Grounding a Youth Ministry Mission Statement in Theology

Skip Masback

Grounding a Youth Ministry Mission Statement in Theology:

An Illustrative Example

“Planting Seeds of Hope and Joy

Best Practices for Starting, Nurturing and Growing Ministries with Youth”

A Yale Divinity School Summer Study Course

June 1-5, 2015

Follow youth ministers through their day and you will certainly see them reflecting on how to walk with their kids in earnest, authentic relationships; how to reach out with entrepreneurial vigor; how to design the right, age-appropriate mix of activities, experiences and lessons; how to draw on the best practices of similarly situated youth groups. Getting these elements “right” will often suffice to draw our young people into sustained participation and relationship. Yet, scholars have been increasingly attentive to reflections on how to ground our youth ministry practices in theology – how to give our theology “legs” in the practices of our youth ministry. After all, we aspire to more than just community formation; we aspire to loving care and discipleship in Christ’s name.

Author Mike Root gave this concern voice in a review of the seminal book byKenda Creasy Dean and Andrew Root, The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry:

We have been perplexed by decades of accumulating and overwhelming data indicating that the Christian church in North America is failing to form disciples among adolescents who stay connected to their churches. Root and Dean skillfully illustrate the essential role practical theology plays as an imperative correction toward authentic Christian formation of young people.

In the youth ministry I served in Connecticut, we explored several ways to ground our ministry in theology and to give our theology “legs” in our ministry. When we recently turned to rewriting our mission statement, for instance, we turned to a framework drawn from the Psalms.

For twenty years I’d made a Psalm-based lectio divina part of my “little rule” of daily life. After times of meditation, I often jotted down little margin notes “coding” topics and issues that percolated up in my readings.

When I was reviewing my margin “codes” five summers ago, I was struck by two patterns: first, how frequently God cares for humanity with parent-like tenderness (and how frequently the Psalmist appeals to God for parent-like care and provision); and, second, how many Psalms seem to organize around three concerns as foundational for personal, familial, and communal flourishing. If God is a “parent” who seeks flourishing life for God’s “family,” then it seems that God’s parenting plan is based on three principle concerns: love, covenant, and communion. (If I were going for a “3 C’s” catchphrase, I might have said “caritas,” “covenant,” and “communion.”) By “love,” I mean unconditional love and acceptance. By “covenant,” I mean clear and understandable commitments and boundaries. By “communion,” I mean connection, relationship, participation in something larger than oneself.

It struck me that these same three concerns might provide an appropriate foundation for our youth ministry mission statement. After all, if the Psalms reflect the values, setting or environment God thinks essential to human flourishing, then they necessarily point us to the values, setting, and environment that should ground our youth ministry as well. To the extent love, covenant, and communion are God’s gifts to humanity, we seek to be channels of God’s gifts when we serve to instantiate them in the particular body of Christ that is our youth group. To the extent our young people experience these gifts proximately through the ministry of our youth group, they both experience the nurture foundational for human flourishing and are pointed back towards the God who is the ultimate author of the gifts in the first place.

Our youth ministry mission statement sought to capture these foundational aspirations as follows:

1. We believe that the way of Christ offers our youth a life that is abundant, flourishing, and everlasting.

2. We believe that flourishing life is best nurtured in a community marked by love, covenant, and communion.

Love: A community in which all our youth, wherever they are on life’s path, are unconditionally loved and accepted as they are.

Covenant: A community in which our youth share covenantal commitments to clear and understandable values and boundaries.

Communion: A community in which our youth passionately participate in something larger than themselves; the great adventure of loving and serving in God’s name (Youth Ministry Mission Statement).

A. God cares for humanity with parental care and tenderness

In the Psalms, God cares for humanity with parental tenderness. For instance, Psalm 103:13 tells us, “As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion for those whofear him.”Psalm 89:26 reads, “He shall cry to me, ‘you are my Father, my God, and the Rock of my salvation.’ ” In Psalm 71:6, the Psalmist turns to God as a midwife: “Upon you I have leaned from my birth; it was you who took me from my mother’s womb.” As Calvin noted in his Commentary on the Book of Psalms: “[God] bears the character of the best of fathers [and/or mothers], who takes pleasure in tenderly cherishing his children and bountifully nourishing them” (170).

Commenting on Psalm 103, Claus Westermann put it this way:

At this point the summons of the Psalm first receives its basic tonality. “You infinitesimally small human, do not forget who unites your little life with the mighty dimension of eternity. Praise, praise with all your being the eternal God for sending fatherly goodness into your little life; for somewhere and in some way your life participates in something which is sharp contrast with human frailty: the steadfast love of the Lord” (9).

B. Flourishing life is best nurtured in a community marked by unconditional love and acceptance.

The first foundational tenet of God’s “parenting” plan is unconditional love and acceptance. Psalm 36:5 sings, “Your steadfast love, O lord, extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds.” Psalm 27:10 sings, “If my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will take me up.” Psalm 103:8 sings, “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. / He will not always accuse, nor will he keep his anger forever. / He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.”

In the New Testament we might be looking for the Greek word, agape, but in the Psalms, the Hebrew word translated as “steadfast love” is hesed. It has no English equivalent, but hesed is what binds the parties to a covenant together; it encompasses all aspects of a loving relationship: steadfastness, kindness, trust, and forgiveness. And because God remains unconditionally loving despite Israel’s frequent betrayals, hesed strongly connotes “mercy” as well.

How important is hesed, steadfast love, to our Father/Mother God? More than a third of all Psalms sing of God’s steadfast love. The Psalmist sings of God’s hesed 109 times in 54 different Psalms.

Sr. Kathleen Harmon, SNDdeN, Ph.D, has described the Psalmist’s relationship with God like this:

The all-powerful Creator and Sustainer of the universe is not at the beck and call of natural forces, political powers or pagan gods; yet this YOU places Self at the beck and call of the rag-tag human clan with whom a very personal and very permanent covenant of love has been established (122-123).

In hisAnthropology in a Theological Perspective, Wolfhart Pannenberg saw God’s unconditional love and acceptance as the true foundation of the basic trust psychologists understood as the necessary precondition to healthy human growth and development. The infant experiences this basic trust proximately through the mother’s love, but God is the true object of this basic trust right from the beginning:

In the beginning the question is the mother’s love. Then, as basic trust detaches itself from the exclusive link with the mother, the real problem of life arises: How can human beings be sure of being loved and affirmed from this point on? Here a further implication of basic trust emerges. Basic trust is directed to an agency that is capable without limitation of protecting and promoting the selfhood of those who trust in it. This kind of limitless capacity and readiness manifests itself to the child in the devotion of the mother, but, objectively speaking, it in fact transcends the limits that in every case affect in one way or another the capacity and readiness of the mother. Because of its lack of limitation, basic trust is therefore antecedently a religious phenomenon. In the first phase of her child’s life a mother deputizes for and represents to her child the love of God that transcends her love and is directed to the child through her. God is the true object of basic trust even in its beginning.… Hans Kung ... therefore says that faith in God is also “radical fundamental trust” (331).

Our youth ministry sought to work with our young people, their parents, our congregation, and our town proximately to foster a community that reflects God’s commitment to unconditional love and acceptance.We sought to practice a “relational ministry” that would nurture our young and point them to God, the ultimate source of unconditional love. As Kenda Creasy Dean put it in Practicing Passion:

When we talk about the importance of “relational ministry” in Christian youth work, what we really mean is that young people need the ability to give and receive fidelity, and they learn this in the fidelity of God that is glimpsed in human relationships of reliable love. To a greater or lesser extent, every person in youth ministry knows the compelling witness involved in “being there” for young people (90).

And if you had asked our town’s parents, coaches, teachers, and youth ministers, I think you would have found a broad consensus supporting this vision of “being there” for our children. Nobody opposes the notion of affording our kids unconditional love and acceptance.

Still, there is a serpent of temptation in most“gardens” that preys on our own good intentions, that exploits our intense concern for our children in a way that sometimes undermines their experience of unconditional love and acceptance. That serpent, that temptation, is ambition for our children’s college admissions and anxiety about their prospects.

I think our parents were pretty darn good at loving and accepting our children when they were in their care, but studies show that adolescents spend only two to four hours a week in meaningful engagement with their parents. Why? Because, as parents, we have delegated so much of our children’s growth, training and development to professional organizations and individuals. Why? Because we’re concerned that it’s no longer adequate to have sandlot baseball skills to get into a good college; it’s no longer good enough to have a dress-up box interest in ballet; it’s no longer good enough to have dear old Dad struggle through your math homework with you.

Fifty years ago, I learned baseball and soccer by playing with my buddies in the schoolyard and by playing with my Dad every day after work. My mom checked my homework every night – which I most certainly hated at the time. Now, it’s Blue Wave Sports, and English Football League coaches, and professional math tutors.

We do these things because we love our children; because we’re concerned for their growth and development; because we want them to have wonderful choices of college and career. And there are many, many coaches, dance teachers, tutors, and drama directors who themselves labor to create environments of unconditional love and acceptance.

Yet, somewhere along the way, the serpent in the garden began to turn this dynamic around. What happens when a 26-year-old soccer coach, a 30-year-old dance teacher, or a 40-year-old theater director starts taking over instructional and mentoring roles traditionally played by parents and other family members? Sometimes, just sometimes, the competitive needs of the travel team, the dance academy, the theater company and the ambitions of their directors start refracting the value set from an unconditional love and acceptance to a highly conditional approval based on competitive achievement.

Theologian Chap Clark put it this way in his study of adolescent life titled Hurt 2.0: Inside theWorld of Today’s Teenagers:

While these and other nurturing structures and movements were beneficial in many ways, a subtle change soon took place. These structures eventually distanced adults from the specific needs of adolescents. By the time adolescents enter high school, nearly every one has been subjected to a decade or more of adult-driven and adult controlled programs, systems, and institutions that are primarily concerned with adults’ agendas, needs and dreams.The shift has taken place not only in how our systems react to the demands of a particular enterprise but also in the focus of those in charge. In general, the good of the unique individual has been supplanted by a commitment to the good of the _____ (fill in the blank: team, school, community, class, or organization). Today, even very young children learn that they are only as valuable as their ability to contribute (31).

Sociologist Patricia Herschput it this way in her book, A Tribe Apart: A Journey Into the Heart of American Adolescence:

What kids need from adults is not just rides, pizza, chaperones, and discipline. They need the telling of stories, the close, ongoing contact, so that they can learn to be accepted. If nobody is there to talk to, it is difficult to get the lessons of your own life so that you are adequately prepared to do the next thing. Without a link across generations, kids will only hear from their peers. The Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development report, A Matter of Time found that, “Young adolescents do not want to be left to their own devices.” In national surveys and focus groups, America’s youth have given voice to serious longing. They want more regular contact with adults who care about them and respect them (364).

At its best, youth ministry creates the time and space for adults to walk alongside young people in deep relationship, manifesting unconditional love and acceptance. But simply calling a relationship “youth ministry” is no guarantee that it will avoid the dynamics of a “performance-valued” relationship. Youth ministers are not immune from the temptations that nudge the good intentions of teachers and coaches. We, too, are at risk of favoring the most responsive kids, of putting kids in roles that “make the program look good” or drive the numbers up.

We are not immune, but, at our best, we strive to reach out to all of our kids the way Jesus reached out to the “least of these.” And when we do reach out to the suffering, to the afflicted, to the disadvantaged, to the imprisoned—when we embrace all our kids with unconditional love and acceptance—the beauty that results can be astonishing.

“Sven” first started participating in our high school youth group in the winter of 2000. He didn’t seem to have many friends in the group; I mostly remember him as sitting or standing at the periphery of gatherings, when he came at all.

During the fall of 2000, Sven seemed to be drifting away from us, and, as we would learn, his life was spiraling further from the center of school and social life as well. Matters came to a head in March of 2001, when Sven thought it would be a good idea to fill three tennis balls with shaving cream and an accelerant and blow up a locker at school. An acquaintance informed school authorities that Sven had “bombs” in his locker, and events quickly spiraled out of control. The attacks at Columbine (1998) and the World Trade Center (2001) were fresh in folks’ mind, and word of “bombs” at the high school drove all authorities into “red alert” protocols.

Sven was taken into custody and interrogated without counsel; the state bomb squad searched the high school for additional bombs; and network news helicopters hovered as news trucks parked around campus with their satellite antennas sending off the latest breathless dispatches. Sven was sent off to the Bridgeport House of Detention and stripped of shoelaces and belt; the school board promptly met intending to expel Sven from school.

The demands of “unconditional love and acceptance” were obvious. Youth ministers intervened with police to halt the interrogation until we could get Sven a lawyer; and youth ministers traveled up to Bridgeport daily to visit Sven and deliver sacks of letters written by kids in the youth group. Church members intervened with the school board.

While courts and school board ground through their processes, Sven huddled in his cell, trying to keep his bearings. One day he dug into his pocket and fished out a letter he had received from a 16-year-old girl from school. She wrote,

I’ve thought long and hard as to how to make you happy, make you smile and burst with joy. The only thing I can think of is the only thing that makes me truly happy: God. Do you know that your life has a purpose? Do you know that when you laugh, you do not laugh alone, nor, when you cry, do you cry alone? When your world seems to collapse, remember that God is there holding you up. When Christ died on the cross, He made all suffering holy. Through suffering, we become closer to Him. And God is love and joy and peace and all our hearts could ever long for. All will be made right in the end through Christ our Lord. The truth shall set you free.