avoiding indoctrination

Summer is in full swing, halfway over already. Many of you have probably already gone to summer camps with your students or will be heading off soon to some new adventure...whether a mission trip, a mix of mission and fun, or a sort of evangelistic type summer camp with all the bells and whistles, or maybe even a contemplative and reflective camp experience.

This Sunday I'll be leading a group of students down to Impact VA! a missional and justice oriented summer camp put on by Virginia Baptists, this time in Appomattox, VA a small town where I grew up. Whenever I prepare for any camp/retreat experience with the students, I always have the rising fear...a fear that the speaker or the worship leader is going to force something down the throats of the kids. A fear that the kids will be pulled around by a charismatic personality or a fear of hell, or an authoritative voice from the top-down. Summer trips are full of possibility, and having grown up in churches and with a strong parachurch organization background as well, camps kind of scare me these days.

If you haven't seen Jesus Camp yet, you should, and if you have, you'll know why I get scared of the indoctrination and forced fear that students often face when going to these sort of mountain-top experiences during summer camps. There is an other-worldliness to these experiences that often trap our students into believing in a fear that is stronger than love.

As we are processing and spending intense periods of time with students this summer, how do we help avoid some of the indoctrination or brainwashing that can often happen at camps? How can we foster a spirit of conversation and hope in the camp/retreat experiences that we help create for our students? I'm not scared that the speaker or worship leader will say something crazy that we can't talk about or work through as a group...I'm scared that the attitudes and arrogance of having all the right answers or the most authoritative voice will drown out the beauty of conversation amongst my group.

Obviously I'm wrestling with this whole "taking kids to camp" idea, and I don't think that taking kids to camp is bad...but how can we avoid treating students like kids who need to be told what to think, but instead help teach and invite them into a new way of thinking?

some things to avoid

So after the epic first post that probably you are still trying to read (because it was soooo long) it is time to get into some tangible thoughts and ideas, methods and theologies, paradigms and perspectives of how this youth ministry should go down. Before we can build up, it is probably good to state some assumptions, admit some presumptions, and participate in some deconstructions in hopes of illuminating some of our hopes and ideas about "youth ministry." So here are a few things that I try to avoid in creating some paradigms, theologies, etc. about youth ministry...

• entertainment- especially entertainment in the form of passive receptivity. i think for many students, having their faith catered to them as a perspective and way of living that is available for their consumption and the notion that you can "entertain them into the kingdom" just doesn't make sense to me. that whole notion, "it's a sin to bore a kid" just doesn't jive for me, it operates on the false notion that if the students aren't 'having fun' they will not buy into this whole 'Christian thing.' my pops has been good to remind me that "The means by which a person is converted, is usually what they are converted to."
  

• 'It's all about YOU!' Youth ministry- that is student centered youth ministry, where the goal, similar to entertainment, is to make the students comfortable, complacent, and the center of all activities and events. What happens however when they realize the radical demands of the gospel means that we must carry our cross and follow Christ (Luke 14:27)? Or better yet, that we are called to love our enemies, and give up the very things that seem to give our life meaning apart from Christ...we must remember, that everywhere our students look, whether on billboards, tv, on the radio, stores, etc. they are being catered to, advertised to, and manipulated to get a desired result--how radical and life-changing might it be to thwart this practice of manipulation and self-centeredness, and call the students to a life of radical transformation with Christ?
  

• I avoid only doing thematic Bible studies. I am not saying that there are times that it may be necessary to study themes for a while, but, if your students are anything like the ones I work with, they struggle to understand the basic narrative outline of the Scriptures. I think that as adults we have assumed that they can't handle reading a book of the Bible (probably b/c we too struggle to read and make sense of a lot of the Scriptures) and figure that we should shelter students from reading whole books, or even the whole canon. I think that we should avoid this belief that students can't handle reading the Scriptures. (I'm not arguing that you start with a book like Revelation or Daniel however...)

What are some things that you try to avoid in youth ministry? What are some perspectives, themes, notions, theologies, etc. that you think we should be aware of that could change the landscape of how youth ministry is practiced?

an intro of sorts

Well, my good friend Tom has asked that I'd participate in the new non-profit organization he's created called Faith Sowers. I have to say that I am pretty humbled that he would ask me to participate, and I hope that as a blogger about youth ministry in conjunction with Faith Sowers, that I might participate in the kingdom of God being on earth as in heaven...that this blog would be a creative adventure of possibility, discovery and exploration for youth ministry and the kingdom. I have high hopes for the vision Faith Sowers, and I hope that I can do my part in helping to be a voice and dialogue partner in the realm of youth ministry.

Before I start talking about the subject at hand, it would probably be better if you knew a little about me and where I'm coming from so that you might have even a slight context for the comments and posts I will share. I'm a 24-year old white guy, living in the the little town of Jeffersonton, a rural community, that is on the outskirts of the town where I am a youth minister which is Warrenton, Virginia. Believe it or not, Warrenton is really not that far from DC, and has gotten lumped in with "Northern Virginia." I'm married to the woman I dated for nearly five years before we got married, we've been married 2 and 1/2 years, (that's right if you do the math that makes us high-school sweethearts), and we are currently living in an apartment that is part of a house that is owned by a family with youth from the church I'm a part of. My wife is wonderful, and is an 8th grade world history teacher in Prince William County. Warrenton is located in Fauquier County Virginia, the county praised as the best rural county to live in, in the U.S. in 2005. That's our claim to fame, and I have to say it's a beautiful area, where the possibility for sustainability and simple living is becoming more of a reality for me.


I grew up in a pastor's family, with my pops having a knack for church planting and missions, and we moved quite a bit. I have a couple of brothers who are fun dudes. I am currently, believe it or not, youth pastor at the church my parents started over 10 years ago (they are no longer there and weren't when I was hired). And I will have been at the current church I'm working at for three years in April. I'm also a second-year seminary student at The John Leland Center for Theological Studies, a small, new, innovative baptist (not SBC, just baptist) seminary near DC. I really love it there, and if you are in the area looking for an awesome seminary with diverse perspectives, this is a great place to be.

And lastly, to get to the heart of what this blog will be about, I am working with youth in a baptist church where the statistics from last summer from our tradition say that 88% of students leave the church within one year of graduation of high school. 88%. That's a lot. And I'm not really a numbers kind of guy, and yet that number causes me to pause for quite a while. Believe it or not, I've heard of statistics as high as 95% in other traditions, while many traditions seem to be hovering around the 85-95% range of dropout after high school. And I have to say that I think these statistics, in my experience, are pretty accurate. And so as I write and think about some of the issues facing youth ministry whether systemic, individual, ecclesiological, missiological, authoritative, pop trends...and more, I wanted to make clear that from my perspective, I think that some pretty drastic changes are needed.

Perhaps we should start there. I really think that youth ministry has some seismic changes to go through in the coming years, but I've met some people who don't think this is the case. So perhaps this is a good starting place. Is the way youth ministry is being done currently in a lot of churches in need of change? Which there is of course a wide diversity of youth ministries, but let me try to name a few that I've witnessed, been a part of, or tried and this is just a short list (and these are broad generalizations):

1. Entertainment driven- keep the students busy, having fun, and hopefully without boring them, discuss God. This model tends to avoid thick theological discussion, or "Bible study" because students aren't ready for it, or are incapable of understanding so called "deep" concepts. However they can and will be expert X-box players.
   
2. Leader driven- the personality of the leader makes and breaks the group. When the youth pastor leaves, everyone leaves, because the youth hinged on the personality and person of the youth leader.
3. Keep-them-busy-so-they-don't-get-in-trouble-youth-ministry- a social club of sorts, where parents are more concerned that youth have less opportunity to get in trouble than that they would become transformed followers of Christ.
   
4. Knowledge Centered youth ministry- where the goal is to have the students know as much about the Bible as possible, yet never practice their faith, or learn how to integrate their faith into the whole of their lives.
5. Youth Compartment- the youth ministry is really a term to describe the people in the church who are in 6th through 12th grade that are an anomaly to the whole church body. They are set off as sort of an alien race that do their own events, have their own worship services, and only see the adults they live with, or those who are in the "real" service.
   

Now let me say, that I know that those are broad generalizations, and that most youth ministries are a combination of a few of those mentioned (and other types too) and that some people may be completely satisfied and seeing much better results in their youth ministry, churches and traditions. However, I think that there are some big changes necessary for us to move forward, to break down some of these categories and assumptions about youth and about youth ministry that have proven, in my view, to be largely unhelpful.

What do you think? Does youth ministry need to change at all? Or is it find the way it is?