The End of Youth Ministry? (Theology for the Life of the World)

Why Parents Don't Really Care about Youth Groups and What Youth Workers Should Do about It

Andrew Root

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781540961396
• eBook ISBN: 9781493420179
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

What is youth ministry actually for? And does it have a future?

Andrew Root, a leading scholar in youth ministry and practical theology, went on a one-year journey to answer these questions. In this book, Root weaves together an innovative first-person fictional narrative to diagnose the challenges facing the church today and to offer a new vision for youth ministry in the 21st century.

Informed by interviews that Root conducted with parents, this book explores how parents' perspectives of what constitutes a good life are affecting youth ministry. In today's culture, youth ministry can't compete with sports, test prep, and the myriad other activities in which young people participate.

Through a unique parable-style story, Root offers a new way to think about the purpose of youth ministry: not happiness, but joy.

One
Toward a Journey to Joy

LATE MARCH

There’s a palpable feeling of connectedness and warmth. I’m sitting in a youth group gathering, but not really. There are as many adults, and even children, as adolescents. I sit in the corner just soaking it in, trying hard to put my finger on what I’m experiencing. I’d heard about this supposed youth group, or whatever it is, and its youth pastor, Janna, from a friend. Janna, or J as all her friends call her (a nickname that has stuck since she was a first-year camp counselor), was nice enough to invite me to this weekly gathering.

I’ve been on a journey for the past six months, and now, in early spring, with winter slowly melting away and the days growing longer, all my trails have led here. I’ve been teaching and training youth workers and writing about youth ministry for over fifteen years. And yet six months ago I had an encounter that made me question what youth ministry is really for. I realized I was not sure how I’d answer if I were given a fill-in-the-blank question, “Youth ministry is for _______.”

This realization brought a sinking feeling that would send anyone searching either for an answer or for a new vocation. I chose the former. Now, six months into my search, I am sitting in this nondescript church fellowship hall. The warmth and connection bring up a sense of anticipation, like I am close to receiving the key I’ve been looking for.

Over the next hour, three people—a man in his fifties, a woman in her early thirties, a boy in tenth grade—get up and tell stories. Their stories all are in response to the same text and prompt. The text is Matthew 19:16–30, the story of the rich young ruler, and the prompt is, “Tell about a time when the good was a difficult or confusing surprise.” Music, laughter, tears, and friendship encase the stories as much as the four walls of the fellowship hall. It’s beautiful, an example of a youth ministry that is much more than an adolescent religious holding pen. It’s something unique I haven’t experienced before. But this alone isn’t the key I’ve been searching for over the past six months.

With the last fifteen minutes, J comes forward and laces these three stories together, drawing people deeper into the text, teaching on it through these three stories of faith and witness. She focuses in on the rich young ruler calling Jesus “good” and Jesus telling him that only God is good. She then invites the room to gather into groups of three or four, making sure each group has at least one young person and one not-so-young person. In these groups they end the night by praying for one another.

As people slowly prepare to depart, I wait awkwardly at the back of the room. J and I have agreed to talk afterward. When nearly everyone has gone and J is able to take a breath, she motions me to a table. To my surprise a young woman joins her. As we sit J says, “This is Lorena. She’s in twelfth grade.” I’m not sure why Lorena has joined us, but I’m happy to meet her.

I start with the obvious, asking, “What made you think of this kind of gathering?”

J starts somewhere else, needing to give me context. “About two years ago I was days from quitting or, more likely, being fired. It was miserable. I was just a few years out of college, and my only youth ministry experience was a summer at camp. I was pretty good at the whole counselor thing, so I thought, No problem. Youth ministry in a church is just being a camp counselor year-round. I’d been the chief counselor of fun that summer. And so this church seemed like a perfect fit. The church wanted someone who’d create events and an overall program that kids would find fun. I knew it was deeper than just entertainment. The idea was that if young people were having fun, then they’d have positive feelings about church and stick around.”

“I could see that,” I say.

“But nine months into it, it started eating me up,” J continues. “I mean, it’s one thing to be the chief counselor of fun for a week, then reboot with totally different kids for another week. But how do you do that in the day-to-day of church life? I knew things weren’t going well. And the more I tried to make things fun, the more energy left the youth ministry and me.”

“So what happened?” I ask.

“Well, a few people on the personnel committee started hinting that things weren’t working, and my senior pastor took some steps to both encourage me and hold me accountable. But they all just kept coming back to fun: ‘Teach them the Bible in a fun way,’ ‘Connect with them and have fun,’ ‘Make church a fun experience for my ninth-grade son.’ As if fun were freedom instead of a chain around my whole body.”

Intrigued, I ask again, “So what happened?”

“She did,” J says, pointing to Lorena.

Surprised by the response, but now clear on why Lorena is sitting with us, I inquire of the teen, “What did you do?”

With a cutting, dry sense of humor that makes her seem older than twelfth grade, Lorena responds, “Oh, I just got some fluid around my heart and almost died.”

I can only hold my breath.

J then says, with equal measures of sincerity and sarcasm that nevertheless reveal a deep truth, “Having a kid in your ministry fighting for her life after some freak infection—that will change things for the chief counselor of fun pretty quickly. That will make youth ministry for something very different than just fun.”

Without realizing it, J has referenced the phrase that I’ve been journeying to answer. My heartbeat quickens. I had not anticipated that I’d ask this question so early in our conversation, yet here it is. “If youth ministry isn’t for fun—because you watched Lorena almost die—then what is youth ministry for?”

J and Lorena look at each other and smile. Then Lorena says with bright eyes, “Joy.”

I let this odd response run over me. It isn’t quite computing. I’m not aware in the moment that it’s indeed the key for which I’ve been searching. Instead, I’m only confused. Youth ministry is for joy, I say silently to myself with incredulity. Over the past fifteen years of teaching and writing, I’ve focused on the cross and the experience of suffering. And here it is again—Lorena almost died, and J nearly burned out. But when they answer what youth ministry is for, J and Lorena don’t say support or commiseration but, oddly, joy.

What does joy have to do with the cross? More concretely, what does joy have to do with youth ministry? These questions push me further into confusion. Yet I’m aware that throughout this journey moments of confusion have been the birth pains of new insight. So, like swimming with a current, I don’t fight the confusion but let it have me. As I do, I flash back to early fall.

I can feel, even taste, the sensations of school being back in session, the still-warm weather reminding me of the summer now over, and the trees showing no signs of change. I’m arriving at a youth ministry conference, the place this intellectual and vocational journey began. There’s a young man. I can clearly see his face. But I can’t remember his name.

Two
Don’t Waste Your Life

Youth Ministry and the Good Life

SEPTEMBER

I’m bad with names. I think it was Graham. But while his name escapes me, his statement shook me. Something about it moved me. What was behind the force of emotion, I wasn’t sure. It just caught me. Now snared, I couldn’t tell if I agreed or disagreed with what Graham said. In those moments when we feel like a statement, perspective, or idea unexpectedly hits us, we often go primal. So I started to size Graham up, planting him in categories I shouldn’t have, wondering if he was more conservative or liberal than I was, if he was brilliant or an idiot, a friend or looking for a fight. But even with my primal Sorting Hat to protect me, I couldn’t shake it.

Graham, this young youth worker I had just met, told me over coffee at a youth ministry conference that, for him, “youth ministry is for helping kids not waste their lives.”

It felt like such an odd statement. Not waste their lives? I repeated it in my head. It just seemed weird.

Aware of my internal reaction, I tried to hide the skepticism that had entered my nervous system. I worked hard to keep my face from contorting like I had just tasted something icky. I decided my best option to keep this from happening was to freeze. So as if I were a cold stone statue, I shamefully sized Graham up, trying to discern where this odd statement was coming from.

Without much of a reaction from me, Graham had to pick up our conversation. His face showed that he worried his statement didn’t connect, not realizing it had done the opposite. So he asked, “What do you think youth ministry is for?”

Unfreezing my body and shaking the Sorting Hat from my head, I found myself saying, “God.”

Reading Graham’s face, I now assumed that he had put on his own Sorting Hat.

The rest of the long weekend his statement kept haunting me: Youth ministry is for helping young people not waste their lives. Could that be true? I had to concede: it is an amazing fact that we are the kind of animals—the only animals—who can waste our lives. Deer or even dogs don’t seem capable of this kind of misuse. Of course, it’s such a waste for a young healthy dog to be put down because we haven’t heeded Bob Barker’s pleas and had our pets spayed and neutered, controlling the pet population. But we’d never blame this on the pet, contending that Max the beagle had wasted his life. We’d never be tempted to judge poor Max for the shame of wasting his days.

But this is not true with human beings. For us it is more than possible. It’s an always lurking threat that one of us, or maybe a whole society of us, will waste our lives. The possibility that we’re wasting our lives can awaken us in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. Regardless of period or place in human history, it has always been possible for a human life to be misdirected and therefore mis-lived. There seems to be nothing more tragic than to recognize a life squandered. Midlife can be a crisis because halfway through we wonder if we’ve missed life. Nothing seems to haunt us, especially us late modern people, more than the thought of wasting our own lives and living in regret.

I was starting to think Graham had a point. Yet later that same day I met a college student. (I do remember her name; it was Kathryn.) Kathryn told me that she was a youth ministry major on the cusp of graduation. She was conflicted about going to seminary and wanted to talk. She asked me earnestly, with a stab of panic, “How do I know if God wants me to go to seminary? I’d just hate to miss what I’m supposed to do with my life.”

To be human is to sense—is to deeply believe—that there is a direction to our lives, that there is indeed a good way to live and, in turn, a real possibility of missing it. That’s what led Kathryn to want to talk. To assume that a life can be wasted is to admit that there is a bad way, a way in opposition to the good way. To not waste your life is to live a good life. We don’t hold deer and dogs accountable for wasting their lives, because their way of living is bound not in visions of the good but in instinct. A goose flies south not in a direct quest for the good but because it’s instinctual. It may be good for the goose to fly south, but it is not a quest for the good that fuels the goose’s motivation.

Human beings, on the other hand, are always directly pursuing some kind of good, deciding to move south because it seems good, because it opens the possibility of living a good life, and therefore welcoming other goods. For a human being, the good of moving south promises more goods like leisure, or time with family, or experiences in nature, or less income tax, or more lucrative employment, or more enjoyable weather, or more meaningful work—or maybe all of these goods in different measure.1

Of course, unlike a goose, a human being knows that a move south will also cost her something. She’ll have to give up things in her old city that made her life good. She’ll have to say goodbye to (the goods of) old friends and her favorite restaurant. She’ll miss the changing seasons and leave her church community. But although she’ll grieve the loss of these goods, she’ll let go, because she senses that she is moving toward a better life (“a gooder life,” to talk like a four-year-old).2 She leaves one constellation of goods for another because she senses (even wagers) that these other goods are better; they give her a real possibility of living a good life, a full or fuller life,3 ultimately a life that is flourishing.4 She leaves the good of Ohio because she believes her life will flourish, will be fuller, in Florida.5

So we human beings fly south never out of pure instinct, but rather because we have an explicit or implicit sense of the good.6 It is toward a good that we’re moved.7 And this means, whether expressed or unexpressed, that we want to live a good life, and we desperately don’t want to waste it. Every human being wants to taste th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Warning for the Reader! (Read before Using)
• Preface
• 1. Toward a Journey to Joy
• 2. Don’t Waste Your Life
• 3. Are the Kids OK?
• 4. Three Sets of Parents
• 5. Identity, Part 1
• 6. Transformation in Youth Ministry
• 7. Identity, Part 2
• 8. Happiness, Part 1
• 9. When Goods Become the Good
• 10. Happiness, Part 2
• 11. Joy and the Custodian
• 12. Borne Burdens
• 13. Open Takes and Closed Spins
• 14. An Identity Event
• 15. Holding Vigil
• Conclusion
• Back Cover