The following thoughts are more or less observations from my years and engagement with people who are teaching, training, etc in youth ministry. I was reflecting on this during the conference because so much has changed over the years.
When I started out in youth ministry full time, Youth Specialties offered two types of training for people. There was the one day resource seminars in which they taught on youth ministry and sold resources. It was a combo of training and sales pitches. There was also the national convention which back at that time attracted a thousand or so annually. They had a core of youth pastors from very large ministries who traveled around to do the resource seminars and these guys were considered the big shots. Many a young youth pastor idolized them and wanted to get to that level one day (my what egos we have). Think Duffy Robbins, Mike Yaconelli, Wayne Rice, Jim Burns, Chap Clarke, etc. Several of these went on to be the first youth ministry professors at colleges and seminaries. When they got there, what did they have to teach? Well, more or less the same things they had been teaching at YS. Models for ministry, how to plan programs, how to play games, etc. The academic world did not take them seriously. So, they decided to work on making youth ministry a respectable academic area. They (and I am speaking pretty broadly here) tapped into a definition of practical theology that had been kicking around among academia and sought to do practical theology of youth ministry.
As the Youth Ministry major at colleges became one of the fastest growing majors, more veterans of youth ministry joined the ranks of professors. It was thought that after a successful (think big numbers and getting published) career doing youth ministry in a church, teaching others was the natural route. However, as the field grew in academia and people started doing PhD’s in practical theology with a focus on youth ministry, it attracted a younger crowd. They were folks who had maybe five or so years in a church or parachurch ministry, then entered a doctoral program and began doing research. Empirical research has become an ideal to reach which sort of makes the field more respectable amongst academics. So, today if you attend a conference of youth ministry educators there are a good number of young guns presenting research they have done for doctorates or to get published in academic journals.
So, what does that do for the whole realm of youth ministry? It strikes me as odd that many of the younger folks moving into teaching youth ministry in colleges and seminaries are not veterans of years of church based youth ministry. How do we prepare students for the career if their professors are more rooted in theory than practice? It perhaps creates a vacuum that might need to be filled with more apprenticeship type programs for newbies. Yet, the average student graduating with a degree related to youth ministry does not think they need further training for their first job.
But something else is happening. I think it might be along the lines of what Andrew Root refers to as a theological turn in youth ministry. (I’ve not read his book on the subject) Some of these younger professors and folks in general in the academic world are starting to look at theologians and the implications for their work on the field of youth ministry. Even better, there are some who are working to introduce biblical theology to the realm of youth ministry. It might sound odd that such an idea is a shift in thinking but it is more sigificant a change than meets the eye. The reigning definition of practical theology in the field currently is that practical theology starts and ends in practice. That is radically different to biblical theology that starts in scripture. So, the former looks at youth ministry practice and seeks to learn about God through what He is doing. The latter looks at the Bible and sees what God has revealed about himself in order to discern theological ideas as they relate to youth ministry.
For me, a non academic who is immersed in the field, the shift that took place in my mind was from looking to sociology to inform youth ministry to actually looking to scripture to inform youth ministry. Academics however went into practical theology as they moved away from sociology. As I listen to the papers presented at an academic conference on youth ministry, my concern is that those in the ivy towers are not all that connected to what the average youth pastors is thinking nor to what might be taking place in the local church. The folks who are influencing youth ministry the most around the globe seem to be in the field – either in a local church or traveling around and sharing some new ideas.
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