Last post I addressed the idea that perhaps the shift from parachurch to church based youth ministries led to an exaggerated form of segregated youth ministry – meaning we focused so much on the needs of youth that we treated them as a distinctly other group and neglected to include them in the life of the church. By the way, I praise God for all who grew up in churches that have a great intergenerational dynamic. I believe that is the way church is intended to be!
Now, the second trend or shift I spoke of in TGC blog… In this paragraph I had a mere 3 sentences, each of which pack a lot.
I spoke of the shift from an attractional model to entertainment driven ministry. Some parachurch ministries would not describe themselves as attractional because they focus on going to where the students are at, entering their world, etc. However, the weekly meeting and the summer camp experiences are where the real action is, so getting out to build relationships is about drawing students into a group. Nothing wrong with that, but it is to some degree attractional. The church however, got very attractional over time. We did all kinds of crazy things to get kids to come to youth group. MTV made us get more sophisticated, buy tech gear, and become creative in a whole new way. I say “we” inclusively here. We used drama, videos, live music, etc to communicate our message. Personally I shifted from a flow that went from games – songs – skit – songs – message, to a more sophisticated: Opening video – live music – drama – music – video – message. Even churches whose groups were not as entertainment driven certainly experienced conferences and youth events that were well produced entertainment packages. Many of those are still in place today and people love them.
I suggested that we bought into the fallacy of “edu-tainment” as a legitimate means of communicating the gospel. In the 1960’s Sesame Street introduced us to this concept. Kids learned letters and numbers and how to count via the characters and concepts. While youth ministry has never been exactly like that, we have heavily employed the media to communicate our message. That is not entirely bad, but it has left us communicating the gospel in sound bites. It tempted us to rely too much on powerful music videos, drama, etc, and less on the Bible as our means of proclaiming the truth. Yes, it spoke to a media driven generation but I think we have reached a point where we are ministering to a media saturated generation and need to be organic – meaning kids physically open their bibles and see what God has for them.
Somewhere along the line, we got to believing that we had to dress up Jesus to make him cool. I never really understood why people in planning programs would make time to do “fun stuff” just to persuade people that “Christians have fun too”. It seems to me that our joy and humanity should make all that we do enjoyable with a healthy dose of laughter. The worst I have seen is the bait and switch approach with events where people plan these elaborately wacky or entertaining events with the intention of throwing in some Jesus at the end (usually unannounced). My friend Ken Moser who currently teaches (and does) youth ministry in Canada compares this to the concept of getting kids interested in hockey by doing something other than hockey and then talking about hockey for five minutes at the end. (see his article here). John Piper nailed it for me when he said “If you alter or obscure the Biblical portrait of God in order to attract converts, you do not get converts to God, you get converts to an illusion. That is not evangelism, that is deception!” I truly wish I had never seen this take place, but I have. Too often in youth ministry (historically) we have seen people dress up Jesus to make him cool and in the process obscured the gospel.
Personally I think we have reached a point in culture where students need the real deal and they need it in an unaltered form. We need to open scripture and proclaim the gospel – relationally and intentionally – and it’s not about us. There is a generation falling away from the church that needs to hear the truth, to see what Christians do, and connect to the body. Students need Christ and community not coolness and consumerism. Our task is to tell the world the good news and Jesus does not need us to make him cool.
Next up… shooting ourselves in the foot.
Leave a Reply