How connected are young people to the adults in their lives? How connected do they want to be? How connected do they need to be?
More than 50 pastors, youth ministry leaders, authors, and scholars gathered last fall to examine those key questions and others at the Christian Formation of Youth Consultation. The conference, sponsored by the Lilly Endowment, Inc., one of the largest sources of funding for programs and research devoted to religion in the United States, was held last Nov. 6-8 in Indiana. Its findings likely will influence the future of youth ministry.
The studies are conclusive: “All young people feel that they need more and better relationships with adults,” said the Lilly Endowment’s Chris Coble. Young people have a lot of adults in their lives, said Gene Eugene C. Roehlkepartain of the Search Institute in Minneapolis, but “it’s striking how few young people have good, sustained relationships with adults within congregations.”
Part of the problem is how we’ve thought about youth ministry, said Dayle Rounds of Princeton Theological Seminary. “We think youth ministers are paid to have relationships with young people. That can undermine the sense that other people should be having relationships with young people, too,” she said.
Another part of the problem is that it takes time to build relationships—and adults feel pressed for time, said Frank Rogers of Claremont School of Theology in Southern California. “We know what it takes for Christian formation. We just don’t do it,” he continued. But encouraging adults to do it is the job of the youth minister, said Mark DeVries, who leads the youth ministry coaching firm Youth Ministry Architects in Nashville, Tennessee. Youth ministers should be “keepers of the vision,” said DeVries— they should be “the orchestrator of gifts, not the incarnation of all giftedness,” he said. “We don’t need camp-counselor style youth ministers anymore.” He said that what we need are architects: people who can nurture “a constellation of relationships for kids.”
Getting Past Fast and Shallow
Anne Wimberly of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta agreed. “What we need is a ‘re-villaging,’ ” said Wimberly, who directs Youth Hope-Builders Academy, a leadership program for African-American high schoolers. Parents, and other adults outside young peoples’ immediate families, need to be encouraged to see themselves as part of young peoples’ “villages,” she said.
Regardless of where young people are and how they are experiencing religion in their lives, there are some common themes that emerge that shape what young people want and need, said Robert J. McCarty, executive director of the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry, based in Washington, D.C.
According to McCarty, young people have “five hungers”: for meaning and purpose, for recognition, for connection, for the holy, and for justice. The issues are timeless and universal, but the ever-changing context demands new responses, he said.
“Young people live in a culture that’s fast and shallow,” said McCarty. Churches need to be “countercultural” in response. Carmen Cervantes, executive director of the Instituto Fe y Vida, which focuses on Hispanic Catholic youth, agrees. “Let them get the fun and games elsewhere”; church is where connection and deep relationships need to happen, she said.
There’s a desire among people—young and old—for human relationships, all agreed. It’s a desire for a place that brings people together to share life. It’s a desire to reflect together on the meaning of our lives and on our own Christian journeys. We all want to receive encouragement and affirmation for the tough and faithful choices we make and the things we struggle with.
Here’s how John Witvliet of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship summarized the kind of youth ministry that the pastors and youth experts felt was needed in response to what we know about young people today: Young people need youth ministry that’s “deeply relational, embedded in community, ecological and not just programmatic, intergenerational, theologically robust, harbors high expectations, is engaged with the life of the world, is lifelong, and helps youth articulate the faith while [it] also recognizes the limits of language in doing that.”
Too often in congregations today, “We’re just living out the middle-class norms of the idea that the nuclear family has to do everything on its own,” said Melissa Wiginton of the Fund for Theological Education. “We need to challenge that,” she said.
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Lynn Schofield Clark, Ph.D., is author of From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural (Oxford University Press, 2005) and co-author of Media, Home, and Family (Routledge, 2004). A former youth worker, Clark is now an assistant professor in Media and Communication at the University of Denver.
