In 1994, I left my job in youth ministry and enrolled in seminary, hungering to learn a way of ministering grounded in continual attentiveness to God. I soon discovered I wasn’t alone in my desire to find a more transforming way to practice ministry. As I shared my studies at youth ministry conferences and gatherings, I found there were many other youth workers who were similarly seeking to deepen their ministry.
Over time many of us began to feel that the problem with youth ministry was a problem of depth. Youth ministry had become shrill and clanging, often mimicking the bells and whistles of the consumer culture. We needed to drop down an octave. We needed to stop piggybacking on the cultural images and trends that shaped adolescence and begin speaking to the deeper longings of the adolescent soul. The question was, “How?”
That’s the question I’ve been trying to answer since founding the Youth Ministry and Spirituality Project in 1997. Thanks to a series of grants from the Lilly Endowment, I and others tested and developed what we called a “contemplative approach” to youth ministry. Here’s some of what we found.
An Ear to Hear
A friend of mine attended a Christian pastors’ conference in downtown Atlanta. The participants, who gathered from across North America, included one Native American pastor who was on his first trip to a major metropolitan city. During a lunch break the Native American pastor took a walk outside with one of his colleagues. As they stretched their legs along the busy sidewalk, the pastor suddenly stopped, turned to his companion, and said,“Do you hear that?” The friend paused and considered the bustling noise of the city. “Hear what?” he replied.
Planted along the downtown sidewalk was a small row of trees. At the base of each tree was a circle of flowers. The pastor walked over to one of the trees, knelt down, reached beneath one of the floral clusters, then stood and opened his hand, revealing a small black bug. “It’s a cricket.”
Dumbfounded, his friend replied, “How could you possibly hear that?”
The Native American pastor reached into his pants pocket, took out a handful of coins, and threw them into the air. As the coins hit the cement, people from all directions stopped and looked down.
The pastor turned to his companion and said, “It depends on what you’re listening for.”
Sadly, the Christian church is losing its capacity to listen.
Instead of heeding the call to “be still before the Lord, and wait patiently,” we “fret” and worry and “plot” (Psalm 37). Driven by our own fearful voices we run ahead of grace, frantically seeking a plan, a strategy, a formula for securing a Christian life. Every idea must be exploited, every insight publicized, every sermon downloaded, every passing thought blogged and posted. We live in a time when everyone is talking at once—a time when the truth isn’t hidden but drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
Christianity is relationship; and any counselor worth her salt will tell you that every healthy relationship is based in listening. What does it mean to do youth ministry within a Christian culture in which listening to God is rarely practiced? What does it mean when churches, parents, and youth ministers instead begin to listen to the anxious, predictable voice of society?
Capital ‘L’ Leaders
Below is an ad that was recently posted on the job openings page of a youth ministry Web site:
We are looking for a highly driven, self-motivated, capital “L” leader to oversee our 9-12th grade program and supervise our 6-8th grade program. This person should have a proven track record of growing student ministry programs (numerically spiritually), recruiting leaders, and supervising staff. If your philosophy of ministry is to start with a small core group of students and grow into a large crowd… DO NOT APPLY! We are looking for someone who can draw a crowd. First Church [name withheld] is a fast-paced environment that aims to keep stride with the culture. We are highly purpose-driven and committed to providing a top-rated student ministries program for the students of our area. Salary will reflect experience and education.
On ï¬rst read, the ad seems practical and in line with values we prize as industrious Americans: hard work, cultural relevancy, efficiency, and a drive to succeed.
And yet, if we sit back and reflect further on what this ad communicates, we might have second thoughts: What kind of youth come out of a “highly driven” youth ministry? What kind of youth leader can serve in such a ministry? Who is the God that seeks a “fast-paced environment,” capital “L” leaders, and people who “keep stride” with the culture? Within such a ministry, would it even be possible for someone to have ears ready to be surprised by crickets?
What does it take to be a listener of God? How do we become people who listen for the still, small voice of peace within the rush of our own lives? What would it mean if our primary practice as Christian ministers was to stop, be still, and listen?
The ï¬rst venture of the Youth Ministry and Spirituality Project was a weeklong retreat for youth pastors. With funding from the Lilly Endowment, we began to share our discoveries within a diverse mix of 16 congregations across North America. We produced ï¬ve separate weeks of formation for pastors, youth leaders (professional and volunteer), church members, and student leaders. Later, we reï¬ned and repeated the whole process with another 13 teaching congregations from 2001-2004.
We also spent time visiting each of the churches participating in the project. We interviewed the youth. We read the journals of youth ministers. We spoke with church members, parents, and pastors. Our ï¬ndings conï¬rmed our own experience and suspicions:
1. Current approaches to youth ministry neglect the spiritual life of youth ministers, adult volunteers, and youth.
2. People long to experience God within their own lives.
3. Communities of transformed adults, living lives of prayer and service, attract and transform the lives of young people.
4. Youth desire to recognize God’s presence in their lives and to be empowered to live out their calling.
Forming Contemplative Youth Workers
To teach people to practice contemplative youth ministry, we worked to design a formation process that would help people notice and respond to their desire for God.
We couldn’t simply present lectures on contemplative prayer; we had to find an approach to teaching that would help youth workers develop a new way of being in ministry as well as a new way of thinking about ministry. The question was how.
In response, we produced a series of ï¬ve formation weeks intended to assist youth leaders in embodying the skills and disposition for teaching and practicing contemplative youth ministry. These events were presented in a retreat atmosphere and sought not only to present the principles and practices of contemplative youth ministry but also to model and embody the contemplative disposition upon which the teaching relied.
We took care to see that each formation event was grounded in the following practices and dispositions designed to enlarge the soul of youth ministers, pastors, and churches.
Rest
It’s in experiencing God’s rest that we sense an invitation to loosen our identiï¬cation with our roles and tasks and remember our larger identity as daughters and sons of God.
If we were going to form youth ministers as people who had the soul and spirit of Jesus, we needed to provide people with the same sense of holy rest that Jesus embodied.
Prayer
The primary form of prayer within the project was contemplative prayer, although we also practiced prayers of thanksgiving, petition, and intercession on a daily basis. Contemplative prayer invites a quiet receptivity to the presence of God. By engaging participants in regular periods of prayer, we sought to create formation events that regularly made space and time for God’s intervention.
Solitude and Silence
Silence and solitude created opportunities for participants to give their full attention to their lives with God. These periods of solitude were also experiences of great honesty. In the silence people found they no longer could distract themselves from hard questions, hurt feelings, disappointments, and longings.
Spiritual Companionship
We provided trained spiritual directors, many of them veteran youth workers, to serve as staff at each event. We trusted that a youth leader’s greatest skill in ministering to youth was his or her ability to increase young people’s awareness of God. To do this, we believed that youth leaders needed spiritual companionship where they could be given the space and time to notice and name the experiences of God within their own lives and ministries.
Contemplative Reflection on Experience
Contemplative awareness trusts that God is already present and working in each and every moment. The challenge in our training events was to help people pay better attention to their own lives and the lives of young people, so they could be more discerning of where life was seeking to break forth.
Critical Analysis of Youth Ministry
In formation events we tried to help people broaden their awareness of the prevailing models of youth ministry, the energies that gave rise to these models, and the impact of these various approaches on youth, youth ministers, and churches.
The “consumer” approach refers to those models of ministry that focus on entertaining youth, thereby reflecting the values and mores of the market culture. The “content” approach describes an educational model directed primarily to the transfer of religious information. Of course, these descriptions are quite general; any youth ministry program will be a complex mixture of all these approaches (and others). Yet the comparison helps to reveal the intention of a contemplative approach and provides a sample of the critical awareness we sought to develop within our teaching.
Teaching Contemplative Processes
To show how prayer and contemplative listening might become central to the practice of youth ministry, we designed various contemplative practices and processes for churches to employ within their ministry. They included a discernment approach to staff meetings known as “the liturgy for discernment,” a process for calling and recruiting volunteers, and several processes for leading spiritual exercises with youth.
Theological Reflection
Each day participants were given time in small and large groups to speak about their experiences in prayer and contemplative reflection. The dialogue that emerged within the project was often encouraged and stimulated by the project’s own teaching on the theological and biblical basis of contemplative ministry.
Play
We also made room for spontaneous outbreaks of play. We found that these moments of play rekindled the soul as much as the more formal “spiritual” times of prayer and worship.
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Most youth workers want to address the deeper, spiritual longings of young people. Most youth workers know their real calling isn’t to keep kids amused. Most youth workers long to work beside Jesus in addressing the great need within the human heart for love and truth and meaning.
My hope is that these practices and dispositions can will help youth workers take kids deeper and allow them to let go of approaches to youth ministry that seek simply to keep young people distracted and entertained.
This article was excerpted from Growing Souls: Experiments in Contemplative Youth Ministry © 2007 Mark Yaconelli. Used by permission of Zondervan. Mark’s previous book, Contemplative Youth Ministry: Practicing the Presence of Jesus, was excerpted in the
