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Incarnational Youth Ministry: Bearing Christ Into the Lives of Young People By: Erin M Haligowski

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Incarnational Youth Ministry: Bearing Christ Into the Lives of Young People By: Erin M Haligowski Incarnational Youth Ministry: Bearing Christ into the Lives of Young People By: Erin M Haligowski Theological Foundations for Youth Ministry An understanding of youth ministry must be shaped by theological foundations, informed by cultural concerns, and find its home in equipping parents and families to form the faith of their children. At its very core, youth ministry involves bearing the incarnational presence of Jesus Christ into the lives of young people through relationships that are clothed in Christ. In Philippians 2:5-8 (NIV), the apostle Paul describes the incarnation of Christ and the heart of incarnational youth ministry: Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross! Jesus forfeited his place of power and priority in heaven in order to come to earth and become one of us—a human being. Those in youth ministry essentially do the same thing, forfeiting a place of power and priority as “adults” in order to enter the world of adolescents and to bear Jesus into that world. In order to really practice this sort of incarnational youth ministry, steps must be taken to build a foundation of “theological rocks”: Since youth ministers must become skilled backdoor theologians—people who can slip theological truth in through the cracks of everyday life, without waiting for a formal invitation to preach—the first task of ministry must discern those theological rocks we want our lives and our ministries to proclaim.1 In order to fully embody the incarnation of Christ and to “smuggle God into the room from the rear before youth can erect the normal defenses,” youth must begin with a healthy theological foundation.2 In Starting Right: Thinking Theologically About Youth Ministry, four authors contribute to this framework by establishing four theological foundations for youth ministry: repentance, grace, redemption, and hope. By taking a closer look at each of these theological foundations, one can begin to see how each provides an important framework for practicing incarnational youth ministry. Before diving headfirst into the theological frameworks of repentance, grace, redemption, and hope, it is first necessary to grapple with the whole idea of practical theology for youth ministry. How is it that those seeking to engage “students in a process by which they may discern God’s call in learning what it means to live out their faith in the conteXt of a believing community” make that happen in a theological framework?3 Chap Clark argues that youth ministry must become an academic subset in the field of practical theology so that youth ministers may be fully equipped to facilitate such discernment among students.4 In response to Clark’s article, David E. White argues that Clark has 1 Kenda Creasy Dean, “Introduction,” in Starting Right: Thinking theologically about youth ministry, ed. Kenda Creasy Dean, et al (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001), 17. 2 Kenda Creasy Dean and Ron Foster, The Godbearing Life: The art of soul tending for youth ministry (Nashville, TN: Upper Room Books, 1998), 181. 3 Chap Clark, “Youth Ministry as Practical Theology,” Journal of Youth Ministry, vol. 7 no. 1 (Fall 2008), 12. 4 Clark, “Youth Ministry as Practical Theology.” 1 made it seem that youth ministry must ultimately “involve the technical skills requisite for a nuclear engineer,” and that it is perhaps better for Christian discipleship and leadership to be more intuitive- affective than the technical-rational approach proposed by Clark.5 Finally, Kenda Dean responds to both by proposing that perhaps practical theology is more a matter of solivitur ambulando, translated “it is solved by walking.”6 In an effort to bring these responses back to some sort of center, Chap Clark offers this statement of summary regarding youth ministry as a practical theology: …we must move the church beyond the programmatic view of youth ministry and shepherd God’s people toward embracing a perspective that maintains a commitment to the spiritual inclusion and development of the young that is dynamically eXpanding from the theological locus of God’s redemptive activity in human eXperience.7 This statement perfectly captures the heart of youth ministry as a discipline of theological reflection. It is for this reason—moving the church beyond a programmatic view—that youth ministry must be understood in the theological frameworks of repentance, grace, redemption, and hope. The first crucial theological framework for youth ministry is repentance. The voice of repentance in youth ministry is the voice of the minister as a prophet—one who calls young people into awareness of sin so that they might bend toward Christ. Robin Maas defines repentance as “the hard, not-so-fun work of spiritual path-clearing or moral roadwork. It is a heart-turning, stomach- churning, mind-burning eXperience that actually changes people.”8 In a culture that is wearing an increasing sense of entitlement, youth ministers “bear the heavy responsibility of announcing [Christ’s] coming to youth, of convincing them that he is indeed on the way, and that they can and must do something about it.”9 Repentance is an important framework in which youth ministers must work to effectively disciple students in following Christ. In addition to the difficult work of repentance, youth ministry must also live in a theological framework of grace, which Augustine himself described as “unmerited divine favor.”10 In a world that is becoming increasingly performance-driven, it is often difficult for young people to even comprehend the idea of grace—of a free gift of unconditional love. Roger Nishioka cites in his chapter on grace that young people “must name at least five adults in [his or] her life that would love [him or] her unconditionally” in order to be able to successfully navigate through adolescence.11 It is this sort of statistic that drives the heart of the faith-webbing model for congregational youth ministry, which seeks to put at least 30 caring adults in the life of every young person in a congregation by the time 5 David E. White, “A More EXcellent Way: A response to Chap Clark’s youth ministry as practical theology,” Journal of Youth Ministry, vol. 7, no. 1 (Fall 2008), 52. 6 Kenda Dean, “We Will Find the Answers as we Go: A response to Chap Clark’s youth ministry as practical theology,” Journal of Youth Ministry, vol. 7, no. 1 (Fall 2008), 39. 7 Chap Clark, “Coming Together: A rejoinder to Dean’s, White’s, and Parrett’s responses to youth ministry as practical theology,” Journal of Youth Ministry, vol. 7, no. 1 (Fall 2008), 68. 8 Robin Maas, “Theological Framework for Youth Ministry: Repentance,” in Starting Right: Thinking theologically about youth ministry, ed. Kenda Creasy Dean, et al (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001), 235-236. 9 Maas, “Theological Framework for Youth Ministry: Repentance,” in Starting Right, 236. 10 Roger Nishioka, “Theological Framework for Youth Ministry: Grace,” in Starting Right: Thinking theologically about youth ministry, ed. Kenda Creasy Dean, et al (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001), 244. 11 Nishioka, “Theological Framework for Youth Ministry: Grace,” in Starting Right, 249. 2 they graduate high school.12 With grace as a theological framework for youth ministry, the minister begins to see every young person with the eyes of Christ, as a beautiful creation deserving of unconditional love. The neXt foundational theological framework for youth ministry is redemption. Darrell W. Johnson writes about redemption as the good news of the gospel for the lives of young people: “If Jesus Christ comes to redeem us, then he comes to set us free from whatever binds us—to release us from whatever prevents us from being the person God created us to be.”13 The task of youth ministry is to draw young people into that redemptive love of Christ so that they may be free of those things which bind them from fully eXperiencing the freedom of Christ. The final theological framework for youth ministry is a framework of hope. With the recent escalation of teen suicide and bullying being hyped up in the media, today’s young people need an injection of hope in their lives. Evelyn Parker addresses the issue of Christian hope for young people: “Given the state of hopelessness among teenagers in North America, an emphasis on Christian hope shifts the theological lens of youth ministry to eschatology as we consider the theory and practice of ministry with youth.”14 Young people need to know that God is present in the midst of suffering and despair, that it is okay to eXpress anger and frustration to God through lament, and that there are ways to cope with the suffering that they eXperience in their own lives.15 When this hope is balanced with the theological frameworks of repentance, grace, and redemption, youth ministers can begin to make room for the incarnational presence of Christ in the holy ground of relationships.16 Cultural Concerns Once youth ministry is founded on the theological bedrock of repentance, grace, redemption, and hope, it must then become informed by the cultural concerns that surround the world of young people. In a 2007 book titled UnChristian, David Kinneman unpacked some groundbreaking research from the Barna Group revealing the predominant attitudes and perceptions carried by young people outside the church, particularly those who were relatively recent high school and college graduates. From the very start, the cultural outlook seems grim for those who are still fighting for the love of Christ: Our research shows that many of those outside of Christianity, especially younger adults, have little trust in the Christian faith, and esteem for the lifestyle of Christ followers is quickly fading among outsiders.
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