Midrash is story. It is people gathering together not only to tell the story of the Bible but to tell stories that give new levels of connection between the biblical stories being told and the people who listen to them. Midrash takes the stories we find in the Bible and changes them from black and white to full color or, as Paul Harvey used to say, they tell us “the rest of the story.”

The church I currently serve has a “remember when” story of a VBS from years ago that continues to circulate. In this VBS, there was a tabernacle. Most folks at the church don’t remember specifics about the tabernacle. But they do remember how great VBS was that year. When you ask them about it, they often recall it as “really neat” and “so inspiring;” some even say they will never forget it.

So when Bethany wrote about the detail and feelings she encountered as she journeyed through this tabernacle, she filled in a lot of what I missed by not being at the tabernacle at my church. She helped me feel those emotions; she unleashed the smells; she painted colors, and I saw them. All of these things are part of a historical tabernacle, but I did not get to experience them directly.

Did all the details in Bethany’s story likely happen at the VBS at my church? No. Does it matter that her tabernacle experience was different from the one that occurred at my church? Not to me. Her story transported me back to the “best VBS ever.” It gave me insight and raised emotions I didn’t know. It made the best VBS I never attended come to life for me.

Story is vital to who we are as a people. Story is what ties similar people together, despite being separated by time or space. Story ties us all to something larger and beyond each of us. Story ties us to God.

Bethany’s article worked in my mind long after I finished reading it. I began to think about the students I serve. I recalled the way they aren’t aware of many of the basic stories found in the Hebrew Scriptures. They seem to know who Joseph is, but they don’t know about his Technicolor Dream coat. They know who Moses is, but they don’t realize this was the “Prince of Egypt”.

As I look at the way many of us do church, I see important aspects of story missing. Many of these aspects have been thrown out as old, too traditional or irrelevant. The problem is, many of these stories tell us who we are. They tell us where we came from. They tie us to a tradition that is thousands of years old. Without them, we are a ship set adrift.

So much of our culture still views Scripture as Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth and nothing more. The Bible is no longer story. I think this has had an impact on our youth. They don’t feel tied to something that is bigger than themselves. Mark Yaconelli speaks to this in his book Contemplative Youth Ministry.[1] He writes that students need to know the history of who they are and where they come from. Students need to know that their faith is much deeper and older than their grandparents.

What’s the impact on the lives of students who don’t understand God’s story as their story? They’re unable to read the story of the Bible. The Bible becomes an inaccurate encyclopedia of facts or a history textbook. It has to be either 100% factual, or it’s not true at all. Our culture has relegated stories down to the stuff we tell kids before bedtime.

As an old Native American saying goes, I don’t know if it actually happened this way, but I know it’s true. This goes for our Bible too. It is a collection of stories. They are intended to tie us to the people and time they are about. They are what make us the people of God.

Bethany tells of a recent experience she had preparing a Bible study. She began to ask searching questions, questions that fuel midrash. When she invited students to think about what was missing from the story, they entered into the story. They became part of it. It was no longer the story of some ancient guy; it was a story about their ancestor.

This is crucial to note. Much of our current biblical tradition won’t allow students to become part of God’s story. Doing so feels blasphemous, inappropriate and wrong. Students desperately need to know that God wants us to be part of God’s story. We aren’t supposed to be outside observers looking in on what God is up to. Following Jesus is about being active participants in the work of God in the world.

I do differ with Bethany on this one point: “Midrash often reflects the reader’s view and values more than the biblical context, and I wouldn’t use midrash interpretations to replace the authority of the biblical testimony.”

I think she may have missed an important point of midrash. Midrash occurs every time we read the Bible. It occurs when we try to interpret for ourselves or exegete it for our students. One difference is that, instead of sitting in a room with others around us, we turn to biblical commentaries or other theological works of our tradition. When we add in illustrations to our talks or sermons, we are making our story part of the biblical story, even if we don’t realize it. To do midrash is to propose new influence to the biblical testimony.

We often don’t invite students into these discussions. Instead we do the midrash without them, thinking that in doing the work for them, and reporting on what we learned, we’re participating in the tradition of the midrash. But that’s not entering into the tradition. Students need to be allowed to ask questions and unleash the thoughts in their minds. Doing this helps them enter the story.

In his book Enter the Story,[2] Michael Novelli suggests that, instead of dumbing down the Bible, we should invite students to become part of the story. He says we need to invite students not only to know the story as a biblical passage but also the context that story is in, which includes the surrounding stories. Eventually the entire Bible can be seen as one meta-story composed of many smaller stories. As we begin to get all these stories, the story becomes part of us. We begin to understand the entire Bible as true to us.

When students become part of God’s story, they don’t forget it. The story is always with them. With this truth in them, there’s no need to set Scripture aside when they step into the biology lab or an anthropology class. The Bible can help them understand the history they are taught from textbooks. The Bible shows them how God has always been active and part of us through all time, regardless of whether that is 4,000 years or 40 billion.

As we practice midrash with students, we grow closer to each other while we grow closer to God. This closeness helps us seek out where God is in our lives today and directs us in the struggles we face to determine how to best live as the people of God.

“What then shall we do?” the crowds asked John the Baptist, and I, like Fisher and his youth group back in California, immediately translate that into, “What then shall I believe?” or “What then shall I say?” It is much safer to figure out how to tell the story properly than it is to figure out what to do with the story or how to live into the story.

But we are not called into safety. Our baptismal vows call us into something wholly different. Read what John the Baptist tells the crowds in Luke 3. When each asks, “What then shall we do?” he responds with a sort of backhanded answer. To the tax collectors, it is, “Don’t take any more than you are required to,” thereby implying, “Because you’ve been taking too much.” It is the same with the soldiers, to whom he says, “Do violence to no one.” (What have the soldiers been doing so far?) If Fisher’s story is fantastical, then John’s silent admonishments sound eerily familiar. They sound like the broken relationships we find so often in churches.

When I started out in youth ministry, I was a youth director for a mid-size church in Texas with a whole lot of problems. Everything came to a head during our summer trip to San Antonio, where the adult youth sponsors sat my ministry partner and me down and proceeded to berate us for about an hour in full view of the youth. Looking back now, I can see the path that led us to that awful night. The sponsors didn’t feel valued, I spent too much time focusing on the youth and not enough on the volunteers, we had been over eager in our plans for the week, etc. But at the time, all I could see was fear and shame. When I asked the group, “What then shall I do?” I heard only recrimination and blame, and I responded in kind. That story did not end with reconciliation.

Understanding what reconciliation truly means has been a long process for me. I wanted to be a doctor once. It was, I thought, a noble calling: to figure out what was wrong with people and fix it. It was what my grandfather did, and I knew scores of people who had been “fixed” by him. Becoming a doctor was the best way I knew to help people. It is all too easy for me, then, to envision the work of reconciliation as a way of fixing people. That is to say, if I could’ve just fixed the perceptions of those youth sponsors, everything would’ve been fine. This kind of thinking, I’ve come to understand, is a trap. Fisher instead astutely casts part of the work of reconciliation as preemptive love. He writes, “Preemptive love is something we believe can change any culture.”

It’s a curious thing, this concept of preemptive love. I first encountered it as an English major with an eccentric advisor. He commended to me a dry old tome by Alan Jacobs called A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love, and it’s been one of my favorite books ever since. In the book, Jacobs says that the problem with the way most people read is that they believe in order to love a book, they need to first understand what it’s about, the author’s point of view, all that literary nonsense you learn to do when you’re an English major. Not so, says Jacobs. Instead, in order to understand something, you must first love it.

This is reconciliation: to love first, in spite of everything, so that healing work can be done. Miroslav Volf, and particularly his book Exclusion and Embrace, is a helpful theological companion for me in untangling the nuances of Fisher’s story. For Volf, reconciliation is about recognizing a “shared humanity” among enemies, and we fail only when we try to force people out of that circle. He writes that “forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.[1]” In other words, forgiveness fails when we try to fix the person sitting across from us without recognizing that we too need fixing. I am called to love the person who has wronged me because we share much more than what is broken between us. We share the very quality of brokenness.

Even understanding all of that, what then shall we do? As I said, Fisher’s story seems fantastical because it is so far outside my own context. The typical church council isn’t going to let my youth group go do a reconciliation mission to Iraq, and neither should they need to. It’s easy to imagine reconciliation as work done by others: Sunnis and Shi’ites, Palestinians and Israelis, North and South Koreans. But the fact is, there is reconciliation work to be done in my community, in my context, right now.

Fisher’s story forces us to look at our own communities and say first, Where are the breaks within my church? How has my ministry contributed to those breaks? An older, wiser version of myself can look back to that terrible meeting with those youth sponsors and say, They were wrong, but so was I. I had not been preemptively loving them for who they were, instead focusing only on their immediate failings. And, as much as I wished they had been the first ones to come forward to start the process, Fisher makes me realize that it has to start first with me if I want it to start at all. It’s up to me to be the first to ask the question, Whom do I have to love preemptively? My senior pastor? My volunteers? Myself? What then shall I do, not what then shall I wait for?

Fisher’s work in Iraq gives me pause, though. Figuring out where reconciliation needs to take place in the walls of our churches is well and good, but Fisher’s context pushes me to think about what is happening in my broader community, and specifically to ask, In what structures of oppression does my church participate? What are my responsibilities as a ministry leader toward recognizing and dismantling those structures? If we focus only on our ministry relationships, I fear we aren’t participating fully in Volf’s “shared humanity.”

The values of preemptive love would suggest that we have to open our eyes fully to everything that is going on around us. Do I know what that really looks like? Not yet. But Cody Fisher makes me want to look around and begin trying. As he says, “God hasn’t let up, so why should we?”

We go to escapist movies because we need to escape. We go to comedies because we need to laugh. We go to romantic movies because our wives tell us to.

I am a huge fan of cynicism and skepticism, and Mayward asserts that we become Christian consumers when we bring these into our faith. I don’t agree. Much of the Old Testament was written for the purpose of creating loud discussion with flailing arms and passionate voices. It is when we sit quietly and keep still and don’t ask questions that our faith becomes boring. Iron only sharpens iron if you are willing to have the sword fight.

When it comes to church, youth leadership and worship, I agree with Mayward’s thoughts about students and entertainment. Lose them in the first few moments and you won’t get them back again. However, this argument (like the one for whiz-bang worship) is based on the supposition that we as a congregation and our youth are an audience. This is not accurate. God is the audience.

We do not participate in worship so we can sing to ourselves. When we begin with that mindset, our entire perspective changes. See a movie on a Friday night with a theater full of college students and you will have a completely different experience than if you go to the same movie on a Sunday afternoon. However, it is not just the when and where of the event itself. It’s also what we bring to the event. What mindset do we go in with?  What are we expecting to get out of the event?

I once lived a city that wasn’t known for its sports teams. I’ve explained to my students that we who lived there did not necessarily go to watch our teams win. We went to sit outside on spring days (or in winter blizzards), to be part of something bigger than ourselves. Mindset matters.

We get out of worship what we put into it. If we walk in thinking, Dang, this is going to be boring, what can we expect? We often walk in expecting to be entertained. Then, if the worship leader doesn’t earn our attention at the beginning, we tune out.  What if the connection is our responsibility as well?

Slow and contemplative worship requires more than our presence. It requires us to be fully present as we believe that God is fully present. Long, slow, contemplative worship services last in our minds. Show worship lasts until Sunday dinner.

Think about the mission trips you have led. The truly God-connecting moments usually occur at night, in the dark, with the group sitting around a candle and you with a flashlight and a Bible. There is no whiz-bang there. You don’t need it. And yet, these are the moments that remain in our students’ memories. These moments change lives.

Next week or the week after, I will not remember Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. Yeah, I paid my 10 bucks, and I was thoroughly entertained for 90 minutes. I’ll remember it when someone brings it up in conversation. However, I saw Another Earth months ago, and it is still with me.  There were three of us at the theater that night, and the discussion over burgers lasted almost as long as the film.

We shouldn’t discount a popular film simply because it lacks substance. Yes, as Mayward said, most of our students have seen Hangover 2. So let’s find the lesson there. Let’s find the moral questions of Mission: Impossible. In that sense, every movie, even the ones that skirt the edge of morality or lack substance, can be used to teach.

My own pastor is fond of saying, “The table is set. Come and let us worship.” What we need to teach our students is that it matters what they bring to the table. Are we bringing a pack of gum to the potluck and impatiently slouching in our chairs? Or are we bringing the best desserts and a desire to be actively involved in the conversations around us?

Yes, Mission: Impossible and Hangover 2 are escapist movies. There’s nothing wrong with that. Many people come to church for the same reason. Mayward, however, seems to be justifying dullness. Let’s be careful not to do that. Dullness isn’t necessary to begin with. Perhaps my disagreement stems from his use of the word boring. Quiet is not boring. Silence is not boring.

We don’t teach boring. We teach meaning, and as Joel says, this takes time and effort. We must teach our youth to think in terms of depth. Any movie can wash over us like a loud wind, but to open ourselves up and allow that wind to pass through us, penetrate us down to our souls, is something that is learned. That’s not just a song sung on Sunday morning. That’s a hymn to God, the creator of all things.

We must teach our students to open up to those words, those harmonies and the intentions of the composer. To do this we must slow down. Turn off the cell phones in meetings. Play fewer videos. Sit close together. Teach less and talk more. Invite students into the prayer time. Participate in the process. Pray in the basement or the janitor’s closet. Or simply shut off the lights in the youth room and pray around a candle.

I resonate with these questions at the end of Joel’s article:

• What does it mean to love my neighbor?

• Is it ever okay to doubt God?

• What does it mean to be called to a place or a people?

• Which is more difficult—to die a martyr’s death, or to live out a long obedience in the simple and ordinary ways of being Christ’s disciple?

These questions must be asked in the silence and discussed in the quiet. The connection with God comes in the pauses. Slow worship gives us time to hit the pause button.

What is the sacrifice here? Who is willing to lay down his life for his friends? Who is patient? Who is kind? Who is acting out jealousy and who isn’t? These are great questions that can all be asked at the end of Hangover 2. An escapist summer flick? Sure. But we can make it holy. We can assign meaning to the simplest of things.

Our job as youth workers is to make the everyday sacred and the sacred every day.

The table is set.

But on that night, a 20-something woman approached me. She grew up going to these retreats and had volunteered many times. This weekend, she led the worship. Fumbling with her words in a way that betrayed emotions just below the surface, she expressed gratitude for my presence on those retreats, pointing out that she rarely saw women leading in youth ministry contexts.

Her comments took me by surprise. The organization overtly supported women in ministry. But the reality remained (and remains still) that the youth ministry culture in our country tends to be hyper masculine, at times copying the personas of reality TV hosts or late-night comedians. Even in our organization, there were fewer women than men in visible leadership roles. She had never worked with a woman in leadership.

I remember how important it was for me to finally see fun, competent women in positions of leadership. It gave me imagination to say, “Hey! I had no idea women could do that! Maybe I can too!”

I wrestled all the way through my education at a conservative seminary with the reality that most of the stories of women in Scripture are negative. I rationalized that these stories describe where the community of God is in that moment and aren’t seeking to prescribe the role of women in our culture today. I recalled the internal gnawing I felt when I chose to believe that someone with more academic chops than I had figured out that the woman who washes Jesus’ feet with her hair is indeed Mary Magdalene when it didn’t seem clear to me (thanks for clearing that up, Christy!). I remember learning the connections between the Samaritan woman that Hearlson references, proud of myself for understanding the cultural context of the biblical era and never once thinking that she may be a victim of the marital norms of the day. And Martha! I’ve always pictured her in the kitchen! As Christy Lang says: There is no kitchen!

But as a youth worker and as one who has mentored other youth ministers, I struggle with how to speak of this. Telling stories of women from places of power seems antithetical to the overall story of the Scriptures. There has to be a way to start the conversation about female role models in the New Testament.

How do we speak of such things in the larger church context? If the rest of the church holds a negative view of women because of our biblical hermeneutic (whether unintentionally or subconsciously), how do we speak of them without merely sounding like women whining?

What does this even mean for the many churches, especially those with a youth ministry staff, whose hermeneutic tells them women are not ordainable or qualified to lead men? Is there a way to see Mary Magdalene, Martha and the Samaritan woman afresh, even in these places?

I believe the reframing Christy Lang Hearlson does with these three New Testament women offers us a place to start. She asks us to examine these stories afresh, to challenge the assumptions we’ve placed on these offerings, like assuming Martha is in the kitchen, and realize that there is no kitchen.

But there’s more, isn’t there?

The internal, accepted perception most of us have regarding these three women shows us the double standard still at work in our culture, the one that says, Girls need to be good, and boys will be boys. We know many of the men in Scripture have back stories: David and his adultery and murder; Saul persecuting and killing Jesus’ followers; Matthew collecting more taxes than necessary from his own people. We don’t question their impact or their leadership. But, for some reason, when Mary Magdalene is purged of some demons, she’s disqualified from being a leader in Jesus’ movement.

We can help our students acknowledge the double standards and the biases we all have. We can help them understand the assumptions we bring to the text and the assumptions that have been implanted in them. Following the way of Jesus calls us to challenge our own assumptions. It’s the basic definition of learning.

To do this, we have to be willing to address our own assumptions and biases. Understanding and challenging our own internal biases is not easy or fun. However, facing these pre-understandings might shift our understanding of God or God’s call in our own life. It might challenge us to live differently.

Christy’s article makes me want to sit down with some students and look at the story of Mary and Martha in the original Greek. I want to walk them through the original language and help them understand the interpretation that always takes place during translation. I want to help them understand the assumptions many have made about this passage. If I could do that, I’d walk them through the various places where the word diakanion is used in the New Testament, learning the places and stories in which that word is used, working together to better understand the word and how to better interpret the Mary and Martha story.

But beyond all of that, these stories remind us that people are complicated and each story unique. These complicated people with their convoluted stories offer great fodder for conversation with our young people about the challenges of life.

Reframing these three women provides a helpful start for inspiring our imaginations to think differently about women in Scripture and the need for female role models. My hope is that we don’t stop there.

As part of our confirmation curriculum, each student is asked to articulate what it means to follow Jesus Christ in seventh grade. Glancing over the projects from this semester’s class reminded me how strongly the young people at our church feel that following Jesus means telling other people about him. Yet, when asked to clarify what evangelism means, most students simply respond with, “spreading the word.”

It’s time to recover a broader definition of evangelism.

This is why I deeply resonate with Jake Bouma’s “Evangelism in the Dark.” I too have often felt that evangelism resembles more of a marketing campaign for Jesus rather than an embodiment of good news. I recall a story a professor once told me about witnessing with a group of students on the beaches of Florida one summer. Students were to open conversations with strangers by telling them they were conducting a survey to discover the religious temperature of the area.

During one conversation, a man simply asked the students what they planned to do with all the data. The group awkwardly stared back at him for what must have seemed like hours, embarrassed, probably even a little ashamed. There was no research study; it was a gimmick employed to get people talking about eternal destination. But how could this group of students tell this man they had been dishonest just to get an opportunity to tell him about Jesus? I don’t think this story is an anomaly. I actually think it happens frequently. After all, the end certainly justifies the means, right?

Jake poignantly reminds us that evangelism has become a strategy for winning converts rather than a way to encounter people in their deepest and darkest questions. He describes the modern perception of evangelism well:

Here’s how we often think of evangelism success stories. We speak our beliefs, and the result is the non-believer’s acceptance of and eventual conversion to those beliefs” But is evangelism simply about conversion? If it is, are we only successful in bearing the good news when someone responds with belief? Jake pushes us to have a much broader vision of evangelism, one in which questioning, struggling, and openness play a more prominent role. Jake writes, “There is a significant and enduring theological tradition that not only values but actually places the very heart of evangelism in this type of exchange—in relational encounters that take place in the dark night of questioning.

 The kind of evangelism Jake offers is one that requires us to see more clearly the humanity of others, to identify with their scary questions and enter into their doubt. It leaves tricks and gimmicks behind and offers only our own humanity in exchange. Contrastingly, evangelism à la marketing is dehumanizing. It has no regard for who people are, their stories, their questions, or their experiences. They only become consumers for the products presented to them. Their freedom is ignored. Evangelism in the dark, as Bouma suggests, allows people to encounter one another in weakness and doubt without imposing upon one another’s will.

A few years ago I developed a relationship with a student in our youth ministry who was experiencing a period marked by significant doubt, questioning even his baptism. He was an intelligent young man and had noticed some inconsistencies with the way the church answered some of his deepest existential questions. Arguments over the question of origins, political affiliations, and self-righteousness weighed heavily on his faith. Instead of attempting to resolve the tension or answer his questions, I shared the haunting space with him. I entered, as best I could, into his questioning. I shared some of my own doubts and scary questions as well.

I think it surprised him to hear his youth leader talk about doubt. I think he expected me to call his parents and the pastor to set up a spiritual intervention. As we journeyed together for the next few years to find meaning, something similar to Jake’s encounter with his brother occurred between that student and me—a transcendent experience where we both allowed for meaningful questions to be uttered. He remains a close friend of mine and is loosely attached to the church after high school. I’m convinced neither would be true had I squashed his doubt with dismissive statements of certainty.

Ultimately, Jake’s article reminded me most of the need for faith to be embodied. As long as faith is kept in abstract thought, on the verge of ideology, evangelism will always feel like getting others to assimilate to the way we think about the world. An authentically embodied faith focuses more on being the gospel to others than trying to convince them to believe it is true. Indeed, embodied faith is more effectively postured to meet others on neutral ground and to enter into doubt and weakness. A nighttime evangelist will be one who has embodied his faith. To do this will take risk, however.

I imagine there are those who criticize this understanding of evangelism as timid, lacking courage. Boldly proclaiming the gospel should not be reduced to those with confrontational personalities approaching strangers on the street. In many cases, sharing in moments of doubt and weakness requires a great deal of courage, perhaps even more than typical confrontational evangelism.

I think Jake is right; our students are positioned best to embody this kind of evangelism. But, as he suggests, for our students to enter into doubt with their friends outside of church, we must begin to allow their own doubts to be heard within the church. Perhaps we could spend a lot less time answering questions they weren’t asking to begin with. Or, what if we dedicated more time to listening to their questions instead of guessing which ones to answer? Would our students begin to feel comfortable dwelling in places of doubt? Would they begin to develop the skill of asking the right questions? I’m afraid that, if we don’t allow them to ask questions or seek meaning in the face of doubt, they will feel shame when doing so on their own.

I am hopeful, though. Jake is proof that hidden within this theological shift currently underway in youth ministry is an overwhelming amount of attention to creating space for young people to ask and wrestle with big questions. As youth workers allow this to happen, I am hopeful that the next generation of Christians, comfortable with their own limitations and acquainted with their own weaknesses, will resist the urge to sell the good news and be it instead.

When I read Jonathan’s article as a theologian, I heartily agree with his concepts. When I read again as a youth ministry practitioner, I am overwhelmed by the difficulty of possible implementation. The tension between these perspectives plays directly into the author’s argument, which he summarizes anecdotally by quoting the equivalent of a monk’s motivational poster: “Everybody wants to join the revolution, but no one wants to do the dishes.”

This is at least doubly true in the context of an adolescent subculture that is simultaneously idealistic and individualistic. Most teenagers want to be a part of something significant, but few are willing to inconvenience themselves in order to participate in said significant thing. While I enjoyed and was personally challenged by Wilson-Hartgrove’s suggestions, I find myself asking some pretty deep questions.

Personal vs. Private

First, he speaks of the difference between faith being personal and private:

Benedict’s whole-life spirituality is a radical departure from standard religion in American culture. While it assumes that our relationship with God is intimately personal, it leaves no room for our individualistic assumptions that faith is private.

This sounds well and good (to be sure, I agree), but how do students walk that tightrope? Most of the kids in my ministry are convinced that the moment they wake up for school, they are mandated to leave their faith at home with the rest of their valuables, or at least secured in their lockers until the final bell rings. They live in homes with giant garage doors and tiny front entrances—bulwarks of privacy. While many put themselves out there on Facebook, few are truly vulnerable in social media. It’s too risky. They could be bullied, ridiculed or even abandoned. In fact, most kids have been bullied, ridiculed and abandoned into silence. They have been trained to be private. And it’s not always out of selfishness. Sometimes they are that way because of fear.

So how can we encourage them to have a deep faith that is at once deeply personal and very public? I’m certain Benedict would supply some answers. What I’m not sure of is that Benedict understood the plight of today’s adolescent.

Rule of Life vs. Legalism

I love the idea of a rule of life. When I was completing my studies in church history, I even adopted a sort of 21st-century rule of my own. There are certain values, habits and disciplines I want to live by—no exceptions. Some of them are pertinent only to me; others involve relationships and community.

As a 30-year-old who has had ups and downs in his own faith journey, I think I have arrived at a place where I can examine my adherence to that rule with honesty and objectivity that does not make me a slave to it as the Judaizers were slaves to the law. Rather, I consider it a guide. It is by grace that I am saved and in obedience that I respond.

But I also remember what I felt like when I was 12 or 13 and missed a day of reading the Bible or said a cuss word. Ravaged by guilt, I wondered if God loved me, if he could or would forgive me, if I was headed straight for hell.

I am not sure how to teach students to live in community by a rule of life without nudging them ever closer to an understanding of Jesus that is severely flawed. What happens when they sleep through an alarm alerting them to rise and pray? What about when someone in their small group gossips about them and brings a schoolful of ridicule upon them and they have a hard time forgiving? Will their concrete-thinking minds be able to separate struggle from sin? Will their failure to abide by the rule lead them to despair? I’m not sure, and I’m not saying it means we shouldn’t try. I simply struggle to feel confident that this will not be a huge obstacle.

I wholeheartedly agree with Hartgrove when he concludes that “the truest radicals aren’t yelling down the corporate elites… They’re learning to pray.” Yet I wonder how effective our efforts to introduce a way of life such as Benedict’s will be. While students long for community, they are also in a process of discovering themselves. Until they know who they are, they may never truly belong to any group.

Our primary task is to inform students’ identities as they are shaped by Jesus, not other people. Only then will young people emerge who are so passionate about the revolution that they are willing to scrub some pots and pans in order to see it come to pass.

Seconds-old Jacob had apparently been holding back his first trip to the bathroom for weeks, maybe the whole nine months. So the moment his tiny newborn body entered the cold hands of our family OBGYN, the dam broke in his bladder, and Jacob covered the table and the doctor’s hands, before the doctor eventually held him upside down so he could finish his business.

Jacob doesn’t obviously remember anything about that moment, but he retells that story often. We have many of these stories in our house about Jacob—the time he broke his arm; his first rash; strep throat; and, my favorite: the first time he put his Fender mini strat behind his head all “Jimi Hendrix style” and played the pentatonic scale perfectly. I’ve been there for everything. I love my son more than I love the air I breathe. And when we pray together at night, we often put our foreheads together and say secret things to each other. He tells me about the hopes he has for his life, what he wants to do, asking me what I think God is calling him to become. We talk about what it means to have a crush on a girl and who has bigger arm muscles.

I desire so much for Jacob. I want him to be a good man, a good husband and father. I want him to be happy. I look forward to the day when I can look into the grown-up eyes of my son and know, for sure, that he is a good man, whole and happy and complete; Comfortable with his life and yet completely uncomfortable. The thing is, I have no idea how to get Jacob to that place. The answer to such a question is as much a struggle as the question, How did I get into adulthood? How can I understand Jacob’s process when I really don’t understand my own? Mark Yaconelli’s narrative is simply beautiful. Good authors don’t prescribe; they show and tell, demonstrating their struggle in the world of the narrative, taking us along in their journey. The most agonizing aspect of the article, for me, was my own sense of loss at having to navigate the worlds of adolescence and maleness mostly alone.

A Community of Men

Men getting together with other men is a lost art in America. We get together to watch games on our huge TVs. In my community, men get together to hunt. But, other than those two very cultural gatherings, men don’t connect. We do not camp together and, heaven forbid, we never get together to weep about the future of our sons. We flex our muscles to show how dominant we could be, but we’re rarely vulnerable. I think part of that is natural and is God’s knitting together of emotion and psyche so we can be his in his way. Mark has a community of men he’s gathered together, and his sons know that as their community. It’s a community whose DNA is naturally vulnerable. This spirit of reliance is vital for our sons. Other men can teach them things we can’t, or teach them better. Even though I’ve taught Jake the basics of how to use screwdrivers and power sanders, it was our close friend who recently brought a group of boys together (including my son) to make Merry Christmas door signs out of old wood who taught him how to use these tools effectively. Men need each other for their own psyches, but they also need them for their sons. Do you have that community for yourself? For your son?

A Spirit of Exploration

On most spring afternoons, you’ll find my Jake on the driveway practicing ollies. I cringe every time he launches the skateboard off the hard cement, believing he’ll eventually fall backward, crack his head and spend the rest of his life drooling onto a paper napkin while he stares blankly into the distance. My firm belief that Jacob will critically injure himself makes me say no all the time. I say it when he wants to climb a tree, when he wants to ride his scooter down our street or when he wants to try a back flip in the living room. It’s good stewardship and great parenting to be cautious. But it’s unhealthy fathering to create a spirit of fear in my son, so much so that when he grows up, he’ll hear my no echo in his head every time he has to make a business decision. I want my son, with a hefty spirit of exploration, to jump first and look where he’s jumping second.

I’m about halfway through a wonderful book that’s helped my thinking here just a bit. Julian Smith has written a great (and free) book titled “The Flinch,” which outlines for readers both the perils and benefits of living a life that ignores the being-too-cautious mechanism by which many of us operate. Smith boils the meat of his perspective down into this wonderful Emerson quote: “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”[1]  I’ve spent a lot of energy creating a son who flinches and stays at the edge of the forest because he doesn’t see a trail. I want a son who sees the forest as an opportunity to create new paths for others to follow. Do you?

The Passion of Patience

If there were the remotest possibility that my son was lost in the woods, I’d be on the phone hiring helicopters. Police would definitely get involved. I’d likely call the governor. This is the part of Mark’s story that made me the most nervous. What father would leave his son in the woods, possibly lost or freezing to death? If I were living that moment along with Mark, I’d definitely be the friend standing right next to him with his finger hovering over 911. This part of the story doesn’t feel safe. It feels unwise.

But I love Mark’s patience and his confidence in his son. His ability to allow his son to take the journey he needs to take feels like a wink toward the Old Testament God, who allowed wayward Israel to make their own decisions and then live with the consequences. It’s a passionate desire to allow a son to take his own chances as he makes paths through the forest, and it’s a patience that says, I’ll be here, even if you make the wrong kind of path, and I’ll wait in the cold for you for as long as I need to wait. This passion doesn’t watch his son over the top of his laptop screen. This passion turns his phone and television off. This passion does not move until he sees his son emerge from the woods.

I hope you (like me) are committing to wait at the edge of the woods for our sons. Can we be fathers who gather other men around our sons, building a visible community for them to rely on? Can we be men who teach them to live with unflinching spirits? And will we wait for them to emerge from the forest of their journeys with a community crescendo like this?…I began to weep—with gratitude that Joseph was safe, with gratitude that God had given me this boy who was now on his way to becoming a man, with gratitude that the Spirit was teaching me to resist the fear of adolescence, to trust that the sons we had raised would grow into men who can carry suffering, who can face fear, who can be trusted to find their way home.

I sure hope so. Today, press your forehead onto your son’s and tell secrets to each other. Show them the best of how you live and encourage them to live into that. Guide them to the edge of the woods and commit to wait there for them.

Wait a second. No room for the Holy Spirit? Interesting.

For some reason, the same Holy Spirit whom my pastors assured me could do amazing works of restoration in even the most hopeless of souls…couldn’t quite lick the Kryptonite of written prayers.

Why is it that written prayers and liturgy are considered to prevent the Holy Spirit from getting any work done? Everyone seems to treat the Spirit like weird Uncle Frank. You remember Uncle Frank. He was the uncle who smelled funny and always showed up way late to Christmas. He was pretty much guaranteed to screw up the holiday schedule Grandma had been planning since Presidents’ Day, but none of the kids really cared because he always brought really extravagant gifts (thanks again for the iguana, Frank).

For those of you who didn’t have a weird Uncle Frank, I’ll explain. It seems that we have reduced the Holy Spirit to the disheveled but interesting part of the Trinity who is always running a little late. Why is it that we can’t imagine the Holy Spirit being present when the committee met to decide on the order of worship? Or when the pastor had set time aside for sermon preparation? Or yes, Mr. Liantonio…back when these ancient prayers were being written.

There have certainly been times in my life when I needed to speak with God like a buddy sitting next to me. But there are other times when the most faithful thing I can do is sit back and pray the prayers of the saints who have come before me. Sometimes it’s simply to expand my prayer horizons. But other times it is the words of written prayer that carry us when we don’t much feel like carrying ourselves. I guess what I’m admitting is that sometimes we pray because we want, and other times we pray because we ought. In the case of the latter, Liantonio reminds us, our predecessors have left us something to lean on.

Now, with all that being said, it might also be important to issue a few warnings. I think there’s an idea we need to distance ourselves from in the church. This idea has frozen some churches in time and led others to spend the bulk of their budgets on cool media equipment. It has caused church splits, denominational divides (insert redundancy joke here) and even a few civil wars. And no, it’s not predestination.

It’s the word best.

For a few millennia now, faithful followers around the world have searched for the best types of music, the best theology, the best sermons and, of course, the best prayers. I’ll admit, this is typically an honorable endeavor taken by well-intended souls. When it comes to all things God, it’s not difficult to see why people would be interested in finding the very best way of doing things. After a decade of working with youth and young adults, I believe that the quest for best is killing us.

I think my prayer life worldview would have been pretty different if I had simply been told, “Written prayers aren’t really our style at this church; we kinda like to ad-lib.” Then maybe I wouldn’t have grown up thinking written prayers were composed by a bunch of sinners.

That’s where the notion of best gets a little tricky. It insinuates that if there’s a best way, then all the other ways are inferior. And while inferior is okay when referring to laundry detergent, it’s pretty much just another way of saying wrong when dealing with how we relate to the Creator of the universe. It’s a dangerous cycle, and it doesn’t take long to pick up speed. I’ve watched it play out with my students more than once.

They pray a particular way (it doesn’t matter which) because that’s how they always have. They discover a new way to pray and notice the benefits of this new method. They assume a certain status of enlightenment over people representing the old way. Dissension ensues.

It’s a pretty predictable pattern, one that I’d bet most can relate to. Feel free to take out the term prayer and replace with worship music, seeker friendly, discipleship, missional, emergent—you get the point. What if all of these words weren’t attempts to be the best but were rather seen as tools and voices in the grand, ongoing conversation about faithfulness?

This is where corporate and written prayers have so much to offer. Youth and young adults are growing up in the age of the individual, and subsequently, we’ve managed to raise some pretty impressive individuals. However, we’re a little behind on raising team players. Liantonio’s comments on prayer narcissism were right on. Spiritual practices like written prayers could be just what the doctor ordered for a generation that needs to experience what it means to be one of many involved in something bigger than itself.

While we should be careful not to think we’ve rediscovered the next best thing, written prayers could offer our generation of attention addicts the opportunity to step out of the prayer limelight and notice God all over again.

Hours of planning events, recruiting adults, networking with students, developing leadership and rallying support have, at times, been met with ambivalence and apathy from the students my teams have worked so hard to reach. Constant competition for teens with para-church organizations and other larger churches can leave leadership feeling drained and frustrated. At times, it feels like no matter how many resources we pour into our ministry, students don’t seem as interested or as involved as we would like.

Why?

Adam McLane believes the problem lies with church leadership, stating that there is no way a “staff-led church” can reach our communities. At face value, this statement seems logical. However, it also seems to represent our culture’s rejection of institutional authority. Having served in seven different churches over the past two decades, I have experienced the extremes of both staff-controlled leadership and completely volunteer-driven ministry. For me, the answer lies somewhere in between. But are we really asking the right questions? Does the problem actually run deeper than church leadership?

McLane’s comparison between Jesus’ open-source conflict with the religious establishment of his day and the church of today is similar to comparing car brands to airplanes. The religious subsystems before Christ have little to no similarity to the church of today. The whole argument leaves out one important element—the Holy Spirit. The religious leaders of the Old Testament law were not working together with the power of the Spirit to build the kingdom of God on earth. Rather, they unknowingly worked against God to keep his people separated from him. Unleashing an open-source firestorm was the reason Jesus came to earth.

Yet the history of the early church teaches us that God led the disciples and subsequent leadership to clarify and re-clarify what the structure and teaching of the church would be. Open-source ideas brought confusion and heresy in an age when communication and access to Scripture was limited. The Holy Spirit has repeatedly intervened over the past 2,000 years to lead godly men and women to re-center the church on the true meaning of the gospel.

In the greatest example of open-source control in Scripture, the ancient Israelites during the time of the judges repeatedly fell into a pattern of rebellion and sin when they had no national or spiritual leadership. The final verse states, “At that time there was no king in Israel; people did whatever they felt like doing.” (Judges 21:25) In other words, everyone had control and input into the destiny of the nation, and it was an unmitigated disaster.

McLane’s assertion that the church is a “closed, proprietary system in which few people have access, control or power” sounds like a description that someone might give who is looking in from the outside. I cannot think of one church example in my upscale Bible-belt community of a church that limits the ministry of its people by exercising institutional control.

Furthermore, I find nothing in the Bible that teaches that the church should be an open-source gathering of people. In fact, the New Testament teaches that the church is like a body, made up of many parts, and each part is uniquely gifted to build up the believers. Each person has a role; some are to lead; others are to follow. This may seem open source but would better be described as theocratic.

While I passionately believe in the priesthood of the believer, I don’t believe that the church should be an open-source dialogue for leadership and control. To say that the church’s struggle with attendance and growth is an institutional issue may have some merit, but it sounds a bit like complaining that it is rainy or cold. You can complain, but you can’t change the weather.

Is it possible that the issue is not the institution of the church or our current strategies but rather our idolatry to the riches of the western world instead? The places in the world where the church has seen significant decline are the places where wealth and comfort have become the sole pursuit of the culture. Yet the church grows like wildfire in regions of the world where people often don’t have enough to survive day to day. The bottom line is that we don’t need Jesus in America because we have enough wealth and power to control our own destiny. And when you don’t need Jesus, you usually don’t need the church either.

I enjoyed reading Tony Jones’ article. Tony’s description of the youth ministry he attended sounded eerily familiar. We enjoyed the same practices and fellowship each week in my church. There was a heavy emphasis on missions, and the church regularly recognized the youth ministry as an asset. I certainly fell in love with my church. But I am not sure that was enough.

As a youth ministry consultant, I’ve noticed a worrisome trend among the churches I have served. Kids are growing closer to the church and each other, but they’re unable to articulate what it means to grow closer to Christ. Recently, I was meeting with several students, and one youth suggested, “Closeness to each other equals closeness to Christ.” Is that correct? And is that all we want students to articulate about their faith?

It would seem that we as youth workers have done a good job creating a culture of friendship, service and worship with our youth. It would also appear that we’re hoping they find Christ along the way. What would we have to change or adapt in order to put Christ at the center of our youth ministries? What would we need to tweak to ensure that the students who graduate from our churches are able to speak clearly about Christ and live boldly for him?

It shouldn’t be surprising that young people often struggle when they graduate into life away from home. We’ve been feeding them the gospel message, but we may have forgotten to teach them how to feed themselves. They’ve left their support systems behind. Their faith has never been challenged or stretched, and they often struggle. The familiar feel of youth group is hard to find in adult church. The mixture of ages and backgrounds can be unsettling. The preaching style and worship music feel inadequate. Many young adults don’t stick around long enough to build supportive relationships in these strange new churches. Is it any wonder why so many young adults volunteer at youth groups?

Tony clues us in to his answer, or at least the answer that is working in his context. He’s helped build a church that has a “bit of a youth group feel on Sunday nights.” He even described a recent adult retreat that “had the feel of a youth camp, even though the 1,700 of us there outgrew youth camp years earlier.” But you have to wonder. Is this a good thing? Did these adults experience the same spiritual crash and burn that many youth experience in the weeks and months that follow an incredible week at camp? Or did the church provide the environment for continuing growth and support to keep them moving toward Christ? I wonder if adults struggle to find a new church after they transition from Solomon’s Porch.

Lately, I’ve been running into youth and young adults who are clearly growing older but have not been challenged to grow deeper. These interactions have reminded me of the expression, “Many people grow old in Christ, but not many people grow up in Christ.” Maybe we need to adjust our methods, turn our strategies upside down. What if our youth described their youth group in this way: “Growing closer to Christ builds unity and creates closeness with each other.”

Tony challenges us at the end of his thought-provoking article. “In the increasingly participatory culture in which we live, they’re only going to expect more of this when they move into adult church in the coming years.” This begs the question, Do we want to give our adults exactly what we gave them in youth group?

Ministry builds on itself. Children’s ministry ought to prepare children for continued growth in the youth ministry. The youth ministry should produce young adults with an abiding, sustaining faith that will undergird them as they move into careers and new communities.