De-Programming Youth Ministry

John Vest graciously invited me last week to contribute to a NEXT Church blog series he’s curating about the future of youth ministry in the Presbyterian Church. Here’s a teaser:

Each Wednesday afternoon I’ve got two groups of students who gather at the church I serve: one group of junior high girls and another group of high school boys. I’m a bit baffled as to how this came about, as I certainly didn’t plan for it.

Read the rest of the post here and offer your thoughts.

Changing My Thinking About Change

“Times, They Are a’ Changin‘” is not a strategy.

“What’s The Matter with Kids These Days” is not a plan.

I’m 37. I’ve been ordained for nearly a decade, and I’ve only ever known decline in my denomination. I started my seminary training the week of the September 11th attacks. The rapid, unpredictable change gripping the church and the world has been my constant companion from day one. It has neither surprised nor troubled me. I have taken change as a given in my vocation and have thought condescending thoughts toward those who lament or, worse, resist it.

Defending the status quo is not a vision for ministry.

But neither is embracing every change.

It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that our calling in times of changing patterns, mores, and norms is to discern which changes ought to be resisted and which ones embraced. To ask together: which changes promote bonds of community and which fray them? Which elevate virtue and which vice? Which compel compassion and which apathy?

Neither fighting for nor fighting against Change is a good unto itself, and the choice between the former and the latter is false. Today’s rebel is tomorrow’s bore.

I’ve written a bit in this space about Youth Ministry 3.0, Mark Oestreicher’s provocative vision for youth work published in 2008. Its description of the changes shaping youth culture compelled me early in my present call to cultivate a menu of student programs, each of which might appeal to different students in the church and community but none of which would have central importance.

Out went The Youth Group and in came youth groups–two on Sunday afternoons and two on Wednesday afternoons. Also, special events became opportunities to engage particular groups of students in ministry and not another thing The Youth Group is expected to show up for. Scheduling a youth retreat does not cancel the weekly youth group.

Specifically, I heard clearly Oestreicher’s plea for smallness:

Smallness is both a value and a practice, though the value has to precede and continue on through the practice. Smallness values community in which teenagers can be truly known and know others, rather than being one of the crowd (even if it’s a really fun crowd). Smallness champions clusters of relationships rather than a carpet-bombing approach. Smallness waits on the still, small voice of God rather than assuming what God wants to say and broadcasting it through the best sound system money can buy. Smallness prioritizes relationships over numbers, social networks over programs, uniqueness over homogeneity, and listening to God over speaking for God (emphasis mine).

Clusters of relationships. Social networks. That’s what I’ve nurtured these past four years.

Today, though, I’m looking at these clusters and feeling acutely what they’re not doing. They’re not making much of a claim on student’s passion. They’re not holding up well to the carpet-bombing approach of homework and soccer and band and debate and water polo and A.P. classes and college applications. They’re not growing student’s knowledge of the Bible. They’re not compelling commitment to the gospel of Jesus.

Maybe they’re not experiential enough. Maybe they’re not fun enough. Maybe they’re badly led.

Or maybe the splintering changes gripping young peoples’ lives today shouldn’t be accommodated by championing smallness. Maybe these are changes to resist. Maybe bigness and uniformity gave where they appeared to be taking.

Could the last four years have been embracing changes they ought to have been resisting?

Graduation As A Marker of Youth Convention

Last night was the local high school commencement, and I was in attendance at the invitation of the parents of two of the graduates. To anyone who was paying attention to the nearly hour-long program of speeches and performances that preceded the awarding of diplomas, on display was a dizzying spectacle of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, the event trumpeted the kind of change and creativity that we all associate with youth and youth culture. But change was ruled by convention, and I came away slightly worried.

A quick scan of the nearly 600 graduates’ names showed “Lopez” outnumbering “Smith” five to two. Names like “Rambhatla” and “Matzavinos” were common. The diversity of the class didn’t go unnoticed by the family seated behind me. They had a snicker and snide comment for each name that didn’t rhyme with “Anderson.” The makeup of the class was a telling indicator of the multicultural reality that these graduates have grown up with. It was beautiful.

[sidenote: mainline churchgoers still needing convincing that the culture has left them behind would do well to note that only three of the over 500 graduates belong to the local Presbyterian church.]

Yet for all that diversity, the speeches and songs proclaimed a surprising uniformity and conservatism. More than one student speaker rehearsed for their peers a pre-graduation conflict with school administrators who had proposed changes to the program. “We made our voices heard,” they proclaimed, “To keep graduation the way it’s always been!”

A defiant teen defense of . . . tradition.

And the music? Most of it would have fit nicely into my high school graduation. In 1994. I’m talkin’ “Landslide,” and “For Good” (sung to a tape). The most contemporary performance was of Adele’s “Hometown Glory” (again to a tape), and even that graduate couldn’t muster enough adolescent rebellion to sing the single obscenity in the lyrics.

Most telling was a performance of Soulpancake favorite Casey Abrams’ “Simple Life,” a song that pronounces, “Don’t need no TV/ I don’t need no phone/Don’t need a speedy car to get me home/Don’t need no nothing/All I need is time for the simple life.”

Now, am I encouraged by young peoples’ embrace of simplicity and tradition? Absolutely. In fact, I’m starting to wonder if such an embrace isn’t the most meaningful form youth rebellion can take these days.

Yet if graduation is an indicator of a generation’s ethos, this one seems more suited to the PTA than the Occupy Movement. That may well be a good thing. It’s just not what I expected. It reminded me yet again of how much I have to learn about the young people in my community.

Playing My iPod at Youth Group: Lessons in Participatory Learning

The 7th and 8th graders I work with can’t leave my iPod alone. I play it to add to the atmosphere–relaxed, welcoming, familiar. But it takes mere seconds before one of them–and then several of them–are fiddling with it: switching songs, turning up the volume, and then finally plugging in their own music player.

Yesterday I had a “Back-in-My-Day” moment over this and exclaimed, “When I was your age, if someone played some music, you listened to it. You couldn’t just hijack what they were playing for your own music.” Actually, when I was their age we did take control of the music people played in public, only by changing the radio dial. Your frequency of choice was an important marker of identity in my teen years, and any car outing I take with students shows that it still is.

But this is way different. These students have entire radio stations in their pockets, and it’s nothing for them to plug it in and dj the youth group. That is, until someone else takes over. Honestly, the likelihood that any one song will get played in its entirety is very, very low.

I want to celebrate this and to say that these junior high students are comfortable taking control of their experience (read: church) without waiting for instructions. But I don’t see this tendency extending very far beyond the iPod. Ask them what questions they’d like to explore in youth group and you get blank stares. Invite them to take some ownership of the Biblical narrative–to rework stories or to pick and choose content for study–and . . . nothing.

What’s up with that?

Does their musical mastery presage something constructive? Or is it simply a loyal consumer reflex?

Ownership: The Annual Youth Retreat Post

Last weekend was the annual youth retreat run by our regional camp and conference center. This was the third one I’ve taken students to (read my posts about the first two retreats here and here). After wrestling with the message and the atmospherics of these retreats for two years, this year I was much more focused on the mechanics of who was in charge and how they related to my students.

The Director of this year’s camp was returning from last year, and he was just as impressive. He’s energetic without being silly, thoughtful without being professorial, and in control without yelling. The unifying theme he prepared and the graphic that tied it together all weekend was relevant and interesting. Seriously, I’m a fan.

The thing I appreciate most about this retreat, like the last one, is the self-directed nature of what students are asked to do. There’s a central Biblical text driving the weekend, but smaller cabin groups led by adult counselors take ownership of a small part of that text in order to explore it with depth and then share their learning with all their peers.

[The unifying text was Colossians 3:12-14. My cabin group (8th-11th grade boys) chose to wrestle with “meekness.” Think about that for a minute.

What they found and shared will certainly stick closer to them than anything any speaker could have told them. Of that I’m confident.]

It’s the students’ ownership of their own learning at these retreats that is producing my one nagging . . . critique? The substance of it is this: as a person with a high level of ownership in my relationships with these students, I want more ownership of their retreat experience.

Tell me if this is bad. It suddenly feels off to me that the people pulling the levers of the retreat experience are young adult youth workers and musicians who don’t know the students–mostly (many of the students have been to the retreat or to summer camp before). They don’t know them at the start of the weekend, and since the heavy small group lifting is born by small group leaders (the students’ pastors and youth leaders), they don’t really get to know them by the retreat’s end.

Here’s what I’m feeling: it would be a good move to either involve more of the pastors and youth leaders from the churches sending students in the conception and planning of the retreat. It would also be a good move to structure the event to force more interaction between youth and these dynamic, smart, compelling young adult leaders.

Retreats are a valuable supplement to my Christian formation program. I want my students taught by people other than me. I want them interacting with peers from far away. Part of my un-ease feels like a lost opportunity–either for my kids to really get to know the paid staff leaders or for their pastors to inform more of what they do at the retreat.

What do you think? Which is more valuable: the exposure to new adult teachers and leaders or a program designed by the people who know students best?

Top Chef: Youth Group Edition

Chaplain To The Culture?

One of the phrases I picked up in seminary for describing the church I did not want to lead was “Chaplain To The Culture.” To me, this term describes the anti-missional church, a church and denomination that views its role as providing religious goods and services to people without expecting any Christian commitment in return. Think clergy-led prayers before football games and come-one-come-all baptisms.

But a couple of recent youth events have me questioning the usefulness of that dig.

In the last two weeks I’ve facilitated or helped to facilitate groups of young people working together to challenge themselves and to make their communities better. I have no prior relationship to many of these students; they’re not part of our church membership and they’ve never come to a church program before. Yet it’s pretty clear to me that the work we’re doing with them is exposing them to things about themselves and their world that are valuable and enriching, even if we never see them again.

All the while they’re praying when we pray and talking with us about Jesus.

So I’m starting to wonder if being a chaplain to the culture in this way is so bad. So what if we’re not strategically recruiting those kids and their families into church membership or even orchestrating a conversion experience? So what if their only experience of church is a weekend camp with a high ropes course where they say grace before meals and compare the last paintball game to following Jesus?

The “goods” and “services” being provided are pretty darn good and valuable, it seems to me. Not only for the young people, but also for their parents. And also for the wider world in which they participate. If we get just a small opportunity to enhance these students lives (and, by extension, their whole relational network) through a program or event, then that’s valuable work. We shouldn’t pooh-pooh it as settling for functioning as the “Chaplain To The Culture.”

The real problem with that slight is that it sells chaplains short. Chaplains are not mechanical dispensers of blessings and religious kitch. Chaplains accompany people–most often complete strangers–through crises.

If the church, then, can accompany the culture and walk alongside, why wouldn’t we do that? Why would we view that as something less than “missional?”

Put Me in, Coach (Youth Ministry Version) Revisited

TheYouth Ministry Coaching Program wrapped up this week with the last of six two-day gatherings in San Diego with the great bearded Mark Oestreicher. The balance of our time was spent sharing growth affirmations and challenges we’d all written for one another–a slightly awkward thing, sitting silent for 20 minutes as people tell you what they think is great about you and how you could yet grow (the awkwardness was relieved a bit when, just as one cohort member was extolling my “thoughtfulness,” my new ringtone went off).

Peter, Tim, Margie, Armando, Wes, Pat, Drew, Josh, Jesse, and, of course, Marko: thanks for your honesty and attention. You’ve all made me better.

In the next couple of blog posts I’m going to share some of the growth challenges I received. My aim is to hear how you all do the things I’ve been challenged to do and to broaden the community of practitioners I interact with.

For example, one very helpful challenge was to build my playful and silly side. I tend toward the straight-faced and analytical, so I need to seek frivolity in my calling.

How do YOU do that? How do you seek opportunities to be playful? How do you build silliness into your work? For those of you who do, what is the effect it has on you and your work?

Here’s something to get us started: