Ecclesiology and Youth Ministry
Youth ministry and the Church often have an uneasy relationship. It is over twenty years since Kenda Creasy Dean bemoaned the “chasm between youth ministry and the theology of the church as a whole.”[1] Much of her critique remains valid, and this is not ok - given that, in Christ, there is no slave nor free, Jew nor Greek, male nor female,[2] and we might consider adding young nor old, such a chasm is not something we should be ok with.
At least part of the reason for this tension is the way the tradition of youth ministry on both sides of the Atlantic was formed in large part outside regular streams of church life, embodying what Stanley Grenz calls the ‘parachurch ethos’ of evangelicalism.[3] There is good in this – many evangelical organizations that influenced church-based youth work were formed as missionary movements that reached young people disconnected from church life[4] - the challenge comes from the way in which the models and methods of these movements were taken, often uncritically, into church-based youth work resulting in an ‘untethering’ of such ministry from stronger theological (in this case ecclesiological) foundations.[5]
There is a task to be done in re-tethering youth ministry to the theology of the church – to ecclesiology – not least because St Paul intimately connects the life of the individual believer to the life of the church. To be in Christ is to be part of the Body of Christ, the Church. In 1 Corinthians 12:12–13 we read of how we are baptised by one Spirit to form the one body. This is reinforced in v.27 as Paul writes that the Church is “the body of Christ, and each one is a part of it.” There is no room in Paul’s theology for individual believers apart from the Church. Ecclesiology[6] – our theology of the Church – matters.
This re-tethering however is not the sole responsibility of youth ministry however, but should challenge the wider church in its relationship to teenagers. Research by Naomi Thompson in the UK has revealed how churches can unintentionally put up barriers to young people and then blame them for abandoning the Church.[7] As I suggest in the introduction to An Interweaving Ecclesiology the challenge is to see the Church, mission and young people not as three separate things but as one:
Our ecclesiology is all the poorer for not considering the hermeneutical location of young people, our work with them is all the poorer for not reflecting rigorously on the theology of the Church. Our participation in the mission of God will be poorer for both.[8]
This is a challenging topic and task so in this limited space I want to suggest three interconnected ideas that might help navigate the territory:
Be cautious about ‘blueprint’ ecclesiology.
The church is always both institution and movement.
Embracing young people as cultural interpreters.
Nicholas Healy famously coined the phrase that there is no such thing as ‘blueprint ecclesiology’ to be applied in all times and places. Instead, he argued the Church needs to be practical and prophetic in its response to the context in which it finds itself.[9] Similarly, Mannion and Mudge argue that many moves in ecclesiology can be seen as responses to the questions and challenges of a particular age.[10] Interestingly we can read something of this into Paul’s contention that there is no slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile, male nor female in Christ – not that the call for breaking down of division was contextually specific, but rather these categories were direct responses to questions from his first century context. The Church today is called to embrace and embody the radical society envisaged whilst also discerning the particular categories of division that need to be called out today.
This leads to the second idea – the Church is simultaneously institution and movement. We see this in some biblical metaphors for church. The Church is described as living stones being built into a spiritual house (1 Peter 2:5) and the Body of Christ itself (1 Corinthians 12), to name just two. Each of these suggests something given and something growing and moving. The Church is an institution with the vocation of protecting the tradition of faith, preserving the Apostles’ teaching and proclaiming Christ in the sacraments. Yet it is also a movement, a pilgrim people, seeking to faithfully follow the Spirit of God into the world.
In youth ministry we tend to identify with church as movement, the pilgrim church. Engaging with young people, those at the sharp end of culture, seeking to meet them where they are, means an ongoing missional momentum in our work. It is no surprise then that there might be tension with congregations that perhaps embody more of the Church as institution. Too often though this tension is expressed in dismissing or diminishing the ecclesial nature of the other – to claim that the congregational centre of church life carries too much embedded tradition to express the life of God, or that the work with young people is only legitimately an expression of the Church as those young people find their way into the congregation. The Church needs both to be more fully itself. Let’s celebrate the beauty in both the tradition, that which has been passed on faithfully for 2000 years, and the pilgrim nature of a church following the Spirit into an ever-changing world.
In An Interweaving Ecclesiology I write of how we see this expressed in the sacramental life of the church. The sacrament is found in the event of coming together to break bread and share wine, or in the celebration of baptism. But, as Stephen Pickard argues, the ‘effectiveness’ of the sacraments is not only in these moments but also in the ‘ongoing transformation of societal life, in which the Body of Christ lives, moves and has its being’.[11] As the sacraments recall and re-enact the gospel narrative of death to life, Christ is also revealed in the sacramental life that seeks to embody this narrative day by day in acts of self-giving. Youth leaders do this instinctively in pouring their lives into young people. Perhaps a key ecclesiological task for Christian youth workers is to celebrate loudly both the institution and movement of the Church, embracing and demonstrating how to live well with the ambiguity of these in tension.
If we are to be a church that responds to the key questions of our context, whilst existing as both institution and movement, we must learn how to listen to young people as cultural interpreters. When reading Church in Color by Montague Williams, I was struck by his challenge to the Church:
Young people often carry weighty stories. You cannot assume you know what young people are wrestling with just by considering the way they present themselves, [or] by considering broad claims about youth culture. We gain clearer pictures of who young people are and how we ought to engage theology through those sacred moments when young people choose to share the complexity and previously hidden realities of their lives.[12]
Whilst Williams was reflecting on the topic of race, this challenge is vital to navigating the tension between youth ministry and the church. In a culture in which young people feel suspicious of many traditional institutions, why should they embrace the Church if we have not taken time to attend to the complexity and hidden realities of their lives? This is especially pertinent during the ongoing global pandemic that will affect them in ways we do not yet fully understand.
The Church and youth ministry often have an uneasy relationship. Perhaps part of this is a failure to acknowledge the tension of the Church as both institution and movement. Recognizing this alongside resisting a blueprint approach and taking time to listen to the young people in our midst might help navigate this better. For the church to be fully the church in and for the world we need those who can live in this tension and advocate for the church in both modes. Youth ministers, we need you to be these people!
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[1] Kenda Creasy dean and Ron Foster, The Godbearing Life. (Upper Room Books, 1998), p. 30
[2] Galatians 3:28
[3] Stanley Grenz, Renewing the Center: Evangelical Theology in a Post-Theological Era. (Baker Books, 2006), 288.
[4] I chart the story of one such movement in the UK, Crusaders / Urban Saints, in An Interweaving Ecclesiology: The Mission and Young People (SCM Press, 2021).
[5] See David Bailey, Youth Ministry and Theological Shorthand: Living Among the Fragments of a Coherent Theology. (Pickwick Publications, 2019).
[6] Drawn from the Greek term Ekklesia meaning the ‘called out assembly’.
[7] Naomi Thompson, Young People and the Church Since 1900: Engagement and Exclusion. (Taylor Francis, 2017), p. 23
[8] Mark Scanlan, An Interweaving Ecclesiology: The Church, Mission and Young People (SCM Press 2021), p. 1
[9] Nicholas Healy, The Church World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
[10] Gerard Mannion and Lewis Mudge, The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church (Routledge, 2008), pp. 2 – 3
[11] Stephen Pickard, Seeking the Church (SCM Press, 2012), p. 201
[12] Montague R Williams. Church in Color: Youth ministry, Race and the Theology of Martin Luther King. (Baylor University Press, 2020), p. 1