Progressive Youth Ministry Has Left The Building
On truly adapting to what is working and is probably better anyway
What counts as church? In modern church life I think there has been a strong focus on programs. Programs are from the modern church viewpoint the church in action.
As an example, as a pastor who has worked in youth ministry for a long time I’ve always assumed a major or even primary responsibility was the coordination of youth programs. Plan youth events. Organize a youth group. Offer Sunday school.
Such programs are typically run by staff or volunteers working at the pace of staff and are primarily for the members of the church.
However, some recent conversations with our staff, plus simple meditation on how I actually move in the world these days as a pastor, has me reconsidering what I count as youth ministry.
Here are the examples:
I DM (Dungeon Master) a weekly D&D group with some high schoolers, most of whom are members of our church but don’t attend worship frequently. This group is more regularly active than our high school “youth group.”
I started substitute teaching during the pandemic to relieve teacher shortages.
I coach soccer.
Our congregation organizes and hosts Queer Camp, a camp that is not primarily for our own member youth though it does included them. It’s for LGBTQIA+ youth in the region who desire time and space to be with their community in a safe and affirming environment.
We put ourselves on the line advocating for youth-related issues including food insecurity and trans youth medical care.
Some summers more youth walk in our Pride parade float with us than attend the average youth group gathering.
We partner frequently with social justice related youth organizations in town. We are in relationship to them and support them.
We’ve launched ministries that significantly impact minority youth, including Canopy NWA (refugee resettlement), and Ozark Atolls (Marshallese community advocacy). Both of these groups provide care resources for youth.
Many schools and youth-focused non-profits know us and make use of our church campus for their programming, from debate teams to theater groups to rock bands.
The number of youth who come for 9 a.m. Sunday school may be small but the number of youth we hang out with weekly is big.
Looking at this list, I observe at least some of the following characteristics:
In our practice youth ministry is a ministry of integrated presence. We serve and play together with young people in our community purely for its own sake, because it is good to do so.
Some of our most successful youth programming is not exclusively or even primarily for our own church members.
As a professional pastor (I serve full-time as a pastor supported financially by the church) I devote a considerable amount of my time not necessarily to organizing church youth programs but in service to improving the lives of young people in our community.
We’re militant about not proselytizing. We affirm the faith traditions of the groups and youth with whom we partner.
I have a feeling the average young family with kids in our congregation is uncertain, for a variety of very good reasons, about their own commitment to participation in ongoing youth programs. But they do want their children to grow up in a congregation that cultivates the values we do.
I line all this out in an attempt to analyze the practice theologically. A historical touchpoint in Lutheran theology is the concept of vocation. Basically, Lutherans have understood the primary context for Christian ministry as taking place in daily life.
Luther chafed against the idea that certain lifestyles (for example, monasticism) might be considered more holy than others. He famously remarked that changing diapers was a holy occupation, and more holy than a monastic in their cell precisely because someone changing a diaper is unlikely to believe that what they are doing is a special, elevated religious activity.
Now, this is not exactly like the phenomenon in “Christian” America where “Christian” businesses publish directories and put bibles out in their waiting rooms. The Lutheran sense of vocation isn’t that one should or can Christianize or have a special Christian way of repairing cars.
Rather, vocation for Lutherans is simply neighbor-love. You change a diaper because the baby needs it. You repair cars and repair them well because it benefits the driver.
Perhaps this is the core problem with the idea of church programs. There is a risk of elevating them in our minds or even in practice so that we come to the conclusion that as a church activity the youth group we organize or the Sunday school classes we plan count more than, say, youth organizing for positive change in public schools because they are grounded in the ethics their faith tradition stewards.
[I would add an important historical note here: until the 18th century Sunday school didn’t exist, and until the 20th century youth groups didn’t exist. Both are very modern developments in church life, and the church prior to those centuries found ways to be church without those age-specific programs.]
So let me attempt a somewhat subtle analysis here: it’s difficult to discern in such secular spaces how the church is supposed to think about such activities qua church. That is to say, is there any useful distinction to be made at all between a D&D group that just plays D&D and a D&D group where there is an awareness that the game master and participants are connected to a church?
This is a very difficult question to answer because of the phenomenological complexity. If the pastor who DMs the game is really doing it just to “reach” the players, then there is a useful distinction to be made in the negative sense. I’d be opposed to such a practice on Christian grounds because I don’t believe relationships should be instrumentalized for proselytization.
However, in the sense that a pastor like myself is called to give of their time to youth in the community, such an awareness becomes a heuristic for deciding whether to spend the time and how much can be spent. The same kind of analysis happened when I brought the idea of substitute teaching before our church council: they unanimously felt it was a good use of their pastor’s time both to meet a need and because of the benefits of presence in the school.
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To be honest, in 2022 our own congregation sometimes struggles to sort out how much energy we want to put into traditional youth programming like Sunday school and youth group. Some folks like it, more people say they want it than actually attend it, and the aspects of our youth programming that attract the most attendance, grant dollars, and energy are things like Queer Camp that are unique contributions to the wider community and social-justice focused.
So, if I step away from my long-standing habit of organizing youth programs and ask myself instead what church in the youth space might do if it wasn’t attempting to revivify such programs, I’d keep leaning into the practice of presence and integration. If we did so consistently as a whole church, I think we’d prioritize the following habits:
We’d watch for what the youth are already doing and organizing and join them (rather than trying to organize or get them to do things with us).
We’d invite all youth more directly into all aspects of the life of the church that are uniquely church—worship leadership, social actions, study and prayer.
We’d consolidate youth activities so they are integrally connected to these core practices (this last one we’re already doing because we’re going to experiment with a developmentally appropriate “Sunday school” for the younger children that occurs during the sermon).
We’d find more effective means of equipping parents to integrate Christian commitments into their daily life. As a whole church, this might mean making a concerted effort to be more green, to organize against government and corporate abuse of the poor, and to structure more of our family time in order to live our individual vocations well in daily life.
Be ready, as the need arises, to innovate and launch programs like Queer Camp that meet an actual need rather than simply perpetuate what is assumed as de rigueur.
Why does this all matter? Well, it’s all me trying to shift my personal attention from putting energy into things I emphasize to myself more out of habit and nostalgia than anything else, and then honor and recognize that many things we may not name as “youth programming” are actually precisely that, but better and more vocationally true and really just a lot of fun and impactful.
Readers might ask themselves, as I am asking myself as a pastor and dad: what do we want or desire out of youth programming? Do we even know? We make choices all the time about what our children will sign up for and commit to, from Girl Scouts to soccer to D&D Clubs to marching band to summer jobs. How do we make such choices, and do our convictions inform such choices?
Our decisions around worship participation, volunteering in the church, attending church programs, and participating in the wider (and ever more demanding) set of demands of secular life currently lack balance. We know this because most of us are on some levels dissatisfied. Either we feel over-committed, or we feel frustrated that we struggle to schedule those things we actually value, or on some levels we commit ourselves to activities and we don’t even know why.
The demands of our situation are insatiable and the new media landscape overwhelms us with formational resources that overwhelm any chance that the one hour of worship on Sunday morning can compete. For example, I recently listened to an interview on The Daily with a conservative evangelical pastor driven out of his parish in Fort Smith by the rise of Trumpism. If you listen to the interview, you get the sense he’d been doing his level best to form a community, a growing community, only to discover between 2016-2020 that the majority had willingly bought into the falsehoods of Canon.
The result: an existential crisis for the pastor. If everything he had been doing with his parish still resulted in them believing such false things, had he been doing it all wrong? What was the value of all that time in worship and programs if it didn’t buttress them against manipulative lies and fealty to a morally problematic leader?
No wonder those of us in the emerging landscape of progressive church have a certain level of skepticism about engaging our people at the intensity level of the evangelicals. We’re uncertain that would be healthy or effective. But more likely there’s also a kind of secular complacency, a willingness to be populated in our use of time by all the demands of modern life. That’s less good and progressives more than anyone else should be skeptical of the way the systems around us wish to catechize us.
Perhaps this is the way forward, to ask ourselves what youth ministry looks like if the goal is to equip and strengthen our communities for resistance and resilience.
I like what you say about changing the way we see youth ministry in the church - especially the part about equipping parents to provide Christ-centered experiences within the family. One of these experiences - and a direction I think at least some churches may be headed - is to help children experience the wonders and magnificence of the natural world that is all around them. Because my husband and I have been on a journey to transition our 115 acres of MN farmland from corn/soy production to more diversified and earth-friendly agricultural practices, we have become aware of the importance of incorporating spirituality into the care of creation. In particular I recommend reading Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul by John Philip Newell, and Church of the Wild by Victoria Loorz. I enjoy reading your confessions. We care deeply about the church and feel that God is actively working to bring about changes in God's church. We would be privileged to be even a small part of those changes. Keep doing what you're doing.
Where does confirmation fit into this new landscape?