YoRocko!

Help me understand something that’s happening with the youth ministry I’m responsible for:

A student of mine (call him Steve), on his own initiative and without consulting me, approached an adult in our community to teach him and some of his friends meditation, and he offered the church as a sponsor and venue. The adult in question is known to me, and I regard her highly.

I spoke with her, and we scheduled three dates for a meditation experience that she would lead at the church. We sent out general publicity to our roster of students via email and text, but I insisted that participants primarily be recruited through Steve. I wanted him to invite his friends.

I couldn’t attend the first week (another adult did), but I attended last night. There were nine students there. Two of them are part of our congregation. The other seven represented Steve and six of his friends (five of which were girls). Steve’s mom is discouraged at the lack of participation by church youth, but my reaction is the exact opposite. I love this.

I love it because I have a growing conviction that ministry as a platform and youth ministry 3.0 insights are for real. During the last program year I blogged about Maggie and her use of a couple of church programs as platforms for her and her friends to do good work. This seems to me to be the same thing. Except it’s Steve and his friends.

Going into next year, it seems that several youth ministry “participant communities” are emerging. While there is still the traditional community of students from the church who come to weekly youth groups, there is also the community of Steve and his friends and the community of Maggie and her friends. The challenge will be to work with that traditional community on programming for them while also discerning opportunities to work with those other communities in meaningful ways.

Help me out: is this the right way to be interpreting what’s happening? Where else do you see this happening, and how does one discern well opportunities to do good work with new communities of students?

See the first three posts on A New Culture of Learning here, here, and here.

Collectives are made up of people who generally share values and beliefs about the world and their place in it, who value participation over belonging, and who engage in a set of shared practices. Thus collectives are plural and multiple. They also both form and disappear regularly around different ideas, events, or moments. Collectives . . . are both contextual and situated, particularly with regard to engaging in specific actions.

They are built and structured around participation and therefore carry a different sense of investment for those who engage in them. When, for example, a person sings a song onstage at a karaoke bar, he is doing it within a collective environment. In the karaoke bar participation is not only valued, it is the substance of the activity itself. The collective that forms as a result provides an opportunity to do certain things (agency) and a connection with other performers who are similarly situated (identity)–neither of which exists in the other two venues.

What is the substance of the activity we call “youth ministry?” Short answer: there isn’t any.

If Mark Oestreicher is right, then there’s no such thing as a “youth ministry” in any particular church. There are youth ministries: various efforts to connect young people, adults, and the world around them in vibrant expressions of faith. All those various activities have some substance to them, but the youth ministry of the church doesn’t. Trying to define it, name it, strategize around it will feel good and useful, but it won’t be. At least not to the youth we’re trying to work with.

I’m wrestling instead with the substance of my Sunday night high school youth group and my Tuesday afternoon junior high guys group and the work trip and the confirmation class and Maggie and her friends. Those are all different collectives. They are all built and structured around a different kind of participation. The agency and connection students get from those different collectives don’t really relate to each other. They don’t have to. And there’s no rule that says they have to live forever. These collective form and disappear around the students in them and the things the students are drawn to.

Yet here’s the trouble I’m having. If collectives are made up of people who generally share values about the world and their place in it, then those are two things that teenagers are notoriously bad at understanding. Most adolescents’ values conform pretty closely to those of their parents, and their sense of their place in the world changes constantly. These are things that the church is helping them figure out.

So let youth ministry be karaoke. Let a group of students who want the substance of their participation with one another in the church to be playing games have that experience. But guide them as well, so that they encounter values larger than the ones they were raised on and so that they can’t settle into an easy sense of their place in the world without being given some options their school and Mtv can’t give them.

In an earlier post, I introduced Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown’s book  A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, asking how youth leaders actually get at the internal motivation that, married with access to an unlimited source of information, drives learning.

Here’s another key idea in the book: the collective.

“As the name implies, it is a collection of people, skills, and talent that produces a result greater than the sum of its parts. For our purposes . . . they are defined by an active engagement with the process of learning.

“A collective is very different from an ordinary community. Where communities can be passive . . . collectives cannot. In communities, people learn in order to belong. In a collective, people belong in order to learn. Communities derive their strength from creating a sense of belonging, while collectives derive theirs from participation.

“[Collectives] are content neutral platforms, waiting to be filled with interactions among participants.”

What if youth ministry were viewed in a particular context as a constellation of collectives? What if, instead of The Youth Group, where one Youth Leader was trying to expose all participants to Scripture study, service, spiritual practice, worship, community building, etc., you instead had a collective of students who were participating in service and a collective that was focused on Scripture study, and any number of youth collectives engaging any number of things?

A student could choose to participate in whichever collective appealed to her. She could form a collective of her peers around forms of participation that don’t yet exist at the church.

In our congregation this year, a particular student has gathered a collective of her peers around her to engage issues of hunger. She recruited them to raise money for and participate in a walk. She got them to do the 30 Hour Famine. What that collective does next I don’t know. But I’m sure they’re not done.

I like what the collective suggests. What are the limitations, though? Does this appeal to you as much as it does to me?

I blogged yesterday about Maggie the Magnificent and her really stellar leadership of our church’s involvement in a local hunger walk.  Maggie is a high school student who is “disconnected” in programmatic terms from the church’s youth ministry activities. But she’s doing good work in the world, and it made me sad that the church wasn’t positioned as a platform for her to do some of that work. So I invited her to lead the walk efforts, and she killed it. She totally killed it.

Another thing that emerged, though, from this year’s walk effort, was that the youth at our church who participate in it are not necessarily the same ones who come to youth group.

In the past, Sunday youth groups would be cancelled on the day of the walk, since our youth would presumably have already done something that day. I had my doubts about that presumption.

So this year we held youth groups on Sunday night per usual, and, as I expected, that was exactly zero overlap between the students who walked for hunger and those who came hungry for Sunday night community. Ze-ro.

The walk involved the same number of youth as regularly come to youth group gatherings, but they were (this week at least) a totally different group of youth.

This is an emerging attempt on my part to put into practice Mark Oestreicher’s Youth Ministy 3.0 contention that there’s no such thing as a youth ministry, in the singular. Instead, churches have ministries to different groupings of youth. Trying to craft a comprehensive program that will attract all manner of students is foolish. It’s also kind of lazy.

Of course, it’s also a continued grappling with Jeff Jarvis’s thoroughgoing What Would Google Do? with its unambiguous answer that Google would create a platform for youth to do what they already want to do.

My next question, then, is this: if a hunger walk gives youth a platform to do good work on behalf of needy people, then what are youth groups a platform for?

Thoughts?