Youth Ministry Re-Imagined: Youth Ministry 2.0

After 60 years of a youth ministry that was, in general, not connected to local churches and seemed antagonistic to youth culture an new generation of youth ministry pioneers emerged to take youth ministry in a brand new direction. These pioneers had grown up within youth culture and found a relationship with Jesus as members of youth culture. They, therefore, began to experiment with youth ministry models that were culturally relevant and incorporated forms of ministry that reflected the daily lives of teenagers.

In adopting the forms and models of youth culture, youth ministry 2.0 did not simply seek to be considered cool. Rather, they sought to build youth ministries that would help students live out the gospel within their culture. They placed an emphasis on building relationships with students, rather than youth friendly preaching. This new model of ministry helped churches understand that youth culture was a viable place for Christian discipleship to take place. Students could be disciples of Jesus Christ and teenagers.

A downside to this era of youth ministry, however, was that it also adopted the dominant cultural models for evaluating success: the business model. The emphasis gradually shifted to providing lots of programs with high attendance as the core value.

Additionally, some youth ministry experts have observed, youth began to instinctively feel their culture being co-opted by the adult run ministries and programs. If there is one overriding characteristic of youth culture it is that it is a culture of opposition. Youth culture cannot be co-opted before it shifts again, which it did. A shift took place that was subtle and, according to those same experts and veterans, has not been noticed by most churches and therefore has made youth ministry 2.0 obsolete. Bringing us to youth ministry 3.0, next week’s topic.

Youth Ministry Re-Imagined: Youth Ministry 1.0

Youth ministry models come and go. When they are at their best, they are responsive to the cultural needs of the teenagers being served. We haven’t always done youth ministry the way we are now. Youth ministry, at its core, is a missionary endeavor that adapts to the cultural landscape.

As adolescents first emerged on the scene in the 1900s, complete with their own language and interests, the institutional church was slow to respond. Those who felt called to shepherding the spiritual formation of teenagers found they had to do so outside the context of the local church. As a result, the first phase of youth ministry (roughly 1900 – 1950s) was dominated by the rise of parachurch ministries like Young Life and Youth For Christ.

The predominant ministry model for this phase of youth ministry – called Youth Ministry 1.0 by Mark Oestreicher – focused on the preaching of the gospel by men in suits to teenagers using the language teenagers used and topics teenagers were interested in.

The predominant value for youth ministry 1.0 was exchanging youth culture’s norms of behavior for biblical ones. Although these first pioneers of youth ministry were responding positively to their calling to serve teenagers, implied in their methods and message was the belief that youth culture was bad. Over time, this belief would serve to create a divide between the growing power and strength of youth culture and the church. It would eventually lead to the next phase of youth ministry: Next week’s topic Youth Ministry 2.0.

Youth Ministry Re-Imagined: The Tasks of Adolescence

As we consider the changing landscape of the lives of our teenagers it is important to remember that this has happened before. We didn’t always have teenagers, at least not the way we think of them now. Around the beginning of the 20^th century a new phase of life emerged: Adolescence.

Those who took an interest in this new breed of teenagers became convinced that an adolescent had three main tasks to accomplish before they became adults (“adult” being the word used to describe someone who has moved from dependence to interdependence in a particular culture.). A teenager essentially needed to answer three questions: 1. Who am I (questions of identity) 2. Do I and my choices matter (questions of autonomy) 3. Where do I fit in (questions of affinity).

Around 1900 adolescence (which most believe begins with the onset of puberty) began, on average, at age 14.5. At the same time, the average age one entered adulthood was 16. This new phase of life was only 18 months long. In 1900 it only took a teenager 18 months to participate in their culture in such a way that they finished the three tasks of adolescence.

Skip forward to 1970. The average age of the beginning of adolescence had now dropped to 13. The average age of adulthood was now 18. What was once an 18-month process was now 6 years (roughly the two years of junior high and the four years of high school). It was during the 70s that churches began to respond to the specific needs of adolescents by hiring young youth pastors to guide them through adolescence.

Today the average age for the beginning of adolescence is 10.5 – 11. Most observers of culture argue that adolescence ends in the mid to late 20s. What began as an 18-month process of discovery has turned into a very long, very difficult 15-year journey. The implications for how churches minister to junior high, high school and now college students are staggering.

Our challenge in youth ministry is to understand how we as a church community can help our students ask the questions of adolescence (who am I? do I am my choices matter, where do I fit in?) with Jesus Christ as a central conversation partner. We have begun to ask ourselves the following questions:

v What experiences can we facilitate to help them ask who Jesus says they are?

v What kinds of relationships will help them begin to understand that they matter in a deep, eternal way?

v What kind of church environment should we cultivate in order for them to know they fit in with the body of Christ?

v Do the efforts that we employ currently still help our students find a path of spiritual formation when they were first experimented with in the 1970s, a time when adolescence was a much different experience?

You probably can think of better ones. We’d love to hear them. We’d love to hear what you think the answers might look like. Join us. www.youthministryreimagined.blogspot.com.

Youth Ministry Re-Imagined: Ministry in a Time of Transition

A little over two months ago I sat down to have lunch with Mark Oestreicher, the president of Youthspecialties, the world’s largest youth ministry resource provider. Marko, as he is called by, well everyone, was kind enough to grant me some time to discuss the changes in youth ministry that he has witnessed and prompted him to write Youth Ministry 3.0: A Manifesto of Where We’ve Been, Where We Are, and Where We Need To Go. During our lunch over tacos and great salsa he pointed out the importance for churches to understand that teenagers are growing up in a time of liminality. I pretended to understand what he meant. Later, dictionary.com informed me that liminality is “the condition of being on a threshold or at the beginning of a process.” Marko continued to explain that our culture and specifically youth culture has undergone significant changes over the last two decades and that the models churches have used to help students find a path of spiritual formation are no longer working. Marko writes “While there’s wonderful stuff happening in youth ministry all over the place – in pretty much every youth ministry – our impact, the transformation of kids’ lives, seems less than we’d hoped” (Oestreicher, 24).

Which brings us back to liminality. Our world and how we relate to one another is not what it used to be, but we also have yet to arrive at what it will be. This gives us a tremendous opportunity to experiment, to dare, to re-imagine what spiritual formation with teenagers can look like. I am convinced that what youth ministry will look like 10 years from now hasn’t even been thought of. This is an incredible time to be in youth ministry.

If there is one word that captures the process we must enter to remake our youth ministry it is re-imagination. We must re-imagine what it feels like for a teenager to experience a sense of belonging at a time when institutional loyalty is at an all time low. In a world in which online social networking provides the illusion of intimacy we need to re-imagine what true communion – true community with Jesus in the middle – can feel like. In the midst of a youth culture that has come to distrust the ability of facts and information to communicate deep truth, we need to re-imagine how experience shapes spiritual formation.

In order to get there, we have some experimentation to do. Marko summarized the road ahead for youth ministry as a process. “We’re going to have to work this stuff out in the coming years through radical experimentation, glorious failures, unfortunate rabbit trails, ticked-off parents, decreasing numbers and a host of other challenging – but 100 percent necessary – speed bumps… One thing I am sure of: Tweaking things won’t get us there” (Oestreicher, 82 – 83). This summer our youth ministry leaders are engaging in a conversation about what it can look like for our congregation to re-imagine youth ministry for the 21^st century. We would love for you to join the conversation. Email us. Stop us in the halls at church. Ask lots of questions. If you like to use technology to communicate, we have set up a small blog at www.youthministryreimagined.blogspot.com that will have each of these articles posted and then space for you to comment. The way forward isn't clear yet. It might not be clear for a long time. But our youth ministry team is convinced this congregation can find and thrive in a youth ministry re-imagined.