Immerse | A Journal of Faith, Life, and Youth Ministry

When I first started in youth ministry, I really thought bigger was better. I thought true success was about big events, big growth, with a big movement. Granted, I did grow up in the ’80s, when parachute pants were the norm. Walking into my high school youth group room as a 15-year-old was like going onto the set of the MTV show Remote Control (google it if you don’t know what that is). Our youth group’s name was Battle Zone, and it was all set up with smog machines running and Steve Taylor singing “Meltdown” in the background. This was what being a Christian teenager was all about for me. When I went into youth ministry as a leader, these were the images I had of youth ministry.

I remember being a youth pastor in L.A. in the mid ’90s and drawing large amounts of students to our mid-week programs. I was still operating out of an old model of youth ministry. As a result, we were definitely light on substance. Honestly, you can only do attraction-based youth ministry for so long. Shallow ministry, as we all know, does attract students, but it does very little to nurture spiritual growth and development, and it doesn’t effectively engage students in the faith journey.

Grant Wood’s article in the July/August 2011 issue of Immerse, “The Complexities of Adolescent Spiritual Formation,” resonated with me. The first thing that jumped out about the article is that Grant is no longer a youth worker.

It’s important to remember when you get below the surface of today’s students that they want to grow, want to be invested in; today’s teenagers long for something more. They want a faith that is real, experiential, intellectual, holistic and one that calls them out of the norm and into the movement of Jesus on earth. This article was a refreshing read because it affirms what every good youth worker is trying to do: create an environment that fosters spiritual growth.

Creating Environments

Grant quotes Anthony de Mello.

“…Love sees clearly and responds accurately. We don’t forget that behind the hard surface or the expressionless face, is a student longing for something more, and love is sensitive to this.[ACM1]

As thoughtful youth workers, we must begin by creating an environment of love and grace. This is the essence of youth ministry.  Through the games we play, the talks we give, the discussions we have and our very presence, we create this culture of grace.

I loved Grant’s example of the student, Amy, who is insecure and constantly feels left out and excluded. But Amy’s youth worker sees through the hard veneer and gives encouragement and is attentive. When we do this, students then come to realize that God not only loves them, but he actually likes them; that he has warm thoughts over them as he looks at them with such a tender gaze. Them, the ones who do such ridiculous things. Them, the ones with bad skin, bad breath and bad desires. He is absolutely in love with them. Our job is to just point them, with everything we do, toward him.

Creating the kind of environment where students are engaged in spiritual growth isn’t easy, though. It takes time, work, patience and loads of grace. Developing a culture that values spiritual growth opens the door to God moments. Even failures and painful events become opportunities for God’s hand of grace, through us, to reach in and motivate change. They mess up; we show grace. They mess up again; we show grace again. They reject us; we show grace.
Again Grant writes, “Students will forget what we say, but they will never forget how we make them feel.” Grace, as I understand it, means that we focus on the heart’s attitude, not the behavior. Spiritual formation is not one size fits all. It is imperative for leaders to be diligent in observing the whys in a student’s life, and asking the tough questions gives access to deeper understanding of what motivates us.

You can change behavior without changing the heart, but you cannot change the heart by changing the behavior. The heart is where we will reach students, heal them and give them vision. All of Grant’s examples of students are examples of students who are hurting. I think we can honestly say that the struggle students face today in growing up is one of extreme abandonment almost across the board (see Chap Clark’s book Hurt). In the ’80s, I can think of maybe one or two friends whose parents were divorced. Today, in my youth work, more than half of my students come from divorced homes. This is a major shift, and as youth workers, we cannot do youth ministry as usual.
Discipleship and spiritual formation as I experienced them in 1986 were fairly passive. I think our youth workers and volunteers just hoped I would grow spiritually through osmosis. Maybe they thought I would get it from them telepathically. I guess they just assumed or maybe wished I could just somehow do better and catch it. But they never asked me direct questions, challenged my thinking personally, asked about my heart or confronted me about my choices.

Confronting Conversations

I love how Grant, in every scenario, these hurting students have a great youth worker who intervenes in the midst of the tough terrain of youth culture.[ACM2] The youth worker notices a sad face or a passive aggressiveness and walks through it all to care to ask pointed questions that lead to raising the consciousness of the student. I love this![ACM3] As a leader of youth workers, I want our ministry to be challenging for students. Years ago I started a habit of asking at least one student each time we gathered a pointed question that made them think and showed them I cared. Now I give volunteers and staff this motto: We will not go home until we’ve had a confronting conversation with at least one student. The idea of “confronting” does have a negative connotation, but really, that’s misleading. For us, confronting means we ask open ended and pointed questions. Questions like: “What did you think about the talk tonight?” “What’s going on at home?” “What’s happening at school that’s difficult?” “You look sad tonight, what’s going on?” “How are you doing in your relationship with Jesus?” “Is there anything I can be praying for?”
Students have gotten so used to these kind of questions, and what’s funny, is they feel robbed if they go home without having a confronting conversation with one of us. We are proactive in pursuing depth, making them think, challenging their motives and honestly, this is loving, caring, and thoughtful discipleship. We don’t go home from youth group until we’ve had at least one of these conversations with a student.
Grant writes, “Teens need the kind of guide who will help them develop a rugged, adaptive spirituality and go gently with them when they struggle… They know how to allow tension to be a teacher and resist easy answers.” What a beautiful job description for us as youth workers. I agree with Grant when he says later on that easy pat answers to life’s complexities have done massive damage to students’ spiritual journeys. And in fact, this is lazy youth ministry. It’s lazy not to get your hands dirty and get in there with students. It’s lazy when we notice a student isn’t quite right but we ignore it. It’s lazy when they ask hard questions and we dismiss them with a ridiculous pat answer. Grant writes, that we must “ask penetrating questions based on curiosity and intuition about what’s happening in the emotions and the lives of students. In the 80’s I just showed up to a program, Grant describes a very different type of youth ministry. This is a kamikaze, radical, and daring type of ministry.
Their Hearts Desire

In this age of abandonment I’m finding that my students are asking this important question: “Will you be there?”

“Will you be there when I am doubting and feeling like leaving the faith?”

“Will you be there when my parents get a divorce?”

“Will you be there when my boyfriend breaks up with me and I feel like crap?”

“Will you be there when I walk across the stage and get my diploma?”

Students continually measure our commitment to them with this question and we must be able to say, “Yes, we will be there. As best as we can, we will be there.” And then we point them to the One who is greater than us, who has always been and always will be there for them.

This creates a relational safety net, where students then feel safe to truly allow us to speak into their lives. They feel safe then to share the crap in their lives, the inconsistencies, the doubts, the fears, and the addictions. But when they do this I must include myself in their brokenness.

Me Too!

I love how the great prophets would include themselves in with the sin of the people. “Lord, we have turned against you, we have sinned.” When students mess up, my first response is to say, “me too.” “I screw up too, I mess up all the time too, and I need Jesus’ help too.” Spiritual formation continues when we have an attitude of humility and then grace lays the foundation when we live with a “me too” philosophy. It levels the playing field and allows students to engage in the truth that spiritual formation has no destination, it’s a journey.

Grant uses a Henry Nouwen quote in his article that sets this grace idea up perfectly through the lens of what it means to create this type of atmosphere. Nouwen’s quote is,

“Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer space where change can take place… The paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create emptiness, not a fearful emptiness, but a friendly emptiness where strangers can enter and find themselves free; free to sing their own songs, speak their own languages, dance their own dances; free to leave and follow their own vocations.”

This space that Nowuen so beautifully speaks of is a place created where together we become aware of this loving and amazing God. The great Psalmist says, “God you’re the lifter of my head” (Psalm 33:3). As this atmosphere of grace takes over and changes our ministry, students will then take another step in the spiritual formation journey. And we get to partner with God as we spend time with students and look for opportunities, whether at a retreat or at lunch, to lift their heads.
Students’ spiritual journeys can at times feel a bit schizophrenic: one minute loving Jesus, the next minute exploring Buddhism, the next making out and grinding on the dance floor. But we, in the midst of this culture, get to be that stable presence who will be there to love, encourage, and graciously challenge and point them towards the one who will give them true life. That’s the kind of youth ministry that has always worked and is what the future is all about.

Over the years I have changed the way I do youth ministry from the model that I grew up with but there are some things I would never change. The other day we took students to this huge arcade just outside of New York City. I don’t know what it was, but when we arrived I felt this magnetic pull guiding me into the back of this huge game room. And then I saw it, the game of my youth, Galaga. And as I played that epic game I thought, well, there were a few great things about the 80’s that I just don’t want to go away.