How Youth Ministry Can Change Theological Education -- If We Let It

Kenda Creasy Dean, Christy Lang Hearlson

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781467444736
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Ministère chrétien

Since 1993, forty-nine theological seminaries have created opportunities for high school students to participate in on-campus High School Theology Programs (HSTPs) that invite them to engage in serious biblical and theological study. Many of the young people who take part in these programs go on to become pastoral or lay leaders in their churches. What has made these programs so successful — especially given the well-documented “crisis of faith” among young people today?
 
In this book thirteen contributors — many of whom have created or led one of these innovative theology programs — investigate answers to this question. They examine the pedagogical practices the HSTPs have in common and explore how they are contributing to the leadership of the church. They then show how the lessons gleaned from these successful programs can help churches, denominations, and seminaries reimagine both theological education and youth ministry.
 

Part One

A More Excellent Way

Vocational Discernment as a
Practice of Christian Community

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.

1 Corinthians 12:27-31

Chapter One

Taste Tests and Teenagers

Vocational Discernment as a Creative Social Practice

Kenda Creasy Dean and Christy Lang Hearlson

You did not choose me, remember. I chose you.

Jesus (John 15:16, paraphrase)

If you were on your way to work in Washington, DC on January 12, 2007 — and if your route happened to take you through the L’Enfant Plaza subway station at 7:51 a.m. — you might have noticed a young man in jeans and a baseball cap playing a violin. L’Enfant Plaza is the nerve center of the federal government’s morning commute. The young man’s violin case was open, welcoming the occasional dollar tossed inside by the various species of government workers who scuttled by. Some had children in tow on their way to day care. Everyone was in a hurry. The young man played for forty-­three minutes.

During that time, several things happened. The young man played six classical pieces, netting $52.17 (one woman threw in a twenty). The videotape shows 1,097 people passing by, but only six stopped to listen for a few minutes. Children craned their necks to watch, but parents scooted them away without pausing. No one realized that the young man was playing a three-­hundred-­year-­old, $3.5 million Stradivarius, or that he played Bach’s “Chaconne,” considered one of the most difficult pieces ever written for the violin. And, with the exception of the woman donating the $20 (she recognized him from a concert), no one knew that the musician was world-­famous violinist Joshua Bell, who had soloed with the world’s most celebrated orchestras, performed an Oscar-­winning soundtrack, and appeared on Sesame Street and Late Night with Conan O’Brien — all before turning thirty-­nine.

The Washington Post called the subway concert “art without a frame,” an experiment to see if people would recognize a musical feast prepared by an artistic genius if it was right under their noses.1 Turns out, they didn’t.

High School Theology Programs: Feasts of Hope

This book pays attention to another experiment — “theological education without a frame,” perhaps — that has continued, mostly unnoticed, for nearly two decades. The Lilly Endowment Initiative “Theological Programs for High School Youth” constitutes North American theological education’s most ambitious pedagogical experiment in fifty years.2 Distressed by congregational youth ministries’ failure to seriously engage teenagers theologically, the Lilly Endowment’s Religion Division enlisted teams of theological educators and youth ministers to imagine a kind of theological education for teenagers considering Christian leadership. To that end, High School Theology Programs (HSTPs) spent the better part of two decades testing various pedagogical cocktails that would “help teenagers fall in love with theology” and inspire, challenge, and shape the next generation of Christian leaders for the church and for the world.3

The practices these programs use to prepare young Christian leaders are striking both for the ways they echo formal theological education and for their unapologetic departures from it. Very few of these programs claim that forming future clergy is their primary aim, yet some research suggests that an astonishing one in four HSTP alumni have graduated from, are currently enrolled in, or plan to attend seminary — and another 28 percent say they “are considering” attending seminary.4 Yet of those who “pass by” High School Theology Programs each summer (and many do this literally, since most of them take place on seminary campuses), very few church leaders have taken note of how likely these students are to want theological training, how often they credit these programs with awakening their sense of calling, or how transformative practicing vocational discernment in community is for both young people and the church, as young people come to think of vocation as discerning the church’s calling in the world, and not just their own.

We believe that approaching vocational discernment as a social practice is a distinctive theological contribution of High School Theology Programs, challenging individualized notions of vocation in ways that include, but go beyond, identifying where young people’s deepest passions intersect with the world’s greatest needs.5 A different metaphor began to inform our discussion about the vocational ecologies of these programs, brought to mind by Isak Dinesen’s famous short story “Babette’s Feast.”6 Babette — an enigmatic maid who, as a young woman, had been a celebrated chef in Paris — makes her way to a Norwegian village where she serves two sisters, members of an austere Christian sect, for many years. Day in and day out, she prepares the plain fare they have shown her how to cook. But when Babette wins the lottery, she asks permission to make the sisters and their guests a real French meal. The food is divine; the guests warm to the wine and to each other. Old rifts are healed and old loves are confessed, and the sharp line dividing spiritual from other appetites melts in the joy of the meal. Surprised to learn that Babette will not return to France with her winnings, the sisters are aghast to learn the reason why: she has gladly spent every penny on them, offering the feast.

Like Babette’s gift that awakened joy throughout the village, Lilly’s decision to invest in the vocational formation of young people felt like “winning the lottery” to many scholars and practitioners interested in adolescent faith formation. Forty-­seven teams of academics and youth ministers, located in seminaries across North America,7 were given license to prepare a vocational feast for people whose joy they longed to awaken: young people, and especially teenagers who showed promise for theological leadership.

Spiritually Interested Teenagers: Hungry for More

Megan LeCluyse and Emily Chudy are two young Presbyterian (USA) pastors who met at Pittsburgh Theological...