My brother and his wife spend most of their waking hours thinking about drag racing. Their whole lives revolve around race cars: they build them, race them, rebuild them and race them again. When I have the opportunity to watch them race, I’m always amazed by the precision with which they tune the car, burn the tires, pack the parachute and adjust the electronics for optimal acceleration down the quarter-mile stretch. They love cars, and they love racing; and that’s exactly how they became interested in motor sports. Through the years, however, they’ve come to understand just how much knowledge and skill it actually takes to build a car and race it down the track.
I started out in youth ministry much the same way nearly 30 years ago. I loved Jesus, and I loved kids; and a friend of mine told me that was exactly what youth ministry was all about. While there’s a lot of truth in that, there’s also a lot more to it than that; and I’ve learned just how much knowledge and skill it really takes to build a ministry and lead teenagers down the track of vibrant Christian living.
My brother would say that everyone in the grandstands loves cars and loves racing, but only those who’ve taken the time to acquire the knowledge and skills of the sport are out on the track. Likewise, there are many Christians who love kids and love Jesus—the brave few come out of the grandstands to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to engage in faithful and effective youth ministry.
A Growing Knowledge Base
Racing a soapbox derby car down a hill takes a certain amount of technique, but racing a top fuel dragster at more than 300 mph is something quite different. As cars become more complex, more knowledge and skill is required even though the basics (four tires and a steering wheel) remain the same. As our society has become increasingly complex, diverse, tolerant, individualistic and relativistic, it has been necessary for us to broaden our scope and deepen our knowledge and understanding of the multidimensional organism that is youth ministry.
Our approach to youth ministry is affected by our sociological understanding of culture, subcultures and primary groups. It’s affected by our understanding of the physiological and psychological development of adolescents. Many middle school youth workers and parents rest easier when they understand how early adolescents are wired—and that the wiring improves with age. It’s affected by the history of how we were ministered to as teenagers and by the selective folklore of the “good old days” when youth ministry was easier. It’s affected by our theology and the core values that we—the church, the parents, the elders, and the senior pastor bring to the table. Youth ministry happens in a context, and everything in that context (for good or ill) affects youth ministry.
To that end, youth ministry has been blessed with the infusion of many thoughtful and talented people who’ve taken the time to ask hard questions and think critically about the future of youth ministry in an ever-changing global society. The research and scholarship that has been done concerning adolescents and ministry has provided a wealth of knowledge and resources to help youth workers in their ministries. In fact, the USA Regional Conference of the International Association for the Study of Youth Ministry hosted a conference on Adolescents and the Gospel in American Culture in January 2006. Many youth workers have found that the more they understand about the sociology and psychology of adolescents and the more they understand their own theological assumptions about God and ministry, the simpler youth ministry becomes.
Beyond Just ‘Loving Jesus and Loving Kids’
Top fuel youth ministry is no longer simply held together by a loose affinity around loving Jesus and loving kids, though those are great bonds. We’re working hard to ground the practice of youth ministry on philosophical and theological foundations, as well as empirical data from social science research that informs our practices. There’s always a danger in professionalizing youth ministry that we might become an ivory tower filled with theoretical journals and philosophical jargon that’s meaningless to the grassroots practice of youth ministry—but I don’t have any sense that’s happening.
Those doing research and writing are passionately concerned for the spiritual wellbeing of typical teenagers on yellow school busses all across the country. The successful development of youth ministry as a profession has nothing to do with associations, publications or educational degrees—but it has everything to do with the wisdom gained and applied through such vehicles as they promote vibrant community, quality resources and life-long learning.
As we continue to create additional opportunities for youth ministry education, we’re improving our understanding of the proper contexts and delivery systems for training people in areas of practical theology such as youth ministry. I think we’ve been pretty honest with each other about that. Remember, it’s one thing to learn a lot about cars and racing; it’s quite another to learn how to race a car without killing yourself or someone else in the process. There are some things about youth ministry that students simply can’t learn in an academic setting, because they can only be learned on the job. Continuing education through seminars and conferences while on the job can be very helpful in processing certain issues.
On the other hand, there are foundational principles, models, and skills that can’t be learned in a one-hour seminar and are best learned in an academic setting prior to engaging in ministry so youth workers can avoid the old trial-and-error method of developing a ministry (which often results in a significant amount of pain for parents, students and youth workers).
Building Foundations
While formalizing youth ministry might suggest that it’s becoming too static, nothing could be further from the truth. Youth ministers are becoming more creative and dynamic than ever. The most creative youth ministries of the ’60s and ’70s look dreary compared to what’s happening today, in part because we’ve raised the bar in the field of youth ministry, and youth workers are starting out at a much higher skill level and on a much stronger foundation. The students I’m working with will begin their youth ministry careers right out of college with more knowledge and experience than I had after my first 10 years in ministry, and that’s very exciting!
The field of youth ministry now has a wealth of educational resources which create a framework through which the practice of youth ministry can be processed. Some denominations and churches have created standards and formal qualifications for youth workers. In most cases, churches and communities know what youth ministry is all about and know what they want their youth ministries to produce. Much of the guesswork has been taken out of youth ministry as it has developed during the past century; while there are a variety of models and variables in the practice of youth ministry, church and parachurch organizations, for the most part, have a firm commitment to the foundational theology and principles that undergird their mission.
Theological Diversity
This hasn’t simply happened overnight with the waving of a magic wand. Countless faithful saints have worked diligently to ensure that assumptions about youth ministry are well thought out and properly aligned with our particular theologies. Not only has it become important to ensure that our theology lines up with Scripture, but we’ve also taken seriously our understanding of the collective wisdom of the community of saints, past and present. In many cases, we must ensure that our theology reflects the same theology of our overseeing authority. More than a few youth workers have had to “relocate,” not because they were doing a poor job, but because they were doing the wrong job from the perspective of the overseeing pastor, council or committee. Transplanted to fertile ground where their view of youth ministry was more in line with the desires of their overseers, the youth worker flourishes. If my brother tries to race his dragster on an oval track, nothing good will come of the venture; likewise, place an Episcopalian youth worker in a Southern Baptist context and life could become explosive very quickly.
One of the struggles these days with the professionalizing of youth ministry is maintaining our ability to work across denominational and theological boundaries. As conservatives, moderates and liberals continue to drift further and further apart theologically, we must maintain a first-things-first principle and stay rooted in our foundational beliefs and causes.
Last summer, I was sitting around a table with a half-dozen youth ministry educators representing Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants and Evangelicals. We asked ourselves a very basic and honest question: What do we have in common? After much discussion we concluded that we were all passionate about the gospel of Christ, the issues of postmodern culture and the lives of teenagers. The result of this ongoing discussion was the creative development of an ecumenical symposium for youth ministry educators entitled “Adolescents and the Gospel in American Culture.” Even as different factions of Christianity fine-tune their definitions of youth ministry, it’s critical that we maintain thoughtful dialogue with one another and not lock ourselves away in our comfortable (and often narrow) traditions.
Advancing the Field
Youth ministry is different. Period. No matter what profession you try to compare youth ministry to, there’s never a sound association. The first sentence in Rick Warren’s best-selling book The Purpose Driven Life states: “It’s not about you.” Nothing could be truer of the people who’ve been instrumental in developing youth ministry over the past century.
When you consider some of the rich history of youth ministry organizations, you find that the great pioneer Jim Rayburn eventually is fired from his own organization; you read about the great independent Youth for Christ rallies that had an affinity of cooperation and networking long before Youth for Christ International became an association; you can find a senior pastor in Francis Clark who was so passionate about young people that he created a massive youth education ministry in Christian Endeavor more than 100 years ago. Yet you’d be hard pressed to find a person whose original vision was to create an organization.
Youth Specialties and Group Publishing were started by people who wanted to put creative ideas in the hands of church workers; and they sold resources out of their cars, garages and apartments to help youth leaders be more effective. YouthWorker Journal was born from a sense that some are called to youth ministry as a life-long calling and require thoughtful, reflective dialogue to meet their ever-growing personal and professional needs as professionals in youth work. We shouldn’t be surprised then that the development of academic youth ministry has followed a similar path.
Unlike most academic fields, formal youth ministry education began with a few seminars, then a few courses, then a few seminary professors, then it trickled down to colleges. Then one day, Ken Garland at Talbot School of Theology thought, “What if we got some of these educators together?” So he invited all the people he knew who were teaching youth ministry in a formal or semi-formal context to get together and share experiences. That simple act of gathering like-minded people together for a weekend was the beginning of the Association of Youth Ministry Educators and the academic Journal of Youth Ministry.
About the same time, Pete Ward was serving as the advisor on youth work to the Archbishop of Canterbury in England; with the help of a few soul mates, he decided to invite people around the world who were doing research and teaching in youth ministry to gather at Oxford for a discussion. That simple desire to communicate globally about the field of youth ministry was the start of what’s now the International Association for the Study of Youth Ministry and the Journal of Youth and Theology.
Concerns for the Field
More than 15 years ago, Tony Campolo expressed his concerns about the professionalization of youth ministry in his book Growing Up in America: A Sociology of Youth Ministry. He warned that the development of ministry technique would supplant dynamism, that rationality would replace spontaneity and that the increasing tendency toward what Max Weber described as the routinization of enigmatic leadership would destroy a once vivacious movement.
Have Campolo’s prophetic words come to pass? Has charismatic leadership been replaced with rational professionalism? I don’t think so. I still know a lot of irrational youth workers who are very creative, challenge the established norms, and because of their education and knowledge, are ministering far more effectively than ever before. Sure, we can point to certain quarters where youth ministry has become too programmatic, too rational; and too routine; but by and large, youth ministry has maintained its cutting-edge, vibrant, entrepreneurial spirit.
Raising the Bar
Today, there are books and courses and people doing all sorts of research on ministry models, adolescents and cultural issues; but youth ministry isn’t coming of age because someone told us we needed to (we still tend not to do what we’re told) or because we found a vacant ivory tower that needed occupying. Youth ministry is coming of age because of the passion that women and men have for passing on the faith from one generation to the next. If that has resulted in research, associations, journals, seminars, conferences, resources and academic degrees, that’s wonderful—but these products are simply the result of a charismatic passion that lives deep within our souls.
The takeaway from all this isn’t the standardization of youth ministry, but the general raising of the bar for everyone in youth ministry—broadening our scope, our understanding and our resources. Leading a ministry based on a single personality or one person’s experience, or driven by the views of one seminar speaker or one author, one resource will be short-lived in our complex, multicultural society. My brother taught me early on that a race car engine must be tuned differently for each race based on the altitude of the race venue, track conditions, humidity, wind velocity, etc. For him, understanding how to tune the car in order for it to perform optimally under a variety of conditions is critical; context matters. In the same way, as we research, teach and work together, we educate one another in the broadest context possible so we might implement the best practices available in the proper context when God gives us the green light to run the race set before us.
Emerging Venues of Discourse
As like-minded people have come together to advance the field of youth ministry, a number of educational and research venues have emerged to promote intentional discourse on pertinent issues of adolescents, culture and ministry. While some of these organizations focus on resourcing the grassroots practitioner and others focus on academics, they’re all working to help develop the very best practices in youth ministries. Most of the following organizations are in conversation with each other—as academic organizations rely heavily on input from practitioners for guidance in researching and thinking through the right issues (don’t you just hate it when scholars solve the wrong problem?), and practitioner organizations rely heavily on academics for new knowledge.
Academic Associations
The two most significant academic organizations to emerge in the field of youth ministries to date would be the Association of Youth Ministry Educators (AYME) and the International Association for the Study of Youth Ministry (IASYM). The AYME is a group of North American men and women committed to youth ministry education at the highest level. College and seminary professors along with denominational leaders and independent youth ministry educators encourage and challenge one another in setting the course for the future of youth ministry education and its effectiveness. In this type of educational context, youth ministers learn from and inform the questions asked by researchers and the answers found in research itself. The theologically conservative AYME is the publisher of the Journal of Youth Ministry, which is published twice a year and contains applied research articles, book reviews and reviews of social science research that have implications for the field of youth ministry. Its annual conference is held each year near the end of October.
The IASYM exists to further the study, research and teaching of youth ministry around the world and maintains a global membership of educators and researchers who are in dialogue concerning the contextualization of youth ministry in a variety of cultures. This is a very diverse group theologically with progressive leanings, which make the online conversations all the more fascinating. The IASYM publishes the Journal of Youth and Theology twice a year containing a wide variety of international articles, holds regional conferences around the globe and hosts irs primary global conference every other year in London, England.
Research Institutes
Perhaps the most significant research institute to emerge since Merton Strommen founded Search Institute in 1958 has been the Link Institute at Huntington University, which was started in the early 1990s under the direction of Dave Rahn.
Link Institute strives to be a catalyst to the church for the development of biblically faithful, increasingly effective youth ministry for a rapidly changing world. Their passion is to improve the practice of youth ministry through critical research, writing and networking attempts to make significant connections between scholarship and practice in order to produce more faithful and effective youth ministry.
In recent years, numerous other academic institutions have created formidable institutes for youth ministry research. The Institute for Youth Ministry (IYM) at Princeton Theological Seminary is committed to integrating theory and practice not only through its degree programs, but also by providing theological training for youth workers in the field. While the IYM is ecumenical in its scope, it maintains a particular interest in the advancement of youth ministries in mainline denominations. The IYM also conducts an annual forum on youth ministry out of which they publish the Cloud of Witnesses CD that contains lectures from the forum on youth, the church and culture .
Fuller Theological Seminary launched the Center for Youth and Family Ministry (CYM), which engages practitioners and educators to identify the most pressing issues in youth ministry, carry out research on those issues and turn the research into practical solutions and resources for youth workers. The list could go on and on—there’s a good chance that a college or seminary or institute in close proximity to most youth workers is in the process of seriously studying the issues of youth ministry.
Resource Organizations
In addition, there are several organizations that, while not necessarily doing primary research, have become passionate about disseminating high quality research and analysis concerning adolescents, culture and theology. For more than 15 years, the Center for Parent and Youth Understanding (CPYU) has been committed to building strong families by striving to bridge the cultural-generational gap between parents and teenagers. The CPYU has developed an international reputation as a voice providing cutting-edge information, quality resources and thoughtful analysis on contemporary youth culture based on the latest research, critique, and commentary available.
Youth Specialties has been resourcing and training youth workers for more than 35 years. An organization that began with ideas books and graduated to chapter books is now publishing academic textbooks in the field of youth ministry for highly educated youth workers to find continuing education. Its annual Youth Workers Conventions and CORE seminars reflect the wisdom YS has gleaned from significant interaction with scholarly professionals.
Group Publishing has also been producing ministry resources for more than three decades, and there’s a significant amount of research that goes into its products. In recent years, Group has been bringing together some of the best scholarly thinkers and some of the best hands-on practitioners to force the intersection of research and practice, resulting in new creative designs for the implementation of ministry in the church. Group established an Initiative Grant Program to encourage scholars and practitioners to engage in research on Christian ministry that will lead to transforming faith.
Research on Adolescence
Every once in a while, there’s research on adolescence that has genuine implications for youth ministry but comes from a most unlikely source—a research university. Every research university has psychologists, sociologists and theologians studying adolescents, culture and religion, who publish their findings in academic journals—but not every study is easily applied to the work of the church. Often the most applicable research can be found in summary form in a Research Notes section of publications such as the Journal of Youth Ministry and the Christian Education Journal.
At the University of North Carolina, sociologist Christian Smith decided to embark on a high-quality academic research project on adolescents and religion while at the same time ensuring the findings would become highly accessible for faith communities. In setting out to fill a significant gap in adolescent research, Smith and his colleagues in the National Study of Youth and Religion, embarked on the most comprehensive and methodologically reliable study of teenagers and faith that has ever been undertaken. The results of this treasure trove of a study were released earlier this year in Smith’s book Soul Searching published by Oxford University Press.
For the first time, high quality research demonstrates there’s a significant difference in the behaviors of students who are highly devoted to their faith and those who aren’t engaged in faith—an issue we’ve wondered about for a long time. At the same time the study indicated that teenagers are incredibly tongue-tied when it comes to explaining what they believe and why they believe it; apparently we haven’t taught them as well as we might, and we need to raise the bar in teaching apologetics to adolescents. These are just two of the results of this groundbreaking work, and the implications of this study will be discussed for years to come.
Let me conclude with one more nugget from this academic goldmine: You may be surprised to learn the faith of teenagers is most often a virtual mirror of their parents’ faith (good or bad). Take that research to your next parents’ meeting.
