Helping Young People Develop Missional Imaginations
From the book Almost Christian by Kendra Creasy Dean. Copyright 2010. Adapted by arrangement with Oxford University Press Inc. All rights reserved.
Every church is called to be a “missional church.” The fact that we have turned the word mission into an adjective testifies to the American church’s frayed ecclesiology. A nonmissional church is not a church in the first place; but in a culture largely devoid of a theological vocabulary, this language has become necessary to remind us the church exists not for ourselves but for the world.
Karl Barth called the church “the missionary community,” and viewed witness as the litmus test for determining “whether the Christian is really a Christian and the Christian community the Christian community.” Yet we persistently view mission not as the identity of the church but as an instrument of it.
The practical theologian Alan Hirsch points out that while “we frequently say ‘the church has a mission,’ according to missional theology a more correct statement would be ‘[God’s] mission has a church.'” The church’s identity in other words is revealed in our fidelity to the mission of God.
Some youth workers’ who recognize postmodernity and popular culture as the natural habitats of teenagers understand the church must be missional.
Adults in youth ministry have long viewed themselves as missionaries to an alien culture, a special breed of theological anthropologists who must learn the language, taboos, artifacts and rituals of the teenage universe in order to make the gospel accessible to them.
Seeking to imitate God’s own missional strategies, youth ministers (and youth ministry literature) overwhelmingly advocate incarnational ministries with young people.
Unfortunately, most of youth ministry’s missiological leanings are too haphazard to operate as a coherent approach to discipleship formation and too intuitive to avoid being absorbed by other congregational agendas. Like all research and development departments, youth ministry’s experiments with mission have a high failure rate. So while youth ministry provides a promising laboratory for test-driving missional ecclesiologies, it may also unwittingly perpetuate anemic understandings of mission and witness.
Ask teenagers in a church youth group what they mean by mission, and most of them will tell you about a hot week in July when they traveled to a poverty-stricken community to do home repair, lead Bible school, and (theoretically) help those who are culturally and/or economically “other.”
For all of their benefits (and I am among those who think they have some), we would do well to admit these trips’ primary beneficiaries are the middle-class teenagers who can afford to take them.
Mission is not a trip or a youth activity, a silent cousin to evangelism or an optional model of youth ministry. Mission is the business that congregations are in. Christ views young people as participants in God’s mission rather than as targets of ours. God does not send out a few teenagers in a church van to represent Christ in the world on behalf of the church; God sends the whole church into the world as missionaries.
A missional imagination assumes that young people take part in the church’s mission—that every Christian teenager is a missionary called to translate the gospel across boundaries, not because he or she is capable or even interested, but because he or she is baptized and therefore is sent into the world as an envoy of Christ. The more teenagers tell this story, the more it starts to “tell them.” In other words, as the Holy Spirit aligns young people’s lives with the gospel and empowers them to proclaim and enact Christ’s embrace, a missional imagination takes root: Teenagers begin to view the world as a place where God acts and to see themselves as participants in God’s action.
This is what an incarnational view of mission looks like: the human translation of divine action in the world. If we take the incarnation seriously, a missional imagination leads to an understanding of mission as translation, not as ideological, territorial or even spiritual conquest.
Lamin Sanneh views the gospel’s translatability as one of Christianity’s signature qualities. Unlike Islam, he observes, “Christianity spread as a religion without the language of its founder:
“Without a revealed language and without even the language of Jesus, Christianity invested in idioms and cultures that existed for purposes other than Christianity…Being a translated religion, Christian teaching was received and framed in the terms of its host culture; by feeding off the diverse cultural streams it encountered, the religion became multicultural. The local idiom became a chosen vessel…Local versatility animated the mission movement.”
The reason parents, pastors and youth ministers should take the theory of mission-as-translation to heart is simple: It is not just about witnessing of the gospel in new cultures. Translation is also how we share faith with our children. The principles that describe the gospel’s transmission across cultures just as easily could describe the way faith is ferried across generations.
To participate in God’s own sending of Jesus Christ, youth ministry must attend to all missionary principles of the incarnation: God’s coming to us and God’s sending of us, God’s blessing and God’s calling, God’s radical acceptance and God’s radical challenge. Let’s read this passage again:
“When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ After He said this, He showed them His hands and His side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent Me, so I send you.’ When He had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained'” (
There it is, in the middle of verse 20: then. An unnoticeable word maybe, unless you are a parent, a pastor or anyone who works with teenagers—but there it is, a delayed reaction, the lapse that occurs between telling a teenager she is beautiful and having her believe it; the interval between showing up at the high school gym and having your player, ready for a free throw, notice you are there; the space between hearing the good news and responding to it. Jesus shows up, speaks up, shows them His scars—then the disciples reacted.
At the end of the day, making disciples requires incarnation, not cultural adaptation. Every Christian community shares a certain amount of ecclesiastical DNA, which emerges in ways that are unique to every body of believers. We follow the same sacred writings; pray to the same triune God; use bread, wine and water in the same special ways; and claim to be mystically related to one another.
Above all, one unvarying theme unites communities that call themselves Christian, according to Andrew F. Walls: “The person of Jesus called the Christ has ultimate significance.” Any cultural practice or ideology that compromises the ultimate significance of “the person of Jesus called the Christ” compromises the church’s missional identity.
The good news is that congregations do have tools for cultivating consequential faith, even if they are rusty from disuse. Practices such as translation, testimony and detachment figure prominently in missionary history. These practices help young people by seeding the missional imaginations necessary for consequential Christian faith. In so doing, they remind us how to be a church that sends young people out rather than rope in young people.
