“Relational youth ministry” has been a popular phrase in youth ministry circles for the past decade or more, and it’s not hard to understand why: Today’s teenagers crave genuine relationships. It’s difficult to gain the hearing of any teenager without showing that you’re interested in who they are as people more than you’re interested in preaching at them. In “How Youth Ministry Made Me Emergent,” Tony Jones describes how this approach to ministry has—for him, at least—laid the groundwork for a relational approach to ecclesiology in the emerging church movement.
In describing what he means by “relational ecclesiology,” Tony writes that “the church is understood as a network of relationships, primarily the relationship that people who constitute the church have to God through Christ and the relationship that they have to one another in Christ.” So far, so good. After all, Jesus sums up the entire Old Testament law in this way: Love God and love others (Mark 12:29-31).
Where I part ways with Tony in the article is how he applies his relational ecclesiology. Tony suggests that the best way to live out a relational ecclesiology is by blurring leadership distinctions within the church. He criticizes, for instance, the practice of church leaders being the ones to lead the rest of the congregation in communion. Now, I don’t believe you have to have a three-year seminary education to lead fellow followers of Jesus in communion. However, having an egalitarian view of the body of Christ, where all are valued equally as children of God does not necessarily mean that we don’t hold on to distinct authoritative leadership roles within the church.
I understand where Tony is coming from. It upsets me when a young college student who served our church and youth ministry well as a student leader in high school is expected by her new church near campus to simply sit in the pews and listen, rather than encouraged to dive into new relationships and get her hands dirty serving God in the way he’s wired her to serve.
In fact, I experienced some of this kind of bureaucracy when I first started out in youth ministry. As a lay youth director at my church, I felt like God was calling me to be a pastor and to minister to teenagers and their families. When I sought to begin the discernment process in my church’s denomination, I was told that I would likely need to give up working with youth if I wanted to be ordained because ordained ministers needed to do more important things than work with teenagers. Convinced of my calling, I enrolled in a seminary in my city that had a robust youth ministry track and eventually became a pastor in a different Christian tradition, still working with teenagers to this day.
While I agree with Tony regarding his distaste for an ecclesiology that emphasizes the role of the few church leaders at the top and de-emphasizes the role of everyone else, I’m not sure he has provided a satisfying and biblical solution to this problem. If the sin of a “top-down” ecclesiology is to encourage too much spectating and little participation, the relational ecclesiology that Tony offers has an equal yet opposite problem: Participation is emphasized to the point that the authority of church leaders becomes almost irrelevant.
Tony notes, “People have more and more autonomy in their lives, and people are going to demand more of a voice in the church. Those of us who were given a voice in youth group will be particularly demanding.” A question that must be addressed in such a framework is this: Is it biblical to expect that the direction of a church community would be decided by the consensus of all the voices that make up that community?
Instead, I believe that a biblical, relational view of ecclesiology is one that embodies Paul’s direction in Ephesians 4:11-13:
So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ (NIV).
Paul’s view of the church in this passage does not include people passively sitting in their pews as spectators. However, Paul’s solution to spectatorship is not to de-emphasize the importance of authority positions within the church but rather to clearly define their purpose: to equip all followers of Jesus to serve him in real, everyday ways. In other words, the problem is not a church structure that has standards for leadership that are not open to everyone at all times. The problem is leaders who are not leading the way God instructs them to lead—which is to equip their flocks to get out of the pews and use the gifts God has given them to serve him with.
If we are to shape a model of church relationships that is compatible with Ephesians 4:11-13, then we have to value a community where leadership and authority positions exist not to restrict the participation of others and the use of their gifts but rather to encourage all members of the community to use their gifts to serve both the church community and the community at large.
Again, I understand where Tony is coming from, and I share many of his concerns regarding the ecclesiology of many churches and church leaders. However, I believe we need a better solution than giving everyone in our church the same level of leadership. I think we’re still a ways off from getting it right, but I’d like to offer the following questions for advancing the discussion:
• Is it possible to have an ecclesiology that includes both strong, authoritative leadership and at the same time equips all followers of Jesus for ministry (Ephesians 4:11-13) and embraces the priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:9)?
• In what ways can our churches embrace the best of what youth ministry has to offer—doing ministry in a relational context in which everyone is encouraged to discover and use their spiritual gifts?
• How do we reconcile the truth that we are all on equal footing before the cross with the fact that not everyone is called to church leadership, such as a pastor, deacon, elder, etc.?
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