of the church -- and in particular, of youth ministries. In addition, youth pastors are paid so little that they often can’t afford to stay long enough at their jobs to do them well.
So Overton is excited about refining a hybrid nonprofit/for-profit model -- something he calls “missional entrepreneurship.”
In 2015, he attended the “Hatch-a-Thon” at Princeton Theological Seminary’s Institute for Youth Ministry, where he got feedback and suggestions about his still-evolving business model. He also shares his experiences and thoughts on his blog(link is external).
“If youth pastors could run small businesses that also employ youth, they could supplement their incomes while providing work experience and having more meaningful mentoring to the youth in their churches,” he said.
“What breaks my heart is, a lot of churches are jettisoning their youth workers. I’m trying to develop an economic engine, so the guy from the outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico, who wants to do youth ministry in a small church will have a model to say, ‘I could build a small business that benefits the community, and I can do relational work with teenagers at the same time, plus help support my family,’” he said.
Mowtown has been able to turn a profit, but Overton doesn’t draw a salary from the business. Once payroll and operating expenses are met, all profits are used to continue the Mowtown experiment.
Overton realizes that many people have a natural bias against the idea of for-profit enterprises in the church. And he acknowledges that there are potential pitfalls -- that's why he considers this very much an experiment and a work in progress. But he also thinks that something has to change.
“I have seen that the more deeply embedded people are in the church, the harder it is for them to understand how you can do business and do good at the same time,” he said. “But that needs to change if we want to make a difference in the way we help our youth and engage our congregants.”
Because Mowtown is a real business, Overton treats the teens like real workers -- another part of the “dignity principle.”
“I can say to the students, ‘Look, we bid out a job; if we don’t get it done the right way, with efficiency, this thing goes under. That affects the next nine students who need work. So you’ve got to do your job, and I’ve got to do my job.’ It’s a good exchange.”
Alex and Bryant have been working steadily for the past three hours and ask about lunch.
“Most people with day jobs like this get a half-hour lunch every four hours and a 10-minute break every two hours,” Overton said. “Kinda brutal, but I don’t make the rules. I just bend them once in a while.”
He bends the rules a bit for his tired, hungry students and breaks for lunch as soon as most of their trimmings are loaded.
They talk over sandwiches and Gatorades. “Hey, I think we’ll have Mowtown t-shirts soon,” Overton said. Alex and Bryant love the idea. So what kind of boss is Overton, anyway? “He’s a great boss, the best,” Bryant said . “Yeah, but we haven’t messed up yet,” Alex said, to peals of laughter.
After lunch, it’s time to clean up. Overton goes to work with a leaf blower, and Alex and Bryant pile more branches in the trailer and truck bed. Tools are loaded up, yard debris gets a final tamping down, and all three Mowtowners take a moment to step back and see the result of their labors.
“I’ve learned in my ministry that people are never finished,” Overton said, “so it’s nice to step back after a job is done and see how good the yard looks. If my mission as a follower of Christ is to bless the world around me, I can’t think of a better way to do it than this.”
Questions to consider:

How does Overton’s understanding of mentoring challenge traditional conceptions? What needs do you perceive in the mentorship of the young in your setting? Does Overton’s innovation answer some of those needs?
Mowtown Teen Lawn Care blends business entrepreneurship and ministry in a unique way. How might a business enterprise reach young people otherwise averse to church? What possibilities does this ministry model inspire in your setting?
How might skill-building and mentoring ministries meet the needs of young people across social classes in your community? Why might this be considered part of a congregational youth minister’s work?
Are you intentionally cultivating a “culture of honoring vision and risk-openness” in your ministry so that innovations such a Mowtown Teen Lawn Care might flourish? What practices might you employ to cultivate that kind of culture?

IDEAS THAT IMPACT
Treat youth as agents, not objects, of ministry
Youth want to do more than participate in ready-made service opportunities, and the work of youth ministry should be to help them experience their own agency, writes the director of the Institute for Youth Ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Faith and Leadership
YOUTH & CHILDREN, YOUTH MINISTRY
Chanon Ross: Treat youth as agents, not objects, of ministry

Bigstock/dolgachov
Youth want to do more than participate in ready-made service opportunities, and the work of youth ministry should be to help them experience their own agency, writes the director of the Institute for Youth Ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary.
On Christmas Eve when she was 14, honor student Keiana Raven returned home from the doctor in tears. She had just learned that she was pregnant.
Keiana decided to keep the baby, and in the weeks that followed, she and her family wrestled with the weight of her situation. Would she be able to keep her grades up and stay in school? What about extracurricular activities? Could she still go to college?
As her pregnancy progressed and her son was born, she felt the piercing gaze of her peers and the unspoken expectation that she would become just another teen-pregnancy statistic. Although her family was able to provide what she needed to be both a high school student and a mother, she realized that other teen moms in her school and community did not have such support.
Keiana asked her parents for permission to give some of her son Joshua’s things to other teen moms. They agreed, not knowing that Keiana’s generosity would lead her to an extraordinary and ambitious idea: starting a nonprofit to serve teen mothers throughout the Atlanta area.
Keiana established Joshua’s Closet International(link is external) in 2008 at the age of 15 with the help of GivingPoint(link is external), a leading youth philanthropy organization. While still a high school student, Keiana grew Joshua’s Closet International into a registered 501(c)(3) that today partners with 20 other organizations and county governments to provide training in parenting, nutrition, job readiness, financial literacy and life skills to hundreds of teen moms. Keiana went on to graduate seventh in her high school class and won a Millennium Scholarship from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Keiana’s story is remarkable, but she is not alone.
In the last two years, GivingPoint has helped 60 young people like Keiana launch philanthropic organizations in the Atlanta area, training them in fundraising, volunteer recruitment, marketing, networking and other skills. The courses are taught by some of Atlanta’s top business leaders, philanthropists and nonprofit professionals.
GivingPoint has also created an expansive social media platform to reach youth across the country. Nearly 10,000 young people use this platform to learn about important causes, track service hours, raise funds and connect with other youth who want to change the world.
“I’m done being surprised at what these kids can accomplish,” said GivingPoint’s founder, Derek Smith, at an annual fundraising gala in August. “The question is not whether youth are able but whether we will empower them to change the world.”
Smith’s observation about today’s young people is a welcome insight for churches and Christian organizations who engage youth in service. Some of our brightest and most faithful youth want to do more than participate in ready-made service opportunities like mission trips, soup kitchens and Habitat for Humanity.
Youth enjoy and benefit from such opportunities, but they also want to experience their own agency -- to make a difference in their communities by investing their lives in the issues they care about most.
Perhaps we have unwittingly underestimated the abilities of some of our young people by treating them as objects of ministry rather than empowering them to be agents of ministry. Might it be that churches and faith-based organizations could cultivate youthful passion to transform the world?
Answering these questions means asking our youth to articulate their individual passions for service. Which issues, causes or charitable organizations are most compelling to them? How could they make a difference? What organizations or initiatives could they start that could make an impact in their communities? How are these passions connected to their faith?
Youth are easily confounded by such questions, because they are not used to thinking of themselves as agents of change. GivingPoint knows this, so they developed an exercise to awaken youthful imagination.
I recently asked GivingPoint to lead a group of 20 high school students through this exercise, called the “Blue Sky” program. These youth from Grand Rapids, Michigan, in Atlanta for a weeklong mission trip, agreed to spend a few hours with the GivingPoint team. None of them had given much thought to how they might make a difference in their home community, but as they emerged from the Blue Sky exercise, they overflowed with excitement. Their ideas were interesting, compelling and diverse. They imagined starting programs to address homelessness, poverty, ecological sustainability, literacy and even local traffic problems. Of course, some of their goals were idealistic, but their energy was determined and focused and boundless. I found myself wanting to help them put their passion into action.
Isn’t this an important part of the work of youth ministry?
Thinking of youth ministry in this way -- as the work of mentoring passionate young people who want to make a difference -- creates opportunities for intergenerational ministry in congregations of all sizes. It can be done with just one teenager. GivingPoint provides youth with instruction and mentoring from successful business and nonprofit leaders, and these kinds of people can also be found in many congregations.
What might it look like for a congregation to link passionate youth who are idealistic, visionary and full of energy with adult mentors who have experience, wisdom, resources and connections? How might both groups benefit from one another?
Keiana didn’t launch Joshua’s Closet by herself. Countless adults believed in her vision and ability, and supported her in bringing her dream to life. Keiana benefited the lives of these adults as much as they benefited hers.
Like Keiana, many of the youth in our churches want to change their communities and change the world. Like Keiana, they bubble over with vitality, energy, urgency and vision. How will you respond to that love of life and positive outlook?
Resources for exploring youth ministry & philanthropy:

The Institute for Youth Ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary provides resources for youth ministers, pastors and lay leaders who want to explore youth ministry and philanthropy, including:
A free copy of GivingPoint’s Blue Sky program for use with a youth group
A free copy of “The Spark: Why Passionate Young Social Entrepreneurs Are Working to Change the World,” by Derek Smith
A new program, the Youth Philanthropy Academy(link is external), for Christian youth who want to launch philanthropic organizations

Contact the Institute for Youth Ministry(link is external) by email at iym@ptsem.edu(link sends e-mail) or by phone at 609-497-7914.
Read more from Chanon Ross»
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 developmental theorist Erik Erikson's haunting phrase. They are looking for a truth 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.

Proclaiming Passion: The Theological Challenge of Youth Ministry in the 21st Century

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 2001]
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.
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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.