Its fall finals for a lot of our seniors. As I look at those in my youth ministry I often wonder what will happen to them when they leave this town, this church, and their high school. Will they also leave their faith. Most studies seem to indicate that truth.
As a youth director in college I remember thinking, "These kids have no idea what they are going to be up against when they head to college." My college faith experience was spectacular, but it didn't start out that way. The first year and a half were a real rough time in my spiritual journey. I did everything I could to try and help them find a new faith community, but I couldn't shake the sense that I was sending them out as sheep among wolves. I remember those exact thoughts passing through my head as they graduated and we said our goodbyes.
Below is an interesting article from Fuller Theological Seminary's Center for Youth and Family Ministry. It is a series of surveys and some interpretation on what is happening with those seniors as they head out the door to college. You can read it here.
Hey all! I wrote the below letter to YS after a few days of reflection on the National Youth Workers Convention in Anaheim, CA. I would be curious to hear what you all think. Did you get this sense as you were there? I doubt I will hear back from them, but maybe. I think this is a real problem we are missing right now (amongst others) in this "new" direction that seems to be everywhere. Peace.---Matt
Mark,
My name is Matt Overton and I recently attended the YS convention in Anaheim. I am a youth pastor at a Presbyterian Church in California and recently attended seminary. I had been invited to the convention by Kenda Dean who is a former professor to help lead some of the focus groups for the Nothing but Nets program. This is just so you know where I am coming from and so you don't think I am a complete whacko. It was my first convention in four years and I was thoroughly stoked to be there.
I love the conventions because they take the time to care for a group of people that nobody really takes the time to care for. For so many there, they are both practical and therapeutic. You all are an answer to prayers for so many out in the field and I pray that you continue in what you are doing for a long time to come.
I was struck this year by the shift in the theological perspective that has taken place since I was last there just a few years ago. I have to admit I was really taken back by the new emphasis on the Kingdom of God not as an empire of Christian converts, but as an ethic. It was the first time that I have heard any large youth ministry group speak about the Kingdom of God as an ethic and as a reality, something that we are actively participating in bringing about. It was so refreshing and it has been a long time coming in the culture and theology of American youth ministry. Thank you for your theological reflection and your willingness to say and do some things from up front that were probably new, and perhaps challenging to many of the youth workers there. Paradigm shifts are a good thing. Having said all that, I also had some deep concerns with what went on at the convention as well.
I was struck on several occasions by the way some of the speakers would allude to this new Kingdom thinking. Often I heard things like, “I am not sure why we thought that youth ministry was just about getting butts into heaven.” “That is just how we used to do things.” “We thought ‘fun’ was what ministry was all about.” “We just assumed the gospel was about reading our Bibles, praying, and getting kids saved.” Usually, this type of sentiment expressed that we were now abandoning an old way of doing things and it was often followed by a new way of doing things according to the Kingdom theme of participating in what God is doing. The whole theme of the convention was “Reveal.” God is revealing something new in youth ministry.
I think the problem that I began to see was that in none of the statements I heard was there any genuine sense of personal or institutional culpability in the whole youth ministry endeavor that had come before. Not one single YS person or seminar leader ever expressed any sentiment that the model of ministry that they themselves had been pushing for the last 20 some years missed the Kingdom ethic of the gospel. It was as though the reduction of the gospel to fun, personal discipleship, and conversions had just “happened” without anybody’s involvement. “That’s just how we used to do things.”
This was remarkable to me because if we truly have been neglecting the care of our neighbor and the ethics of peace and justice then we really have been participants in an amazing evil. We have distorted, reduced, and tamed the gospel of Jesus Christ and that is a travesty. Think about the people, communities, and nations that have been neglected while we were off duct taping kids to the wall (not in and of itself a bad thing) in the name of Jesus Christ. I guess the problem I was having is that there was no sense of contrition in the room. I was overwhelmed by the sense that youth ministry was excitedly forging ahead to the next great thing with a patentley absent self-critical moment.
In the end I am not sure what repentance and contrition looks like for YS or youth ministry in general. In fact, I have no idea what it looks like. My hands have just as much blood on them as everyone elses. I spent the first five years of my youth ministry in college neglecting the real and authentic Kingdom of God that Jesus tells stories about in the Gospels. But, my fear is that by neglecting to remember what we did in youth ministry in the past we are waiting to repeat it. I hope that God is not just revealing some new paradigm. I hope that God is not just revealing the next solution to low numbers or to our church boards being on our backs. If that is all that is being revealed, then I am deeply saddened because 20 years from now we will have forgotten about “being missional”, or 1 Life, Nothing but Nets, or whatever. The Kingdom ethic won’t be cool or edgy anymore. Are we just excited about the Kingdom of God as ethic because it is a new direction and people are buying into it, or because we genuinely believe that we were neglecting the proclamation of the whole gospel of Jesus Christ?
Elie Wiesel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, was a survivor of the holocaust. I found him as the result of Miroslav Volf’s recent book, “Exclusion and Embrace.” Wiesel says this about remembering, “I decided to devote my life to telling the story [of the holocaust] because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. And anyone who does not remember betrays them again.” Wiesel has always been concerned with remembering the past so that we never forget it and then repeat it. My hope in writing this is not to gain an apology or prove I am right, or anything else. Indeed, I have as much to repent of as every other youth worker, or YS group, or Christian camp, or Mission trip organization. I write it in the hope that we might give some pause to think about what it means that we neglected the full scope of the Kingdom of God in our ministries for so long. I think we might be better served if we engaged in this discipline before we moved on to what we need to do next. I am genuinely worried that we are missing the fact that “somebody” didn’t just make a “boo boo.” It was me, it was you, and it was a gross neglect of the gospel. We neglected what God had already revealed. I think its important for us to remember that out loud and not just forge ahead.
I apologize for the length. God bless you in all that you do.
Matt Overton
Since this website is devoted towards theology and youth ministry, I thought we might start at the beginning. What does theology have to do with youth ministry? Why do we need it? What does it have to do with teenagers? Where, when, and how is it communicated to our youth? How do youth ministers take time to reflect theologically amidst a busy schedule? What does "theology" have to do with "program"? How have you been going about actively reflecting and integrating your theology with the teenagers you work with?--Matt
The other night I was invited to attend a Young Life banquet here in my local community. I have never had much exposure to Young Life in my lifetime. There was a chapter at my high school (I think) in Southern California and I knew some folks at Seminary who had been in or led Young Life groups. My recent exposure has been more positive than negative on the whole, but I disagree with some of Young Life's philosophy and theology for reaching out to teens in the name of Jesus Christ.
At the banquet, Young Life had announced that they were going to be starting a new facet of their program that was going to try and reach out to single teen moms in our California community. It seemed like a great idea to me due to the fact that there are a ton of teen moms in our city's area. These moms are often on their own and are caught between being teens and adults. Many of them are ashamed and feel left out of life and any outreach to them would probably be of some help.
My trouble came when the Young Life folks began to show a video about the teen moms who had most recently gone to the Young Life camp in Woodleaf, California. I began to wonder as we watched the mothers on the video whether any of them had been asked to be apart of the video presentation. I wondered whether they knew that they would be caught up in a fundraising effort for Young Life in some town in Cali. Did they want to be displayed in front of an audience listening to sappy music? What if somebody knew them? Would that have been a source of shame?
At youth groups we often show videos about our latest trips to Mexico, the Indian Reservation, inner city L.A. or New York, or to the Gulf Coast. We carefully choose music that fits the mood or the desired feel that we have determined will generate enough sign ups for the following year. My question is: How and where do we draw boundaries with video and photos at our home churches? Must we always ask for permission to show photos or videos of individuals that we have helped? Should we ever show photos even if we have permission? At what point have we begun to market the pain and suffering of others? Do our efforts honor the dignity of a fellow child of God, or do we make people into objects when we engage in drumming up support for next year through multimedia presentations?--Matt Overton
Check out this article in the Denver Post. http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_4333367
A local pastor around here wrote a script for one of those Halloween plays intended to scare people into repentance. Supposedly, it's been copied by over 3000 churches. Now it's going to New York as an off-Broadway play. I'm very curious to see how that goes over in Manhattan.
Having spent the past 7 1/2 years in Portland, Princeton, and now Denver, I've started to assume that this type of theology is fading away in our country. Particularly among youth, my own experience is that they are less and less willing to even claim Christ as the exclusive Savior, because that smacks of intolerance. And those who are willing to make such an exclusive claim realize the need to be tactful in their high schools, and keep a distance from the perceptions of Christianity given by popular culture.
It seems clear that the religious far right continues to be very visible in the media, giving the impression of a growing movement, but are they attracting youth? If so, where are they coming from? They must be a very different breed than any students that I've ever come across.
-Jeremy Watson
The other morning I was praying with some youth pastors from my new ministry community and one of the youth pastors began praying for "our senior pastors." My ears perked up because he began to pray for all sorts of things related to the "senior pastor." The curiosity was that everything he prayed about smacked of a great deal of hierarchy which is one thing that my denomination has tried to diminish in the relationship between the head of staff and the associate pastors. To be sure, my head of staff has more experience than I do, but I do not see myself as a lower minister than the head of staff. We do have some sense of hierarchy, but not to the extent that I was seeing in the room that day. The head of staff does not have a higher rank than I do.
It occured to me at that moment, and for a while after the prayer meeting, that I was the odd fellow in the room of youth ministers at that moment. Most of them are youth pastors 24/7. They are resposnible for their corner of ministry in the church and little else. They have one set of responsibilities and one group to whom they are responsible too. This is not my situation at all.
Each day that I come into the office, I have to make sure that I am ready to navigate multiple worlds. I have funerals to think about, weddings, hospital visitations, adult education, and youth ministry. I wear a collared shirt for the adults and sandals for the teenagers. It is a crazy existence. Lately, I have taken to keeping an extra pair of slacks in my office, and shorts too. I am glad that I am a full fledged minister, but I have to admit that some days I wish I was just working with youth. Sometimes, there are just not enough hours in the day to plan youth group for Sunday evening and the sermon for Sunday morning. It's a lot of different hats to wear. At times I even find myself adjusting my vocabulary between groups. With teens, its teen lingo, with adults its any lingo that demonstrates that I am not just suited to work with teens. Are you experiencing that realm of many hats?
---Matt Overton
The other day one of my youth came in for a Bible Study here at the church as I was setting out Bibles for the study. I wanted to make sure we all were using the same version so as to avoid the confusion we had the previous week. Anyway, the teen that came in told me that she used the Good News Bible because it was easy to understand and had some cool pictures. For the next minute or two we discussed her preference and I tried to convince her that she probably needed to find another version. I wish I had never said what I was thinking.
I have always hated the good news Bible. I have always thought it was too sterile. Everything that was messy and confusing and interesting was cleaned up and edited into nice neat phrases in which everything made sense. It concerns me when I see so many youth reading "The Message" and "the New Living Translation" and "The Good News Bible." And so, as a dutifully constituted minister to youth I tried to persuade her to read something else. But, as I thought about our conversation just a few hours later I felt terrible. If reading the Good News Bible gets her to crack the Scriptures each night, then why would I discourage that? Shouldn't I be jumping up and down in joy that she even cares enough to crack the Bible? Then again, I want my kids to realize that the Bible doesn't always present easy answers to easy questions. It is not a storehouse of facts or proofs for life. Rarely, if ever, should we be wrenching "10 easy steps" out of its pages. Sometimes, the Bible presents more questions than it does answers. I just want my teens to understand how to study and read the Bible intelligently. I don't want them all to be great little scholars, just informed and intelligent followers of Christ. So there I was, straddling my desire to challenge my teens intelectually while wanting to applaud any step in the right direction. Here are some questions.
When do we spur our teens onto greater things?
When do we just applaud baby steps they are taking?
What is a good intelectual standard for our teens, and what it just arrogance?
We should be both educators and exhorters, but which ought to be the greater emphasis?
-Matt
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