When God Shows Up: A History of Protestant Youth Ministry in America
Mark H. Senter III
Baker Academic, 2010, 384 pp., $26.99, BakerBooks.com

It’s tough to read a book without its cover giving you a bias. I’ve been a grateful fan of Mark Senter’s work for years since his opus The Coming Revolution of Youth Ministry mentored me as a rookie youth worker. Rarely do you encounter someone who answers questions you didn’t even know to ask. For that experience, I looked forward to this read.

On the other hand, the title of this book rubbed me the wrong way—God doesn’t “show up” because He is everywhere. This may seem like semantics, especially because Senter’s intent is to highlight when our historical attempts to introduce young people to the Lord have seemed fruitful. That said, Senter does write as I propose—that God is active and it’s up to us to recognize how we successfully and unsuccessfully have connected those dots for students through the years.

Maybe this is why the dominant metaphor throughout the book is “youth ministry as jazz,” while the chapter themes utilize movie titles (i.e., Gangs of New York, Bruce Almighty, Friday Night Lights). Music and cinema reveal the values of an era, and by understanding where we’ve come from we can better modify our present and future activities beyond our usual “creative programming.” What Senter is really after is helping student ministry have a more practical theology that considers historical and spiritual cycles, to which most of us pay little attention.

While this book definitely feels academic, it’s intended to help youth workers modify their bent simply to put on a good program “this year.” More than likely, another change in culture is coming for which we’re unprepared—unless we understand how the church has responded to it in the past. If we won’t wrestle with our own foundation through a read like this, youth ministry in general will continue to reflect a lack of theological grounding.