Tag Archives: christian smith

books, church, youth ministry, youth work

the future of youth ministry, episode 3

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i led a late night discussion at the national youth workers convention this past fall on “the future of youth ministry”. in preparation for that discussion, i emailed a few dozen friends with better youth ministry minds than my own, and asked them to complete the sentence, “the future of youth ministry….” about 15 of them responded (often with more than a sentence!). i’m posting them here as a series, sometimes with a bit of commentary from myself, and sometimes merely as a reflection-prod. would love to hear your responses.

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kara powell and brad griffin’s responses are a nice pair. and as it should be — kara and brad are two halves of the team at the fuller youth institute. and much of their “sticky faith” research and writing these days has been focused extensively on the content of both of their responses…

Kara Powell
I think the future of youth ministry is one in which the age-segregation that has dominated the church ends and we move toward the type of intergenerational community and integration God intends. We’re seeing in our research how important intergenerational community and relationships are to Sticky Faith.

Brad Griffin
The future of youth ministry must move toward more intergenerational connectedness, more valuing of and partnering with parents, and less programming fluff.

i really resonate with what kara and brad say. it’s hard to argue with, since it’s coming straight out of their research. it’s also representative of the research of the national study of youth and religion, conducted by christian smith and others. kenda dean reports on this latter research most directly (for christian youth ministries, at least) in her book almost christian. and, as i’ve posted about here multiple times, i’ve found a good deal of resonance with robert epstein‘s teen 2.0 (and conversations with him).

all of this research and writing, blended with my own observations, leads me to this conclusion: most of our approaches to youth ministry, developed in an era when autonomy was a primary need of teenagers, and when the american church was particularly gung-ho about creating age-based autonomous ministries, has resulted in a church experience, for most teenagers in churches with active youth groups, that isolates teenagers from the adults in the church. one of the many results of this (certainly there have been positives, as well as negatives), is that we don’t provide teenagers with meaningful adult relationships outside of those adults who are either paid to be with them (youth pastors) and those who volunteer to spend time in the age-based ghetto (youth ministry volunteers). in other words, most teenagers in our churches with youth ministries don’t rub shoulders with adults being adults.

teenagers don’t get to watch adults doing adult things.

teenagers don’t get to practice being “apprentice adults” in the adult bits of the church.

by the way, this is true for teenagers in most areas of their lives, not only in our churches — we’ve just bought into the way culture at large addresses teenagers, either with good motives or not-so-good motives: put them over there.

this isolation from the adult world that most teenagers experience lacks on-ramps to the world of adults. no wonder extended adolescence has become our new cultural reality.

i’m not suggesting we throw the baby out with the bathwater and completely do away with youth ministry. there’s a small, hipster movement of churches doing just that (“we don’t have a youth ministry, and we’re proud of it!”). i find that most of those churches are really just saying that they have other priorities that are much more important to them. but i do wonder if it might be wise for lead youth workers to intentionally choose a new job description (yes, easier said than done), from “lead programmer for teenagers” to “champion or lead banner bearer for teenagers”. the former is all about creating the ultimate space of isolation (stating t it negatively, to be sure); and the latter could be about being the voice — the gadfly — in the congregation, charged with the role of finding ways for teenagers to connect with adults, of not letting the congregation forget the teenagers in their midst.

what are your thoughts?

books

mini book reviews, part 3 (of 3)

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Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church, by Kenda Creasy Dean
5+ stars

i hardly know how to write a “mini book review” for this book. it’s too important. i know i write “every parent and youth worker must read this book” from time to time. and, maybe that’s not true for this one if you only read people magazine or star trek novels — because this is not an easy read (there were parts where my brain really had to work!). but anyone who’s thoughtful, and cares about the spiritual lives of christian teenagers — well… yup, you gotta read it. kenda worked as part of the research team for the “national study on youth and religion“, the findings of which were most widely disseminated in christian smith’s soul searching. from her proximity to the study and its subjects, kenda unpacks the findings as a book of practical theology. in other words, she takes the findings and says, “what does this mean for us?” at times discouraging (as was true of smith’s book also), and at times fiercely encouraging and hopeful, it would be an excellent book to read with a team of youth workers, or a team of parents, and have a series of conversations about the implications for your church and youth ministry (and your home). certainly, if i had a “5 most important books on youth ministry in the last 10 years” list, this would be on it.

The 9: Best Practices for Youth Ministry, by Kurt Johnston and Tim LeVert
5 stars

i don’t know tim (though he seems like a guy i’d really like); but kurt is one of my favorite human beings. deeply humble and wildly gifted as a youth worker, he is a passionate utilitarian, constantly asking, “what works?” not that this is a fluffy book of game ideas — not at all; but it’s a deeply practical book, as one would only expect from the creator of simply junior high. based on the findings of the exemplary youth ministries study (well, there were 8 findings in that study — tim and kurt, rightly, add a 9th), the book simply (ha) lists those practices, then riffs on what they look like in the real world of church-based youth ministry. particularly good reading if you’re in your first 5 years of youth ministry, this will be a book i’ll recommend often. sure, there are a couple places i don’t completely agree with the authors (for example, i think they’re overly optimistic about the health of youth ministry in general, and they would clearly say the opposite of my writing, that i’m overly pessimistic); but the book is a conversation, not a manifesto — so wholesale adoption isn’t required. whatever our youth ministry health, these are (9 of) the things we’ve gotta pay attention to.

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal, by Ben Mezrich
4 stars

this story of the birth of facebook is about to be released as a major motion picture, so i thought i’d enjoy reading the full story (i’m sure the movie will have to compact much of the details) first. maybe i have a bit of an entrepreneurial dream — i’ve flirted, as have so many, with daydreams and almost-ideas for websites that would change the world (in fact, i’ve gone a few steps down the road on a few of ’em). and i have a couple good friends who are deep, deep into the major launch of an online enterprise software that really could revolutionize the workplace. so i came to this story with that kind of interest. mostly true (some fact, some reasonable conjecture), it’s an easy and fun read. but there’s some real pain in the story also, and fault isn’t obviously placed at anyone’s shoes: there are lots of gray areas, with varying viewpoints that would shift right and wrong. go ahead and use facebook without knowing the story behind it’s creation — it won’t impact your use experience in the least. but the backstory is a good one. not a ‘must read’, to be sure, but enjoyable nonetheless.

books, church, youth ministry, youth work

encouragement and challenge about the impact of youth ministry

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i’m in the middle of reading kenda creasy dean‘s new book, almost christian: what the faith of our teenagers is telling the american church (it’s so good, and critical reading for all youth workers – i’m sure i’ll be posting more about it). the book is kenda’s interpretation of the findings of christian smith’s ‘national study on youth and religion’ (summarized in the book — or film, if you’re lazy — soul searching), and implications for the christian church (and, specifically, for youth ministry).

smith’s study, if you haven’t heard of it, found that the vast majority of teenagers in america subscribe to a faith he calls ‘moralistic therapeutic deism’. and, as tony jones writes in his endorsement of kenda’s book, “a lot of youth workers have been a bit depressed since the national study of youth and religion revealed what we’d long suspected about american teen spirituality.”

that’s why, early in the book, i found these few sentences very encouraging, while still clarifying the challenge:

we have known for some time that youth groups do important things for teenagers, providing moral formation, learned competencies, and social and organizational ties. but they seem less effective as catalysts for consequential faith, which is far more likely to take root in the rich relational soil of families, congregations, and mentor relationship where young people can see what faithful lives look like, and encounter the people who love them enacting a larger story of divine care and hope.

blogs, books, church, music, tv/movies, youth ministry, youth work

link fest

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Millennials’ Judgments About Recent Trends Not So Different
report on new pew research

a tease:

As might be expected, members of the Millennial generation are enthusiastic about the technological and communication advances of the past decade. They are also highly accepting of societal changes such as the greater availability of green products and more racial and ethnic diversity. What may be less expected is that, in many cases, they are not much different from the age groups that precede them. And on at least one issue — the advent of reality TV shows — their views differ not at all from those of the oldest Americans.

(ht to bob carlton, via email)

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interesting commentary on christians influencing hollywood
i have zero interest in the “christian film industry”. however, i’m very intrigued by stories of faith leaking into hollywood. this commentary is particularly about the success of the blindside, and came out prior to the book of eli. but i find it especially interesting in light of the fact that many of the mixed or negative review i’ve seen of eli (some reviewers loved it, but certainly not all) had to do with the movie being “too christian” (ironic, since no one connected to it, other than denzel, would consider themselves overtly christian).

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one in eight million
wow, beautiful first-person storytelling and black-and-white photography of new yorkers. i could listen to these stories for hours.
(ht to kevin o’brien, via email)

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david crowder and mike hogan’s amazing book, everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die, has been re-written, revised, re-edited, and re-released by a new publisher. i’m happy to say i had a tiny hand in helping this fantastic book see the light of day again. if you haven’t read it, now’s the time. (my review of the old version)

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really thoughtful post by josh griffin about the correlation between a relational approach to youth ministry and student participation.

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been meaning to post about this for awhile, and this will have to do: eugene cho has started a very cool “organization” (really, more of a movement) called one day’s wages, as a practical, achievable global poverty initiative. really worth checking out.

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as a reader who loved chap clark’s book, hurt, tony jones’ book, postmodern youth ministry, and christian smith’s book, soul searching, i have struggled to understand how they might fit together, when they sometimes seem to have messages that are at odds with each other. tony jones has an interesting post about this, and suggests a bell-curve approach to their compatibility.

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a fascinating study on teenagers and sleep, showing a correlation between lack of sleep and depression. important reading for youth workers and parents.

a snippet:

Results show that adolescents with parental set bedtimes of midnight or later were 24 percent more likely to suffer from depression (odds ratio = 1.24) and 20 percent more likely to have suicidal ideation (OR=1.20) than adolescents with parental set bedtimes of 10 p.m. or earlier. This association was appreciably attenuated by self-reported sleep duration and the perception of getting enough sleep. Adolescents who reported that they usually sleep for five or fewer hours per night were 71 percent more likely to suffer from depression (OR=1.71) and 48 percent more likely to think about committing suicide (OR=1.48) than those who reported getting eight hours of nightly sleep. Participants who reported that they “usually get enough sleep” were significantly less likely to suffer from depression (OR=0.35) and suicidal ideation (OR=0.71).

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interesting commentary (on time magazine’s website, no less!) on whether or not the hit tv show “glee” has anti-christian themes. i’m not sure that one hypocritical christian character makes a whole show “anti-christian” – but it’s interesting reading nonetheless.

(ht to ypulse)