It is far too easy to get comfortable in ministry doing the same thing year after year. Adventure takes us out of our routine, forcing us to think through our actions and related beliefs. In short, adventure leads to discovery. This is the reason so many of us do high ropes courses with our youth. They can watch others leap from a pole to a swing 30 feet in the air and know that thousands of people have done so safely. Actually having to jump yourself? Everything changes. In these situations, what you know may be trumped by what you are experiencing. You may have to process what you just watched 30 other people do to be able to feel confident enough to try it yourself.
A few years ago, camps began having adventure weeks or parallel adventure tracks for leaders, student leaders, and those who have been going to camp for years. These camp experiences include sea kayaking, backcountry hiking and overnight solos. These experiences are more intense in order to raise questions and challenge participants regarding what they were capable of doing and being.
Yet, there is a danger in adventure and discovery. It can be done simply for the adrenaline rush or in the hopes that something will work with your students, breaking you and them out of a rut. This kind of adventure seeking can work against itself. Rather than moving closer to Christ, into a deeper faith or new understanding, it pushes you to seek increasingly intense experiences. Think of your friends who became mission junkies. You know the ones. They went on their first trip in a safe, controlled environment leading VBS; before long, their trips were badges of honor with incrementally more difficult, intense and dangerous levels for each one. They may grow with each trip, but it is more about living life on the edge than building and discovering the kingdom of God. An added challenge is that the best designed, most intentional adventures designed-for-discovery look strikingly similar to the ones that merely give an adrenaline rush.
So, what’s the difference?
Your Teacher Is Your Sherpa
The difference begins in education. Sometimes an adventure takes place when we stop seeking adrenaline, slow down, and create space for learning. You read that correctly. It begins with good old-fashioned reading, reflecting and conversation. When our worlds are overwhelmingly busy and we are overstimulated, a new adventure awaits in the intentional spaces of Christian education. When training for ministry is done correctly, it invites us into an adventure we never imagined, where discovery happens.
Here’s how education and adventure lead to discovery. Many habits are formed in the fertile ground of embedded beliefs. We may not know why we do something, such as ending youth group with the Lord’s Prayer, but we have strong convictions that it must. The correctness of a behavior is assumed rather than critically assessed. Habits can be beautiful, life-giving, transformative elements in our world. They may be correct. They guide us when our understanding or experience betrays us. Yet, a habit left unchecked simply becomes a hollow action.
For many of us, the very act of ministry becomes habit. We offer Sunday School, mid-week services and retreats because those practices are what we’ve always done. Previous ministries color our ministerial choices, but the why has been forgotten. Education breaks this down. You move from learning how to do ministry to the why of ministry. Education opens the adventure of discovery to recapture for each new generation the important elements of our faith. Adventures help us name or rename the discoveries tied to our habits. Whether these adventures include a harness or a textbook, the discoveries are powerful and transformative.
Our brains play a major role in this task of creating and untangling habits as adventures and new discoveries take place. The basal ganglia aids in the formation of habits and similarly plays a key role in emotional development, memories and rhythmic structures in our lives. Those emotional ties keep us doing things long after we reflect on why. In the early stages of habit formation, the prefrontal cortex also fires up; it helps choose the patterns to create. As the pattern becomes habitual, the prefrontal cortex powers down. We repeat the habit long after the reason for doing so changes. We go through the motions without the why. We insist on songs in which Jesus is begotten, not created, not knowing this was once a matter of life and death. A collective habit can be more difficult to untangle. Many schools used to have the same spring break, and a spring break trip became a staple in youth ministry. As schools have shifted, many churches still retain this tradition, forcing either multiple trips or hurt feelings along the way.
We need formal Christian education to help us name and examine our ministerial habits. Christian education invites ministers into the adventure of discovery. In turn, when we are choosing adventures for our students, it’s for so much more than the adrenaline rush!
Amy Jacober, Ph.D., is a professor and minister who has focused on adolescents and marginalized communities for nearly two decades. She serves on the National Board for Young Life’s Capernaum Ministries, as well as volunteers in her local community. She is a founding member of the Sonoran Theological Group, an organization dedicated to making personal, practical and affordable theological education available to everyone. When not teaching or writing, she may be found playing with her three small children and oversized dog.
