Credo is Latin and means I believe. It is a personal statement of belief whereas a manifesto is not usually just one person’s ideas or beliefs. I am therefore simply stating what I believe. Some of what I am writing at this point is very open to being shaped and molded in the future. Other ideas I think are fairly concrete with me.
So, for the next week or two, I hope to write a daily bit on some aspect of youth ministry that I believe. They will not be in any particular order – except as they come to me. My goal is to let more folks into my mind and clear up some misunderstandings.
1. Youth ministry is seriously fun! I cannot imagine a more enjoyable, exciting, and adventurous career than working with teenagers. Early on in my work, I found people struggling with the question of how do we balance fun and serious in our youth group? It occurred to me back then that we should not pit one against the other. In other words, we can have loads of fun while being serious. My brother does improv comedy in Chicago and while watching some of his shows over the years I noticed that I might be laughing my way off a chair and suddenly realize that the sketch they are doing is making a powerful social or political statement. When teaching the Bible, I found it is really not difficult to make it fun if we infuse the right amount of creativity and allow ourselves to be off the wall a bit. My favorite Bible expositor (preacher/teacher) Alistair Begg, often cracks me up in his preaching and makes me stop and examine my life at the same time. I just don’t think we need to always separate serious from fun. Of course there are moments that we create a serious environment that we don’t want to ruin and I have seen far too many speakers kill a powerful moment with a joke or interruption. (done it myself)
While I am all for serious fun, I am less than enthused about much of the pointless fun I see in youth ministry. Too many times of following a messy game with an important talk or worship time, has led me to conclude that our main meetings really don’t need the sort of entertaining drivel that youth ministry has been known for. A little creativity goes a long way in planning youth group meetings that are fun and make a specific point that relates to what we are teaching. We have loads of tools at our fingertips to communicate with creativity and excitement. As for the messy games, I would rather that be left to an afternoon’s activity time on a retreat, at camp, or on a night that is purely social activity and not the main meeting. A big part of my issue on this subject is the principle that what we win people with, we win them to. Or to put it another way, what we attract people to is what will keep them. So, I cringe when I go to a big youth event and there is a clown on stage (figuratively) who is winding up the crowd only to hand off to a worship leader. I think the place for that is when we are purely doing entertainment in a late night slot or something just for fun. There is so much energy to discover in pursuing serious fun and not resorting to stupid fun at the wrong times. I hope that makes some sense…
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