Andy Cornett | living in the new creation

endlessly captivated by the person and work of the resurrected Jesus

on dating: the youthworker talks to the parent

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Dear Andy,

You’ve been in youth ministry for (gasp!) over 15 years now. You’ve been a parent for almost as long, and now have a teenager of your own (and two close on the heels). You’re about to enter a decades’ worth (at least) of dating and relationships in your own home. Since working with teenagers and having your own can be two different things and since in tense moments emotions tend to run high – here are some things I’ve learned from other wise guides that I hope you can hold on to in the short form of “Do and Don’t.” Call them “what the youthworker in me wants the parent in you to remember” as you and Robin forge ahead.

  • Don’t bait your kids, mock their dating, or make fun of their desires or choices. Every word and look and joke from you teaches: and all that kind teaches them is to shut down and not trust you. You may not get that trust back for a long time.
  • Don’t live vicariously through their dating relationships. Don’t go all “helicopter parent” over the relationship, its ups, downs, status, etc. I get that you’ll have the desire to want to know what’s going on, to know the other person, be part of it. That’s fine and good to a point. But don’t smother it, own it, and don’t let it feed or starve your own self-image. What puffs up one moment can devestate the next. It’s not about you. It’s not the verdict on you. That last word belongs only to Jesus: rest in that. (And do help them understand this as well).
  • Don’t leave it all to them to figure out and deal with. Everyone but marketers abandons teenagers, and let your own home be the first line of defense here. Worried about what forms them? Practice wise counter-formation. God gave you a responsibility here and a community to help you – engage!

 

  • Do lovingly respect them and listen to them. That means paying close attention to their thoughts/feelings/desires/experiences. You have something to learn here: their world is both like yours and unlike it, but more off your radar and closed to your access. Ask, seek, knock: let them be the guides for once.
  • Do lead and “be awkward so they don’t have to” (HT: the awesome guide here by the Youth Cartel folks). Initiate, use real words, engage, provoke, point out. They will learn with or without you, so take the initiative and go first: lead with your thoughts on what’s true, right, pure, good, beautiful, excellent, praiseworthy. Then listen, learn, and adjust accordingly.
  • Do be honest about your expectations, boundaries, and be firm. Life’s too short to be mealy-mouthed here: boundaries are there to keep us on the path, and guardrails keep mini-accidents from becoming major ones. There might be no “once-for-all rules” on this subject, but that shouldn’t keep you from laying down a wise track. 1 Thessalonians 4 should help you here. Think of yourself as one of the adults who are spotters on the balance beam: you’re giving (him or her) freedom to risk with the knowledge that you’re there for them. (And by all means, when you coolly allow consequences, stay with them).

And above all, remember the story you want to tell. Since we’re Christians, all our stories begin with goodness and end with grace, no matter how messy, screwed up, and sinful they get in the middle. Don’t ever take sin more seriously than grace. Remember that those kids are full human beings learning to take up the task of being a wise representative of God in his world. There are bound to be failures and victories along the way as they learn to reflect their King. Don’t forget that it’s your job to reflect his goodness and grace as well.

grace and peace
Andy

why youth ministry? [part 2]

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A few days ago I asked this question about the “why” of youth ministry: Is there any good or compelling reason that we continue to pour heart and hands, effort and energy into this work of youth ministry … or am we just keeping the car running? What do we find in Scripture that convinces us that this work matters and God calls us to it?

That post laid out a rationale for “why youth ministry” and contained my first three convictions. Here’s the rest.

4. Youth ministry is student work. The church faces a world in which many adolescents are both far from God and in the dark – and yet none less than Jesus himself is seeking them through the work of his Spirit.  Where possible, the church must partner with the family for the sake of declaring the gospel to the next generation (Ps. 71:16-18). But just as the church doesn’t forsake the parents but must equip them to (re)discover their God-given role in the discipleship of their kids, it must not also forsake the kids and students who do yet know Christ. That means the work of training and equipping adults and students from the church to go out and share in the mission: seek students, stand with them, speak out for them, love them, and bear witness among them to Christ at work in their midst.

5. Youth ministry is welcoming work. The church must welcome kids/students into its communal life of worship and witness and BE the extended family of God to those who have been abandoned. If Paul can talk about the church as the place of new humanity in Christ where Jew and Gentile stand before Christ together, it must be the place for adults and kids together in one body. When churches are tempted to divide by age, they must remember that to welcome kids is to welcome the Lord himself (Mk. 9:33-37). Our welcome here IS our worship (Rom 15:7-9). Part of making a home for kids and students means taking pains to make the long-term commitment to walk beside them into maturity as a whole human being renewed in Christ, ready to take up their vocation in this world.

6. Youth ministry is desperate work. To persist in this ministry you must heed the call of God to know him for his sake, to follow him in full knowledge of the cost, and to boast only in his cross. You must loosen your control, let go of outcomes, and lift your eyes to the risen Christ who speaks to your timid heart: “Take courage! It is I: do not be afraid… and I am with you. Always.” Fix your eyes on Him, make your prayer that of Paul in Phil. 3:9-14, and devote yourself to the work of the Lord because none of it goes to waste (1 Cor. 15:58).

why youth ministry?

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I remember one particularly galling Wednesday night several years ago. The previous days had brought a familiar mix of high-effort, low-response, excitement and frustration and discouragement – all rolled into one package. And when I walked away from a house that night I had just one simple question: why?

Let’s face it: there are times in youth ministry when you walk away from a small group study or a conversation with a family or a late-night program and the thought occurs to you … why I am doing this? Is there any good or compelling reason that I continue to pour heart and hands, effort and energy into this work of youth ministry … or am I just keeping the car running?

Early last fall I was at a conference where I got to hear Simon Sinek give a short talk on “The Power of Why”. His thesis: why drives the how, how issues in what. But this is the reverse of our normal practice where we focus on what, argue over how, and rarely figure out any justification for the whole enterprise.

So is there a clear “why” for youth ministry? Why this work with students, this endeavor within (or without) our churches to seek out and minister to teenagers? What do we find in Scripture that convinces us that this work matters and God calls us to it?

The more I reflect on these 15 years in youth ministry, the more convinced I am that youth ministry is really just one of the manifold ministries of Christ and his church. It is highly-contextualized ministry to adolescents that can take a myriad of local forms that all look to Scripture for both guidance and goal. I make no claim to have THE biblical theology for youth ministry, but I can attempt a few words of call, challenge, and comfort that have lead me to a theology for it – and for our day in the church. This is my why. This is what I believe.

Here are three – there are three more to come.

1. Youth ministry is mission work. The reality is that we have been called by a missionary God: a Father who sent his Son (for us!) and his Spirit (in us!) that we might be adopted into his family, united to him as sons and daughters, renewed in his image and participating in his kingdom. I’m growing to love 1 Peter 2 more and more: “you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood” … to what end? “so that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”  We in youth ministry get to stand at the foggy adolescent intersection of childhood and adulthood, family and friend, church and wider society. We stand and say it, sing it out: the praise of God to those who are adrift in the fog and lost in the dark.

2. Youth ministry is corporate work. It is the church’s work. The church is the body of Christ, and where He is working, there the church is to be found.  This family of God, this fellowship of Jesus, is sent (via Son’s own authority! Mt 28:18ff, John 20:21) on the mission of making disciples to Jesus. Though we love the church and are passionately committed to it, we point to Christ, not it (or ourselves) – we want to see students called to a robust, sticky faith in Jesus Christ that is poured out in love for God and for people.

3. Youth ministry is family work. God desires for these broken human families to play their part in telling his story of redemption. God has designed the family such that parents have the primary spiritual responsibility of telling (and showing!) the story of God’s grace in creation, redemption, and restoration and then leading kids to know God: to love him heart, soul, mind, and strength with an everyday faith (Dt. 6).

[Update: read part two of this post for the remaining three convictions on why youth ministry.]

on Into the Woods

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No more giants
Waging war.
Can’t we just pursue our lives
With out children and our wives?
‘Till that happy day arrives,
How do you ignore
All the witches,
All the curses,
All the wolves, all the lies,
The false hopes, the goodbyes,
The reverses,
All the wondering what even worse is
Still in store?

All the children…
All the giants…

No more.

Last Friday I had the opportunity to watch Bishop Verot High School’s Theater department pull off the famous musical Into the Woods. I took my daughters with me and a few other HS students. We loved it.

The lyrics above pull from a haunting lament by the Baker, in the woods, in the second act – right when the characters and stories suffer most from broken conditions and broken choices all over the place.

Put those lyrics in conversation with this provocative bit from Andy Crouch’s tremendous book “Culture Making:”

This is how deeply culture is embedded in the human character; it is the first response to sin, the first place where the inward alienation from God finds its outward expression … [T]his, then is one of the arcs of the story of Genesis 1-11, from the fig leaves to the tower. Culture attempts to deal with the consequences of sin. But this is a vain attempt, in all the senses of the word vain: prideful, self-regarding, and futile. What human beings make of the world only deepens their alienation and independence from their maker. This is the germ of truth in all condemnations of culture. For all its moments of beauty and ingenuity, culture can easily be Babel: a fist-shaking attempt to take over God’s role for ourselves. (p. 117).

This strikes me as an apt summary of Into the Woods, beautiful and ingenious as it is. I applaud BVHS for taking on this difficult work of art. I hope they (as a Catholic school) and the students in the cast took some time to wrestle with the deeper drama here.

[And in a strange bit of providence, Radiohead’s “No Surprises” came streaming over Pandora as I wrote this. One more expression of futility.]

a rule fof life

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(note: this is part one of two).

“Come, follow me,” Jesus said (Mark 1:17)

One: Following Jesus – a rule of life

Training. There has always been a part of me that was very attracted to the ascetic life. I’ve been fascinated by the desert fathers and their countercultural practices and I admire people who train hard on any regimen, physical or spiritual. And yet as I reflect on my years of following Jesus, I think I have lived a rather “undisciplined” life. It might go without saying that our culture is usually no help here: we are tyrannized by the urgent, we feed voraciously on the opinions and approval of others, we value style over substance, and our attention spans diminish as our distractions increase. But there is a whisper in the soul, the echo of a voice calling us to a deeper life with God. Spiritual disciplines have seemed something I needed and something I should be doing. But I was nervous about them. I was afraid of failing at them, or that they wouldn’t yield what they promised, or that pursing them hard would be some kind of theological mistake or rabbit-trail.

Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines put an end to my wrangling and settled the issue for me of the purpose and place of the disciplines in life. The Spiritual Disciplines, or “training for kingdom living,” are not a special set of religious practices pursued as a backdoor attempt at meriting favor from God. They are a simply a means of daily grace from God: training methods that teach us to follow God in the midst of the unique, daily life that he has given to each of us. My own discipline had been spotty and accidental at best. I read regularly to renew my mind, I run to train my body, I work on loving my wife – so why is it that I take so little pains to train my own soul?

Around six years ago I came to the unsettling conclusion that despite my language to the contrary, I had not really decided and intended to follow Jesus with all that I am and have. Rereading some books, skimming selections in the Devotional Classics, and meditating on Psalm 27 brought me to the point where I could no longer think of any reason to hold back from such an intention. As C. S. Lewis said, I wanted to be made into a “little Christ:” to take on his character, formed from the inside out, and to be a genuine follower of Jesus. The only thing that kept me away was my own (still large) selfish will. But that, too, had to go. To borrow Annie Dillard’s words, I wanted to see the stars: therefore I chose to walk into the dark.
With that in mind, I wanted to adopt a “rule of life.” In classic times, askesis meant “practice, training” – a program of activity that allowed you to do what you could not simply by direct effort alone (it’s the verb behind Acts 24:16). It provides an ancient, well-worn pathway to walk in the desire to follow Jesus. A related word is gymnazo (“to train,” as in 1 Tim. 4:7-8). It was time for Andy to enter what the ancients called “the gymnasium for the soul.” Eugene Peterson once proposed that the following three activities serve as the historic, foundational askesis for all Christian believers.

  1. the practice of common worship: joining other believers in regular worship of God.
  2. practicing the presence of God: routinely turning our thoughts, desires, and actions to God.
  3. daily praying the Psalms: working through them as our teachers in the school of prayer.

Any life with God begins only at His invitation and by His grace. Given my historic lack of discipline, I tried to adopt these three classic practices as my own – adding to them the daily reading of chunks of Scripture. There are many variations to this and tons of classic spiritual practices, chief among which is the simple obedience to Jesus in thought, word, and action. Some people add physical or dietary regimens for a time, various working, resting, reading or speaking habits, and so on (see Willard’s book or Adele Ahlberg Calhoun’s Spiritual Disciplines Handbook for a wonderful survey). Take up the ones that suit your need at the present moment, remembering that the spiritual disciplines you adopt are “tools,” not “rules” (as my friend Nate Stratman memorably puts it).

So what about you? Have you ever thought about or adopted a rule of life? What have been your own spiritual practices? Do you find yourself interested, intrigued, or drawn to this?

(Up next: part 2 – when spiritual formation clashes with student ministry in church-world)