Youth Ministry as Peace Education

Overcoming Silence, Transforming Violence

Elizabeth W. Corrie

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506469454
• eBook ISBN: 9781506469478
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Young people can be peacebuilders--citizens who address the root causes of hatred and abuse of power to build more just and peaceful communities. Indeed, young people are already leading movements to change policy and culture--most prominently, the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the Climate Strikers, and the originators of the Standing Rock protests and Black Lives Matter movement. Yet churches are notably absent among those who support and mentor such leaders.

Drawing on the deep wisdom of Christian tradition and practice and the latest insights in educating for peace and civic engagement, Youth Ministry as Peace Education offers clergy, students, and practitioners a new approach to youth ministry--a way to equip young people to transform violence and oppression as part of their Christian vocation.

In this theologically robust and pedagogically innovative and tested resource, Elizabeth W. Corrie takes seriously the capacity of young people and shows how to integrate new tools and insights into the typical facets of congregational youth ministry: building community, learning theology, reading scripture, going on mission and service trips, engaging in worship and prayer. The final chapter suggests an additional facet of congregational youth ministry needed for young people to overcome silence and transform violence: preparing and planning for engaging the world nonviolently.

Youth are not the future; they are the present. Youth are not meant to accept injustice and violence passively. Like all of us, they are meant to work actively to establish God's shalom --peace, justice, and well-being--on earth as it is in heaven.

Chapter One

Shaping Images

What’s the common denominator among the hit Broadway musical Hamilton, the Gen X cult film Dazed and Confused, and the award-winning young adult novel The Hate U Give? Each depicts a particular image of young people. In each, the young characters explore their vocation, what purpose their lives serve in the world. Each work reveals something about the history of young people in North America. And each raises critical questions for those of us who love young people, particularly those of us who believe that the Christian faith has something life-giving worth sharing with these young people.

Young, Scrappy, Hungry: A Forgotten Image of Young People

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s globally renowned musical Hamilton (2015) is as revolutionary as the historical moment it seeks to portray. It reminds those in the audience who still cling to an idea of American exceptionalism that the outcome of the Revolutionary War was by no means ensured, that someone had to persuade the former colonists of the new concepts of a democratic republic, and that those colonists made shameful compromises regarding slavery. The way that Miranda flips the script of America’s founding myth challenges and inspires those in the audience who hold out hope that the injustices of racism and classism can still be transformed. Miranda refracts the script through the lens of “another immigrant coming up from the bottom” who hangs around with “a bunch of revolutionary manumission abolitionists”1 and tells this story through the media of hip-hop and performers of color. It evokes dangerous memories of how inextricably race, class, gender, and immigrant status have always shaped—and still shape—the United States.

Less obviously, Hamilton evokes a dangerous memory2 about young people.

Alexander Hamilton arrives in New York at age nineteen, eager to be part of the revolution that is rumored to be on the horizon. He introduces himself to Aaron Burr, the man who would become Hamilton’s political rival and eventually kill him in a duel in 1804. Burr invites Hamilton to join him for a drink in a tavern, where we meet Hercules Mulligan, John Laurens, and the Marquis de Lafayette, all advocates for independence from the British Crown and all men who would later serve in roles critical to the success of the war as spies and soldiers. Confidently arriving on the scene, Hamilton declares himself “young, scrappy, and hungry,” just like the new nation he wants to help create.

By the end of the song, Laurens, Lafayette, and Mulligan have joined Hamilton’s chorus, all singing that they’re “young, scrappy, and hungry” and will “rise up” to “take a shot” at winning independence. All of these men became close friends of Hamilton. All of these men were indeed scrappy fighters and hungry to change the world and contribute to the start of a new country—and they did so by becoming critical players in the Revolutionary War.

All of these men were also young. By 1776, Mulligan was the oldest of the bunch at age thirty-six, with Hamilton and Laurens twenty-one, Burr twenty, and Lafayette the youngest at eighteen.3

The “dangerous memory” that Miranda’s Hamilton evokes for those of us who love youth is the fact that our country was not so much founded by “fathers” as by young people: young people once did things with their lives that mattered, at the time they were doing them, and they did them for their communities and families as well as themselves.

A Minor, Insignificant Preamble to Something Else: The Modern American Teenager

The 1993 film Dazed and Confused became an instant cult hit among Gen Xers, with its quotable lines and an image of adolescence recognizable to young adults (like myself), who embraced with requisite irony the purposelessness that director Richard Linklater explored in his prior film Slacker and brought to comedic success in Dazed and Confused. Set in 1976 in Austin, Texas, Dazed and Confused takes us to a historical time and place entirely different from Hamilton’s New York and portrays a very different image of young people.

The film begins on the last day of school. Teachers and students alike are watching the clock, waiting for the final bell and the freedom of summer to arrive. As the minutes tick by, we see several different cliques—football players, burnouts, popular girls, and nerds—discuss the plan for this first night of freedom. Unsurprisingly, the plan is a party at Pickford’s house because his parents are going out of town for the weekend. However, once Pickford’s parents get wind of the plan, they forego their trip and force their son to cancel the party. In the days before cell phones and group texts, it takes most of the night for the teenagers to discover that the party has been busted and to come up with an alternative plan. Meanwhile, they are in limbo—driving around the city looking for others, hanging around the arcade waiting for something else to happen, jumping in and out of each other’s cars to share gossip or smoke pot, and diverting themselves with acts of delinquency, from throwing trash cans at mailboxes to stealing lawn statues and painting the statues’ faces like members of the band KISS. The kids are bored. They’re waiting for something to happen.

The movie does not have much of a plot, which is exactly the point. But there are two scenes that encapsulate this tale of teenagers. In the first scene, we find the nerdy clique—Cynthia, Mike, and Tony—aimlessly driving around the town. The pointlessness of the evening inspires reflection on a broader pointlessness:

Cynthia: God, don’t you ever feel like everything we do and everything we’ve been taught is just to service the future?

Tony: Yeah I know, like it’s all . . . preparation.

Cynthia: Right. But what are we preparing ourselves for?

Mike: Death.

Tony: Life of the party.

Mike: It’s true.

Cynthia: You know, but that’s valid because if we’re all gonna die anyway, shouldn’t we be enjoying ourselves now? You know, I’d like to quit thinking of the present, like right now, as some minor insignificant preamble to something else.4

Such insight resembles the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, who observed that “everything is pointless, a chasing after wind” (Eccl 1:14). The time spent preparing for a future adulthood is, for Cynthia and her peers, pointless.

In another scene, a handful of students, mostly from the football team, end up sitting on the school football field, sharing a joint and talking about their hatred of the rules that the school imposes on them. Chided for complaining, because as star quarterback he is a “king” of the school, Randall “Pink” Floyd declares, “Well, look, all I’m saying is that if I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself.” As he walks away from the group in frustration, Pink stares up at the stars while the camera pans around him in slow motion, signaling the climax. In the background, we hear the central message of the film, articulated by Pink’s teammate Don: “Well, all I’m saying is that I want to look back and say that I did it the best I could while I was stuck in this place. Had as much fun as I could while I was stuck in this place. Played as hard as I could while I was stuck in this place.” The teenagers we see here are (often literally) spinning their wheels and aware that their lives to this moment have been pointless. The best they can hope for is to have as much fun as they can while they are stuck in high school, waiting to become “real” adults.

My Voice Is My Weapon: Images of Youth in the Twenty-First Century

Angie Thomas’s debut young adult novel The Hate U Give (2017) tells the story of sixteen-year-old Starr Carter, a Black teenager who lives in an underserved, gang-dominated neighborhood called Garden Heights. Her father, formerly incarcerated, now runs the local grocery store, and her mother works as a nurse in the Garden Heights clinic. The parents are committed to the neighborhood from which they came but also want to see a better life for their children, and so Starr, like her other siblings, attends Williamson Prep, a private, almost entirely white school. She lives in two different worlds and, not unlike many young people, has two different identities: there’s “Williamson Starr,” the “exceptional Black person” who doesn’t talk “ghetto” and doesn’t threaten white, middle-class sensibilities, and then there’s “Garden Heights Starr,” who works in her father’s grocery store and hangs out with her friend Kenya, whose father is the gang leader of the Garden Heights King Lords.

These two carefully segregated identities crash into each other when Starr witnesses the shooting death of her childhood friend Khalil in a clear example of police brutality. As Khalil’s death becomes a national news story, one that portrays him as a gang member and implies he deserved his fate, Starr wrestles with whether and how to speak out for justice for her friend. Starr states, “I always said that if I saw it happen to somebody, I would have the loudest voice, making sure the world knew what went down. Now I am that person, and I’m too afraid to speak.”5

But as the story progresses, Starr does speak. She agrees to give an interview on a local television show and to testify to a grand jury. Her parents and her lawyer tell her she is “brave,” but she rejects the label. In Starr’s mind, “Brave peoples’ legs don’t shake. Brave people don’t feel like puking. Brave people sure don’t have to remind themselves how to breathe if they think about that night too hard.” Her mother helps Starr understand that bravery “doesn’t mean you’re not scared,” but rather, “it means you go on even though you’re scared. And you’re doing that.” With this encouragement, Starr decides to “straighten up and allow the tiny brave part of me to speak.” By the end of the book, Starr allows that tiny brave part to speak from a megaphone as she stands on top of a police car in the middle of a riot protesting the acquittal of the police officer who killed her friend. She becomes an activist, committed to fighting for justice not only for Khalil but also for all the young men and women of color whose lives have been cut short by racism and police brutality. As she realizes it is her turn to join the fight, she promises “never [to] give up” and “never [to] be quiet.”6

The Hate U Give is a coming of age novel for the Black Lives Matter era. It tells a tale of teenagers wrestling with racism and poverty, wrestling with life and death, and learning how to advocate nonviolently for justice. Starr declares, “This is how I fight, with my voice.”7

But it also tells a tale of adults who love their young people, and it tells a tale about faith. In her house, “Black Jesus hangs from the cross in a painting on the hallway wall,” and on the wall of the Garden Heights clinic in which her mother works, “Black Jesus greets us from a mural. . . . His arms stretch the width of the wall. . . . Big letters remind us that Jesus Loves You.” While Starr’s mother is more traditionally Christian, Starr’s father “believes in Black Jesus but follows the Black Panther’s Ten-Point Program more than the Ten Commandments.” Even so, Starr’s father regularly leads the entire family in prayer to “Black Jesus,” and Starr’s mother takes her and her brothers to church weekly. Starr’s early memory of Khalil, in fact, is sharing her first kiss with him during vacation Bible school at Christ Temple Church. Starr has been raised going to church and in a family that takes faith seriously. And this is not incidental to her evolution into an activist. When Starr “wants to crawl up in a corner and act as if none of this ever happened,” she realizes that “all those people outside are praying for me. My parents are watching me. Khalil needs me.”8 Within the context of a supportive community of faith and a family that affirms her bravery, Starr learns how to fight for change using her “weapon”—her voice.

Querying Images of Youth

These cultural artifacts paint three distinct images of being young in North America. Hamilton and his friends are “just like [their] country . . . young, scrappy, and hungry,” ready to get out there and fight for independence and a new experiment in self-government. Despite their age, they are not waiting. Something important needs to be done, and Hamilton and his friends see their own identities, their own life paths, mapped out in responding to this historical moment. Their sense of vocation—what they are called to be doing with their lives—is clear and urgent. They are not throwing away their shot. They are the young Americans produced by the revolutionary ideas of the day.

In Dazed and Confused, however, we see a group of teenagers, a few years younger but quite close in age to Hamilton and his friends, with nothing to do. They have a vague sense that they are supposed to be preparing for adulthood but know they are not yet considered to be adults. Nothing they do really matters, except in service to the future, and as Pink states clearly, this time period is so small and meaningless that if they discovered that their high school years really were the best years of their lives, theirs would not be lives worth living. No one is calling them to do anything except bide their time while they are “stuck in this place” and keep hoping their future will be better than their present. They are passive. They are domesticated.9 They are the teenagers produced by the idea of adolescence.

In The Hate U Give, we see a teenager who finds her way out of this domestication by resisting the criminalization of her friend. Khalil and Starr are the disposable youth produced by classism and racism. But Starr learns to defy this image imposed on her and her friends. All of the conversations about justice and oppression she has had with her parents, all the love of her family and friends, all the mentoring of the activists she encounters—all of this positions her to respond to the historical moment that is calling her to become a public advocate for justice. She is sixteen, and her clear-eyed understanding of right and wrong, unclouded by the many compromises and defeats that often prevent adults from speaking out, makes her a prophet. Like the biblical prophet Jeremiah, she starts out afraid that she does not know what to say, as she is only a child. But she discovers that words flow when the moment of truth comes. While Starr does not attribute this to God touching her mouth, as with Jeremiah, Black Jesus had something to do with giving Starr the courage to pick up that megaphone. Standing on top of a car, shouting to the crowds around her, Starr overcomes the silencing of young voices. This sets her on a path to transform the violence of racism, classism, and sexism around her.

These three distinct cultural images of youth raise the critical questions that undergird this book. Between the founding of the United States and our current moment, the role of young people in shaping their communities and their own lives has changed drastically. What happened? How have our views of young people changed? How have these changes shaped the institutions we have created for them, including churches, schools, government, and workplaces? How have these changes shaped the sense of vocation, identity, and meaning that young people have developed (or failed to develop)? What role can Christianity play in raising up young prophets? Does it require us to shift our image of who Jesus is? Does it require us to shift our image of what youth ministry is? Can parents, pastors, and activists work with young people to equip them to take their turn in the struggle for justice and true peace so that the violence and silence young people live will cha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Shaping Images
• 2. Building Community Democratically
• 3. Learning Theology Deliberatively
• 4. Reading the Bible Cacophonously
• 5. Doing Mission Intersectionally
• 6. Practicing Worship Prophetically
• 7. Acting in the World Nonviolently
• Conclusion: Images That Shape Our Work
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography