Purpose-Driven; in or out?

 “Ministry is not something we do to someone else.  It is a holy way of living toward God and toward one another. . .Somehow in the din of modernity, . . .we traded holiness for effectiveness, charisms for careers, soulfulness for savvy.  In the meantime, youth got lost. So did many adults.”
(The Godbearing Life, pg. 9)

There are two books on my shelf that were written the same year, and seem to come from two different perspectives of ministry.  One is written by a mega-church youth pastor, with a very catchy title.  The other is co-written by educators, with a familiar title, but not outside of youth ministry circles.  One talks about growing a healthy youth ministry, while the other talks about tending to the souls of students.  One talks of putting oneself on a “path” of maturity, while the other talks of maturity through a particular set of practices.   So, which one is right?

I want to begin by saying that there is help that we can take from both, but it depends on the way we approach them.  Let me explain.

There was a popular parody on Saturday Night Live last fall involving the character Oscar Rogers.  His remedy to everything is to “identify the problem, and FIX IT!  Then you identify another problem, and FIX IT!  It’s a simple three step process.  Step one, FIX.  Step two, IT.  Step three, FIX IT.  Then repeat steps one, two, and three until it’s FIXED.  Tomorrow morning when I eat my bowl of cheerios, I better read it’s been FIXED!”

Too often we approach issues we face in life and the church in the same way; we just want to find a “tool” to fix them.  When that is our approach, we always find ourselves searching for the next gimmick or program that will solve all our problems.  So we go to seminars or workshops to get tools that will make us more successful.  We buy the newest video or media presentation, thinking that will enable us to communicate and connect better.  In the mean time, there are students that are coming into our church every week longing for one thing more than any other, significant relationships with an adult and connection with a God that is bigger than a collective us.

Kenda Dean says in her book, Practicing Passion; “Young people, who by definition must figure out how to be human, may not know that their quest for ‘a love worth dying for’, is a quest for the Love who died for them.  What compels them to search at all is God’s gift of passion, the deep human longing for authentic love.”  (Practicing Passion, pg. xiv-xv) 

The question for us to struggle with then is, how do we put students in the best place to discover that love?  What are the ways the church interacts with students to not only keep them connected when they are a young adult, but also provide genuine experiences that put them in a place where they encounter God?  We believe that God is active and at work in the world, at all places, at all times.  How do we create churches that jump into the activity of God, so our students experience it with them?

The first thing I think we need to be reminded of is that there are no guarantees.  We believe that our students have the freedom to choose for themselves how they will live and who or what will be their god.  So even in providing exactly what they need, with genuine encounters with God, this never trumps their freedom to accept or reject this relationship.  Somewhere along the journey, students must own their faith.   

So I don’t think we demonize Purpose Driven Youth Ministry because it is programmatic in approach, but we need to realize that just because we are on the “journey toward maturity”, doesn’t at the same time mean that we can later choose to abandon that same journey.   At the same time, adopting Dean and Foster’s approach to Practice Centered Youth Ministry, if I can say it that way, provides no more guarantees than a seemingly more rigid programmatic approach.  So what is it, I think it’s both.

Just because we want, and I propose, need to make practices a part of our ministry doesn’t mean that we tell our students that we aren’t doing hayrides and ski retreats anymore, because they no longer serve our “purpose”.  There are three things implied in both of their books that I think we can use to help shape our ministry, which by the way, needs to remain contextualized to where you live.  The three areas talked about below will also serve as the topics of our next three months articles.   So for what it’s worth, here is what I’m hearing from these three authors. 

One, we need to be family-centered.  Notice I didn’t say family-based, or family-friendly, but family-centered, and I think that is different.  Family-centered is more systemic, it refocuses the entire church on its ministry to students and children.  Everything you do will run through the family paradigm. 

The questions we ask will quite possible change.  We might move from asking what can we do for our students, to what can we do for our families with students.  We will begin to wrestle with the issues facing the family, with the whole church playing the role in helping families face those challenges. 

How will we come along side parents struggling to understand the culture they are raising their students in?  How will we support parents that have a difficult time communicating with their students, as well as students that feel their parents don’t understand them?  How will we come along side parents in the discipling of their students?  As I think back over my years of youth ministry, I have to own the fact that there were very few times I intentionally gathered parents and students in the same room to talk about things together.  That’s not family-friendly, let alone family-centered.

Two, we need to make moves to become more integrative.  We need to move our churches back to an “us” mentality, and away from a segregated, clean, professional, turf-driven ministry practice.  Without sounding redundant or reactive for those who read last month’s article, it does bear repeating that we need to expose our students to the development of meaningful relationships within every ministry of the church. 

Having our kids and students around is more work.  It is messier.  It might not look or sound the same.  Living in a litigious society has also created a reaction where we have created boundaries to protect, which in and of themselves are good.  We’ve probably reached a day when no one, adult and student alike, should be by themselves in ministry settings.  Pairing up students and older children with adults and/or older high school and college students allows them to be involved in ministry that isn’t just about them.  Ministry that is integrative allows and creates space for students to sing in the choir or worship team, play instruments for key moments in the life of the church, teach Sunday School or small groups, work in the nursery, teach in our VBS,  and the list goes on.

I invite you this week to observe just how segregated your congregation is.  Where do your students sit?  Where do you children go?  Where are your adults in proximity to both groups?  Who is on the platform?  Who is teaching?  You should begin to notice a trend.

Third, we need to be intergenerational.  This seems to be the most obvious.  When half of the children and adolescents who come to our churches come from unhealthy homes at best, and broken or abusive homes at worse, they need to have that compensated from someone.   That usually falls on the shoulders of the youth or children’s workers, and we need to realize that it needs to be more comprehensive than that.

Just this past week I was with a church, talking about just this issue, and two of those sitting in the class I was teaching talked about how their children, now young adults, have left the church because the only ones that seemed to care about that decision were them.  Parents can’t do this by themselves.  Now, whether that is the reality or not isn’t really important because for them, their perception is the reality.  Both parents said that there hasn’t been one adult contact them in the last year, and they are both in the church where they spent most if not all of their formative years. 

This isn’t intended to be an accusation, just something we need to be aware of.  I believe the church is still the most caring group of people on the planet, sometimes we just don’t know.  That says a lot about us in itself, doesn’t it?  In our busy-ness, we need to become more aware, that students value contact from adults most.  They may not act like it, but every adolescent study out there confirms that adults in general, and parents in particular are still they key influencers in the life of an adolescent, be it positive or negative.  They don’t just want 25-30 year olds hanging around them, but they need the life experience of those the same age as their parents and grandparents. 

There was a stat floating around in the 90’s that said for every three students in your church, there needs to be one adult in a significant relationship with them.  That statistic has flipped to now say that for every student in your church, they need to have three significant adults that they are engaged with in a significant relationship for it to have meaning to them.   This again is a clarion call to us all that youth ministry is not just about the youth staff and the NYI president or youth pastor, it is never “someone else’s job”, it’s about all of us.

So is it purpose-driven, or soul tending?  I think like I said earlier that it’s both, but what we’re realizing is that neither of them will have any lasting impact without a ministry to the family that both integrates our students in the center of the life of the church, and exposes them to every age-group.