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Reframing Parkway Heights United Methodist Church for Strategic Adoption

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Reframing Parkway Heights United Methodist Church for Strategic Adoption Please HONOR the copyright of these documents by not retransmitting or making any additional copies in any form (Except for private personal use). We appreciate your respectful cooperation. ___________________________ Theological Research Exchange Network (TREN) P.O. Box 30183 Portland, Oregon 97294 USA Website: www.tren.com E-mail: [email protected] Phone# 1-800-334-8736 ___________________________ ATTENTION CATALOGING LIBRARIANS TREN ID# Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) MARC Record # Digital Object Identification DOI # Ministry Focus Paper Approval Sheet This ministry focus paper entitled REFRAMING PARKWAY HEIGHTS UNITED METHODIST CHURCH FOR STRATEGIC ADOPTION Written by WES INGRAM and submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Ministry has been accepted by the Faculty of Fuller Theological Seminary upon the recommendation of the undersigned readers: _____________________________________ Chap Clark _____________________________________ Kurt Fredrickson Date Received: September 13, 2014 REFRAMING PARKWAY HEIGHTS UNITED METHODIST CHURCH FOR STRATEGIC ADOPTION A DOCTORAL PROJECT SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY FULLER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE DOCTOR OF MINISTRY BY WES INGRAM JULY 2014 ABSTRACT Reframing Parkway Heights United Methodist Church for Strategic Adoption Thomas Wesley Ingram Doctor of Ministry School of Theology, Fuller Theological Seminary 2014 In order to move Parkway Heights United Methodist Church (hereafter, PHUMC) towards embracing a communal paradigm of youth ministry, the church’s mental model of youth ministry must be reframed. Therefore, the goal of this project is to launch Team 51 Ministry, including a training system for equipping adults that incorporates the most pertinent aspects of practical theology, psychosocial development of adolescents, and the ecology of adolescent development, as a framework for communal youth ministry. As part of the ministry vision, PHUMC’s leaders are currently developing a holistic discipleship model for family ministry, ministry to children and youth included, that has intergenerational mentoring at its core and that incorporates the United Methodist Church (hereafter, UMC) tradition of confirmation as a rite of passage and vehicle for strategic adoption into the missional life of the Church. However, PHUMC’s move towards implementing this discipleship model will be significantly hampered if the congregation retains a departmentalized paradigm of youth ministry. In this project, a plan for reframing the congregation for communal youth ministry using Team 51 Ministry will be presented. Part One of this project will consist of an analysis of the ministry context, including an overview of adolescent development, a description of the culture of abandonment and its implications for adolescent development, and an analysis of PHUMC and youth ministry in the UMC. Second, in response to the culture of abandonment, Part Two will consist of a practical theology of adoption and an evaluation of historical and current models of youth and family ministry, including an overview of the UMC tradition of confirmation. Lastly, Part Three will present the plan to launch Team 51 Ministry, including the training system for equipping adults to be mentors for PHUMC. Also discussed will be the adaptive changes facing PHUMC and a plan for implementing these changes. Theological Mentor: Kurt Fredrickson, PhD Words: 300 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my family, especially Katie, Hallie, and Kendall, for their support and patience during my DMin journey. I would also like to thank the Christ UMC Ministerial Scholarship Fund committee for making my DMin journey possible. Lastly I would like to thank the members of Parkway Heights UMC for believing in the vision of Team51 and their commitment to prayerfully rethink youth ministry. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii INTRODUCTION 1 PART ONE: MINISTRY CONTEXT Chapter 1. EXAMINING ADOLESCENT DEVELOPMENT 9 Chapter 2. EXAMINING THE CULTURE OF ABANDONMENT 36 Chapter 3. EXAMINING PHUMC AS CONTEXT FOR YOUTH MINISTRY 64 PART TWO: THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION Chapter 4. A THEOLOGY OF ADOPTION 89 Chapter 5. A REVIEW OF YOUTH AND FAMILY STRATEGIES 115 PART THREE: MINISTRY STRATEGY Chapter 6. STRATEGIC PLAN TO REFRAM PHUMC FOR ADOPTION 135 Chapter 7. TEAM51 AS STRATEGY FOR REFRAMING PHUMC 152 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 169 APPENDICES 176 BIBLIOGRAPHY 191 iv INTRODUCTION The famous painting, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, by French impressionist Georges Seurat, is a powerful illustration of the Church and the role of youth ministry. The painting, which hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, depicts an assortment of people spending a sunny Sunday afternoon in a park in nineteenth century Paris, but it is the style that Seurat used for the painting and not the subject that illustrates the Church and youth ministry. Employing the painting style known as pointillism, which is a painting technique that involves “applying small strokes or dots of color to a surface so that from a distance they blend together,”1 Seurat placed each dot of color in a specific place purposefully. Each dot of color continues to exist as a unique dot, yet when viewed as a whole the thousands of dots of color work together to create a masterpiece. In Ephesians 2:8-10 Paul reminds the believers in Ephesus that they are God’s workmanship, or masterpiece, drawn together from divergent backgrounds for his mission, for it was God who saved them, adopted them into his household, and created them anew as a church.2 This is the essence of the Church, discipleship, and youth ministry: walking with youth to help them discover their uniqueness in Jesus Christ and their place of belonging within the “workmanship” that is the missional life of the Church. This is also the focus of this doctoral project; however, before addressing the ministry target audiences, ministry challenges, and overview of the project, two key 1 Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia Britannica, s, v. “pointillism,” http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/pointillism (accessed May 17, 2012). 2 F. F. Bruce, The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Ephesians (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984), 288-294. 1 concepts, abandonment and adoption, must be defined. In addition, this project’s position on the concept of adolescence/ emerging adulthood will be presented. In this project, the term abandonment is used in two ways. First, abandonment is used to refer to the self-focused, self-perpetuating, and self-serving actions of the various systems and institutions whose original intent was to benefit adolescents. That is, these systems and institutions have turned to self-survival and have abandoned adolescents. Second, abandonment is used to describe the general state that adolescents find themselves in as they relate to the various systems and institutions. That is, adolescents have been abandoned to find their own way to adulthood.3 In this project, the term adoption is also used in two ways. First, adoption is used to refer to the spiritual reality of salvation, in that believers have been adopted in the family of God as sons and daughters. Second, adoption is used to refer to the process of intentional youth discipleship whereby an adolescent becomes adopted into the missional life of a tangible local body of Christ.4 Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, developmental scholars began to discuss the emergence of a new sub-stage of adolescence called midadolescence.5 Over the past decade scholars have begun to talk about yet another new life stage that is neither adolescence nor adulthood, called “emerging adulthood.” However, the description of emerging adulthood as an “age of identity exploration,” “the most self-focused age of 3 Chap Clark, Hurt 2.0: Inside the World of Today's Teenagers, Youth, Family, and Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 23-42. 4 Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus' Vision for Authentic Christian Community (Nashville: B & H Academic, 2009), 144-162. 5 Clark, Hurt 2.0, 17-20. 2 life,” and “feeling in-between” is similar to the descriptions of adolescence.6 Therefore, it makes sense that adolescence would continue to fragment since the emergence of midadolescence, and the newly named emerging adulthood is the result of this further fragmentation. Therefore, despite the fact that emerging adulthood is not considered “adolescent” by many scholars, it will be considered part of the fragmenting journey of adolescence, for, as journalist Kay Hymowitz recently stated, “Adults don’t emerge. They’re made.”7 This project’s first target audience is comprised of those who are in the life stage of adolescence. Adolescence is starting earlier and lasting longer than it did just twenty years ago, and while the rates of the most risky and deviant behaviors have dropped steadily since the early 1990s,8 one statistic that has steadily risen dramatically among late adolescents and young adults is the number of people classifying themselves as “nones,” meaning they having no particular religious affiliation.9 Furthermore, 51 percent of those who classified themselves as “nones” also said “that they attended Sunday school or religious education classes ‘very often.’”10 Also, even among older adolescents and young adults who do desire to attend church services, there exists a sense that the 6 Jeffrey Jenson Arnett, Emerging Adulthood:
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