Doesn’t a conversation about discovery in YouthWorker seem a little oxymoronic? After all, we’re youth workers. Our weeks are filled with activities most adults would love to be paid to do. We play. We plan adventures for teenagers. We strategize how we can help students discover God’s Word. We get together with other adults and plan retreats, adventure games, lock-ins and so many other things.
We live in a constant state of movement; and because we do, discovery becomes rote, and adventure quickly turns toward an unbridled life. We live at the speed of creativity, moving from one crazy event to another. We evaluate our ministries based only on the amount of adventure we’re offering. We push ourselves to offer students more. We do that repeatedly…and somewhere along the way we lose our grip on healthy ministry.
We’ve gathered four youth workers to speak to discovery and adventure in youth ministry. How does a theology of adventure look, and how do we live out that theology in a way that engages students? How do we live out that theology as adults, while not losing our childlike spirits?
Kaitlin Kavanaugh is the director of Middle School Ministries at Isle of Hope UMC in Savannah, Georgia. She has been in youth ministry for eight years and loves teaching students about the joy of Jesus. She thinks her middle schoolers are some of the wisest people she has ever met. She enjoys playing music, blogging and eating tacos. Sometimes she pretends to enjoy working out.
Archie Honrado is a spiritual director based in Southern California. He and his wife, Tamara, have a 2-year-old boy. Archie has been providing spiritual direction for youth workers at Youth Specialities’ National Youth Workers Convention for the past decade. He started his missionary career with Youth with a Mission in his native Philippines, served in Scandinavia and Austria for four years before transplanting in Los Angeles, Calif., where he’s been for 22 years. Archie is a devout student of apophatic spirituality to help Millennials cultivate contemplative Christian spirituality in today’s world.
Patti Gibbons is a 25-year veteran youth worker who recently has been serving as the Connections and Communications Director for Christ’s Church Albany, an 18-month-old church plant in Albany, New York. She speaks for youth and youth leaders whenever she’s able, is passionate about discipleship for people of any age, and has authored material for Group/Simply Youth Ministry and other outlets. She blogs less infrequently than she intends at PattiGibbons.com.
Tim Miller is the director of Student Ministries at Lakeview Community Church in Tarpon Springs, Florida. He and his wife, Stephanie, have four kids ages 5 and younger. Most people simply know him as “that guy with dreadlocks and a beard.” He loves Jesus, watching movies, and writing youth ministry curriculum with his buddy Andrew for DownloadYouthMinistry.com.
YWJ: Describe a robust theology of discovery and adventure. What is a practical, real-life application of that theology?
Tim: God is eternal. It’s going to take us an eternity to learn all there is to know about this awesome, eternal God we serve. Part of the adventure of this life we live on earth is discovering more about our heavenly Father. He reveals new things to us on a daily basis. A conscious dependence on the Holy Spirit will lead you to live a life of adventure. It is inevitable.
Patti: Thinking about a theology of discovery and adventure pretty quickly leads me into the margins of life. If discovery and adventure means always or primarily finding those spiritual places in which we are taking risks, abandoning the status quo for the holy, what’s next, of course, could look different for everyone except for the element of “This feels risky” or “This is not ordinary.” For example, when I talk about this leading me into the margins of life, I’m saying that in order to be living a practical theology of discovery and adventure, I’m constantly seeking opportunities to be with and engage people and activities outside the mainstream of my own life experience. That has looked like me praying through a translator on the streets of Port-au-Prince after an earthquake, but it also has looked like mentoring a teenage mother from a tough neighborhood as she navigated the NICU experience with her preemie. In my current church, adventuring looks a lot like bringing a bounce house to a street fair that’s most attractive to alternative-lifestyle young adults to make it a welcome place for families.
Kaitlin: For me, it has a lot to do with navigating the adventures I welcome openly (the fun adventures), but also maybe the ones I didn’t necessarily sign up for. It’s learning how to call upon my faith in the tough moments in ministry that hit where suddenly something happens (e.g., a student passes away), and we all suddenly are along for the ride together. It’s the hard conversations when we are learning to rely on faith and Scripture and teaching our students how to look at these moments through a Christlike lens. It also looks like the process of confirmation my students went through recently. They learn, teach and begin to own their faith in this process and then stand before their community—a community in which many were present at their baptisms and have watched them grow up in the church—and begin to claim it for themselves. It’s walking through those milestones in their lives, watching and guiding them as they navigate life.
Archie: My mystic/contemplative theology framework dictates that discovery comes in cultivating the apophatic and kataphatic practices. My observation as a cultural anthropologist (every youth worker should be one) sees an abundance of kataphatic practices we inherited from our mainly Protestant practices that value the Word of God, the gospel experience driven by feelings, reasoning, visual, logic, a finished product at the end of a production line. For example, when we ask students to do their devotions, we expect them to get an answer right away or ask them what God told them through Scripture right away. So, a robust theology of discovery suggests not just to climb Mt. Everest because it is there, but to explore Mt. Everest because we don’t know Mt. Everest, a distinction between an explorer and an adventurer. A real life application of this might be: 1. Making my bed, house chores are places to find God. 2. When prayers go unanswered, explore the heart of God, and be ready to accept the fact we don’t need answers right away.
It is in exploring that we might find the adventure. However, exploration has to go into the depths of our interior lives. Youth have to be made aware of the vast desert wasteland, the interior life, that’s waiting to be turned into a country. This adventure transcends the visceral, temporal, quick fixes. It calls for a robust apophatic theology where journey into the dark and bright glory of Jesus requires purity of the heart (through contemplative practices) and balances our temporal youth culture world of senses, feelings, imagery, science of pop-psychology, to being mystics because, it is through this discipline that we peel the layers of the false self into being our true selves in Christ.
Giving them contemplative tools today will carry them through their adolescent into the twilight years of simply following Christ.
YWJ: How does a life of discovery and adventure make us more fully who we are? How does it make us better youth workers?
Kaitlin: We can find adventure in the interruption. A lot of my day is filled with everyday tasks, but the heart of ministry is happening in the encounters that were completely unexpected and unplanned. A student recently called to ask if I could drop everything to talk with her at school. She had a difficult conversation with a teacher about faith and just really wanted to talk about it. I hadn’t planned that in my day. In fact, it was kind of difficult to make it work. I think it can make us better youth workers when we are flexible with our schedules and not locked into every detail that has to be done immediately. Sometimes the interruption is the most important ministry.
Patti: Finding newness in the life of faith is like a treasure hunt. Once we step out and discover, then experience the excitement (or maybe lack of terrible consequences) that comes with having tried something out of the ordinary, then we’ve grown! I’ve found in myself and others that what we might call comfort in our own faith habits can become numbing. Practicing discovery and adventure wakes us up; but maybe more importantly, as leaders and disciplers of others, it helps us awaken others to the possibility that the routines of an American Christian life might not be all there is to this thing.
Tim: I believe God created us to be adventurous. If we are living lives of discovery and adventure, aren’t we living the way God intended us to live? As a youth pastor, I know students always are watching me. They check out the pictures I post, the hashtags I use and my tweets. A student once said, “Before I met you, I didn’t wanna be a dad. You make it sound so awesome that now I can’t wait to get married and have kids.” I love that! We get to inspire our students not just with the words we use, but also with the way we live our lives. I feel that part of my job is to show students how incredible this adventure really is. I love my wife, Stephanie, fiercely. I also want my students to know this is how a husband should love his wife, with a fierce love, the same kind of love Christ shows the church. I think living a life of discovery and adventure makes us better youth workers because students always are watching us. When they see us discover something new, that just might inspire them to not give up, too. I’ve met so many teenagers who just don’t care…about anything. They think this whole life is pointless. I want to show them we serve an adventurous God who loves them fiercely, a God who calls us to lives of discovery and adventure, not boredom.
Archie: A life of discovery won’t necessarily tell us who we are, but it takes to our interior lives where our true selves can be found—that is Christ in us. There is a danger is pursuing adventure without being a discoverer or explorer (a contemplative, if you will). A pure adventurer is a thrill seeker, and the danger is that if the adventure or thrill is not challenging enough, then the tendency to be apathetic creates a space in our thought life.
YWJ: What are some important principles youth workers need to adopt into their lives to begin a discipline of discovery and adventure? What do they need to shed?
Patti: Abandon “This works for me.” Seriously. If personal discipleship keeps me from engaging people who don’t believe/are different/are totally other to me or the people in my church walls on Sunday mornings, we might be misunderstanding personal discipleship’s true purpose.
Tim: I think we get so programmatically focused we forget that some of the most memorable moments of youth ministry are the ones we don’t plan! So the tricky part is: How do we plan for those moments of unplanned glory? We purposefully build in 15 to 20 minutes of hangout time at youth group every week. Sometimes, it is in those 15 minutes when real ministry happens. We may learn more about a student’s hurts at a random Chick-fil-A lunch than we would during our small group time at youth group. I remember when I was interning in student ministry, I often took a group of dudes home after youth group. So many good conversations came out of those car rides. Before long, we started a post-youth group Bible study at a gas station with some orange juice while sitting on the tailgate of my truck. If we are going to adopt a discipline of discovery and adventure in our lives, we need to be willing to accept that sometimes stuff just happens. Adventure isn’t always planned, scheduled or programmed. The same could be said about how God moves and works in our lives.
Kaitlin: I completely agree. I think we really have locked into this idea of “If it’s not on the calendar” or “If we didn’t plan weeks in advance, than we should just wait until we can plan it out more.” I remember interning at a church during a really hectic summer, but we had a student who had been asking to do a camping trip for months. We let her plan the final free weekend of summer. We took about 10 students, and it was some of the best ministry I did in my four years there. There’s a lot to be said about the spontaneity of ministry and how God truly is able to move in that.
Patti: So, what you’re both saying, Tim and Kaitlin, is that people are more important than programs in terms of what we (and our students) can discover or the adventures we can find. Why do we spend so much effort on programming when the one-on-one time is so much more productive?
Kaitlin: Patti, that’s such a tough question. Sometimes I wonder if we do it because it’s the only way we know how, or if maybe we’re scared of the adventure that may happen if we don’t plan everything out perfectly. (Isn’t that what programming is, a plan?). Also, I think our students are so scheduled they think they need programming. Their lives are too packed with so many things that they are not learning how to fit in adventure. Programming ends up being packaged in a way that fits into their schedules. I’m not necessarily saying that’s right, though. I do think programming supports those one-on-one moments. There are many students I know, whom I have met because they come on Sunday nights, and it leads us to more in-depth conversations later.
Archie: The discipline of cultivating apophatic theology (the confidence through the contemplative practices of being in the presence of God when nothing is around but a cloud of unknowing), is based on a principle of humility in our pursuit of pure hearts, in which the possibilities of being and seeing God’s truth, beauty and character can be found. Youth workers are proficient in the kataphatic theology practice (reading Scripture, intercessory prayer, petition, thanksgiving, worship through arts, and lately lectio divina) but need to cultivate the apaphatic practices (centering prayer, breath prayer, silence, contemplation).
YWJ: How do we lead students in holistic discovery of Scripture? What principles do we need to follow?
Patti: My goal is to demystify the Bible. Giving students the tools to understand that it’s a library, has human people with real-life stuff going on, has drama and intrigue, and isn’t all on equal footing as far as the way the literature can be understood. All goes a long way toward setting the stage for discovery.
Tim: I think one key here is to whet their appetite for the Word of God. We use phrases such as, “We don’t have time to cover the whole story of Abraham and his awkward nakedness tonight, but you should check it out this week,” and, “Did you know that was in the Bible? Well, it is,” all the time in our ministry. We purposefully do not spoon-feed our students all the answers. This is where your small group leaders can help. Make sure your leaders are given the proper tools to succeed in this area. A good answer from a small group leader can shut up a student. A good question from a small group leader can cause a student’s head to spin, forcing them to search Scripture on their own. Jesus was really good at asking questions. I think this is something every youth worker should strive to improve.
Kaitlin: I love what Patti said about giving them tools to show them that it has real-life application and these are real people. I also think that if we believe God speaks to students, then we should ask them “I wonder…” questions. “I wonder how it was for Jeremiah to go through that dark time? I wonder if I have ever felt that way?” When we ask “I wonder…” questions, it is an open invitation for students to discover how Scripture looks to them, and in turn help them apply it and understand it better. Also, it’s important for us to acknowledge we do not have all the answers. I think sometimes we start hustling for the approval of students because we don’t want to appear lacking in our knowledge. I think when we say “I don’t know,” we are inviting them to wonder with us.
Patti: Kaitlin, yes! Allowing them to put themselves in the narrative is a permission slip we need to write. What were the experiences of these people at that time in their culture? How does that line up with the experience I have—my friends, family, community—in our time and culture? What’s the place where those experiences intersect? Wonder is a great adventuring tool.
YWJ: So much of youth ministry is getting students out of their culture to experience other cultures. What are the best practices for doing that with students?
Archie: Missiology 101 is cultural anthropology. Be a learner first before being a story teller. Even on a short-term mission, learning about the culture being visited must be the priority. If the cultural divide is huge, when engaging, avoid using one’s own culture; do not import worship songs, arts, style. Be a cultural anthropologist.
Patti: Build experiences into your culture. Going on a mission trip? The year prior could be filled with native foods, cultural fairs in nearby places, geography and lots and lots of stories about the people in that place. Find people whose families hail from that place and learn from their stories.
Tim: I agree with Patti. Building experiences into your culture and going on mission trips are huge. We participate in the 30-Hour Famine every year. We team up with another youth ministry in our area and starve a bunch of teenagers for 30 hours. Obviously, the goal is not simply to starve your teenagers. We want to help our students understand that hunger is a very real problem, and they can be part of the solution. This experience is always a real eye-opener for every student and leader who participates.
Patti: For us, it means partnering with anyone where we can find some common ground. Our city has a lot of nonprofits doing great work. We intentionally seek out organizations with a shared value and work with them on something in that arena. It hardly ever means we’re agreeing on every aspect of each other’s mission, but it always means we care about similar issues, such as feeding the hungry, furthering the arts or mentoring children.
Kaitlin: Our church is currently in the process of discovering how these opportunities look locally. We recently have welcomed a displaced Hispanic church that was searching for a place to meet. The questions placed before our church were: How do we do more than share a space? How do we share community, provide hospitality, and join our churches, regardless of the different cultures? We are discovering what it is to experience culture outside of our travel schedules. There’s something that is almost easy about building a friendship in another country while serving for a week, yet so difficult when trying to build those same relationships with the people across the street. It is not something we have perfected, but we are navigating what it means to do it well.
