Youthful Preaching

Strengthening the Relationship between Youth, Adults, and Preaching

Voelz

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498273671
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What if adolescents aren't bored with preaching? What if they have and are interacting with preaching in complex, various ways that have escaped the attention of adult listeners and preachers? What if their own preaching informed the ways adults think about Christian faith and theories/practices of preaching? While much recent discussion in preaching revolves around underrepresented groups, the relationship between adolescent youth and preaching remains largely unexplored. Youthful Preaching brings youth into contemporary conversations about preaching by listening to their voices and by advocating for communities of faith and practice to seek ways to reimagine, renew, and strengthen the relationships between youth, adults, and preaching.

1

Beautiful and Dangerous

Adolescents and Preaching in Historical Perspective

Contrary to the image of the bored teenager that often characterizes contemporary images of the relationship between adolescent youth and preaching, young people have been regularly and highly engaged with preaching through American history. In order to provide a context for contemporary preaching dispositions toward adolescents, this chapter will narrate the substantial history of North American adolescents as listeners and preachers through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.

This kind of historical narrative functions in two distinct ways. First, the narrative breaks open assumptions about a passive relationship between adolescents and preaching. A preaching-centered history of adolescence in North America will show that adolescents have played various roles in faith communities, and they have not always been marginal to preaching. Second, this narrative initiates a preliminary practice of listening to adolescents about preaching, pushing toward transformed practices of listening and speaking for, to, and with youth.

Preaching and Young People in Eighteenth-Century America18

Youth were often the focus of preaching when congregations gathered and young people’s societies met in late seventeenth century and throughout eighteenth-century New England. Cotton Mather indicated that young people were a particular portion of preachers’ audiences when he said,

When the Word of God is Opened and Applied in the Sermons of His Ministers; young Persons make a part of our Auditory. Young Persons are to take their Portion in all the Sermons of the Evangelical Ministry, wherein Wisdom says unto them, ‘Unto you, O Men, I Call, and my Voice is to the Sons of Men. Yea, the Prudent and Faithful Stewards in the House of God, will sometimes Carve out a Special Portion for the Young Persons in their Auditory.19

As subjects of preaching, young people were integral parts of how the Puritan sermon was “as important for social meaning as for spiritual enlightenment. It not only interpreted God’s plan of redemption and told the people how they must live as a church but also defined and legitimated the meaning of their lives as citizen and magistrate, superior and inferior, soldier, parent, child, and laborer.”20 With “social meaning” and “spiritual enlightenment” in mind as distinct categories, a preaching-centered history of adolescence in this period begins to show how preaching helped situate “youth” in both social and theological categories.

Young People as a Social Category in Eighteenth-Century Preaching

How is “youth” defined? There seems to be no standard answer in Colonial preaching. Samuel Moodey distinguished groups of ages: “And as this Judgment shall be Universal with respect to Persons, viz. Youth as well as Children and Infants below them, and Middle, with Old Age above them; so shall it be Universal with respect to the Works done in the Body, Eccl. 12.14.”21 Cotton Mather distinguished between “young men,” “old men,” and “children” as a result of the conflation of two Scripture texts: 1 John 2:14 (young men) and Ps 148:12 (old men and children).22 Later Mather preached on the occasion of the death of two individuals, “a youth in the Nineteenth year of his Age” and “a Child, hardly more than seven years of Age.”23 Benjamin Colman preached upon the death of fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Wainwright, whom he called a child.24 Likewise, Thomas Prince preached a sermon to “the youth of the town of Boston” upon the deaths of three young men aged twenty-two, thirty-two, and twenty.25

Jonathan Edwards “held special religious meetings for ‘children’ who were ‘under the age of sixteen’ as well as for ‘young people’ between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six.’”26 Edwards also divided the ages by children (ages one to fourteen), young people (ages fifteen to twenty-five), middle-aged (ages twenty-six to fifty), and elderly (ages fifty and beyond).27

Colonial preachers do identify three interrelated factors in the life course that distinguish youth from adult members of the community. First among these is that youth are still under the leadership of their parents. Of the fifty plus sermons analyzed from this period, almost every sermon contains within it an instruction for young people to obey their parents and some with instructions to parents about their duties to young people. A second factor is work. Preaching to a society of young men, Colman stated that in the beginning of youth, young people choose their “trade” and their “Master.”28 Making a living by work, either by trade, inheritance of family farms, or business often led young people out of the family home and marked a transition to adulthood.29 Youth as a precursor to marriage and child-bearing forms a third social indicator. Again, Colman observed,

there are other and Superiour Relations which the Young Person hopes in a few Years to come into, and this will make him a blessing to his own Family when he comes to have one; a blessing to his Consort if he marries, a blessing to his Children if God give him any, a blessing to his Servants when he has them under him. And so the Young Woman becomes a blessing in the house of her Husband, a blessing to her Children and Servants, if from her early days she be truly Religious. . . . And now you dispose of your self in Marriage ordinarily, place your Affections, give away your hearts, look out for some Companion of life, whose to be as long as you live. And is this indeed the work of your Youth?30

Youth were either on the cusp of life with marriage and children or had recently arrived. Colman’s sermon, and others like it, served to reinforce the social conventions surrounding the period of youth from the position that Stout calls “authority incarnate.”31 While substantive, these social definitions do not help define childhood and youth theologically.

Young People as a Theological Category in Eighteenth-Century Preaching

Ministers in Colonial New England possessed a concordance-like knowledge of the Bible and imitated the sermons they heard, creating a reservoir for their preaching. Scripture texts that containe...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Beautiful and Dangerous
• Chapter 2: Silence and Deficiency
• Chapter 3: Renewing the Relationship
• Chapter 4: Youthful Preaching
• Chapter 5: Youthful Preaching
• Sermon Analysis Worksheet (Figure 4.1)
• Sermon Analysis Worksheet (Figure 5.1)
• Sermon Transcripts
• Bibliography