Dreamcare: A Theology of Youth, Spirit, and Vocation

By David F. White and Mark Yaconelli

Dreamcare: A Theology of Youth, Spirit, and Vocation helps parents, youth workers, and congregations cultivate purpose and vocation in youth and young adults. Recent findings disclose a pervasive sense of purposelessness that threatens young adults' health and well-being, and also the common good. The good news is that research shows all young people also have an often hidden sense of purpose that can be noticed, named, and nurtured by parents and communities. This volume supplements research with findings from Emory's Youth Theological Initiative (YTI), which identifies four pathways--desire, joy, compassion, and responsibility--by which young people discover a sense of purpose. Growing from research at YTI, this volume provides concrete suggestions for how Christian communities might engage young people in practices to cultivate a sense of purpose, including narrative resources by which to make theological sense of their impulses of desire, joy, compassion, and responsibility.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: May 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781621896876

David F. White

David F. White is the C. Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Professor of Christian Education at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. David’s most recent writing includes Joy: A Guide for Youth Ministry with Sarah F. Farmer and Miroslav Volf (2020), Dreamcare: A Theology of Youth, Spirit, and Vocation (Cascade, 2013), Awakening Youth Discipleship: Christian Resistance in a Consumer Culture with Brian J. Mahan and Michael Warren (Cascade, 2007), and Practicing Discernment with Youth (2005).

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Dreamcare

A Theology of Youth, Spirit, and Vocation

David F. White

Foreword byMark Yaconelli

2008.Cascade_logo.pdf

Dreamcare

A Theology of Youth, Spirit, and Vocation

Copyright © 2013 David F. White. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR97401.

Scripture quotations marked (NASB) are from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®. Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

isbn 13: 978-1-62032-398-4

eisbn 13: 978-1-62189-687-6

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

White, David F., 1955–

Dreamcare : a theology of youth, spirit, and vocation / David F. White ; foreword by Mark Yaconelli.

xviii + 134 pp. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 13: 978-1-62032-398-4

1. Church work with youth. 2. Teenagers—Religious life—United States. 3. I. Yaconelli, Mark. II. Title.

BV4447 .D534 2013

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

In memory of Walter Wink(May 21, 1935–May 10, 2012)

Foreword

Nearly twelve years ago, David and I were engaged in a weekend event with a unique mixture of scholars and teenagers. On the final night, as we crowded into the Fog City Diner in downtown San Francisco, David sat by me and asked, How are you, Mark? His question was so honest, his presence so open and patient, that although I did not know David well, I began to speak, to pour out the fragmented feelings and thoughts I was carrying. David listened deeply and earnestly, and said, Mark, I think you need a friend. He then became that friend. He reflected on the words I had shared, offering compassion and meaning for what I had suffered—encouragement and hope for the small signs of life he had noticed in my story. His wisdom and kindness were so authentic and true that I welled up with tears when he went to say goodbye.

Reading Dreamcare: A Theology of Youth, Spirit, and Vocation, I sensed the same care, discernment, and intelligence that I had experienced in David so many years ago.

It’s difficult to look at the reality of adolescent life and not feel grief. Has any generation in the history of humankind grown up so isolated from the rhythms of the Sacred, so disconnected from real community? Like the adults around them, young people are being trained to move at the speed of loneliness, to build lives that are disconnected from their deepest impulses for joy, compassion, and relationship. As David White shows in the following pages, teenagers are caught up in a kind of spinning purposelessness, their lives bejeweled with activity while simultaneously devoid of meaning.

David is a scholar; the best scholars are, foremost, doctors, healers. Within adolescent spiritual formation David is one of our best doctors. He has patience, a listening ear, and a capacity to focus his attention on what afflicts blossoming human beings. He has the courage and sharpness of mind to diagnose the complex disease systems that repress and impair human life. And like a good doctor, in Dreamcare he consoles, affirms, touches, and offers a way of healing to the troubled soul.

In an age in which religion is becoming more and more irrelevant to Western life, David exposes the creeping void that afflicts today’s youth, who are forced to find themselves amidst a cacophony of advertising narratives. There is a better story to be told, David proclaims. It is a story that addresses the longing, suffering, and ecstasy that waits within the adolescent. It is a story that blesses every young life with dignity and purpose. It is the Story of the Spirit of God manifest in the longings, gifts, and creativity of each and every adolescent heart. It is a story that counteracts the deadening narratives of consumer culture that seek to diminish and misdirect the hopes and dreams of teenagers. It is a story that David recounts through theological reflection, interviews with young people, and imaginative conversations with some of the great wisdom figures within the Christian community.

This story is the story of God, the story of the Spirit moving within the lives of young people. This is the story of what it means to be a human being. It is a story that is vital to the teenage heart—as vital as food, water, and warmth to the body. David writes, All young people should know the Story of God who lives not in a distant heaven, but amidst a sea of life that surrounds them.

David’s words are not compartmentalized from his lived experience. The message of this book emerges from a deep, thoughtful seeker who struggles persistently and gracefully to become fully alive. David is a humble and approachable soul who is open about his faults, honest in his sufferings, and generous with his gifts. He is a classical guitarist, a cyclist, a sailor, a loving husband, devoted uncle, and cancer survivor. With quiet strength I’ve watched David enter into difficult problems and situations that most of us spend our lives avoiding, ignoring, or even running from. Foremost, David is a Christian. He is someone who finds beauty, comfort, and creative power in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. He is someone who knows within the marrow of his bones that within the Christian experience there is a song of the Spirit that can set the teenage soul dancing.

The book that you hold in your hands is written by a friend—a friend who has spent long hours observing, befriending, listening to, meditating on, studying, and praying over young people, a friend who can offer compassion, wisdom, and encouragement to pastors, youth workers, parents—anyone concerned about the souls of young people. I hope you will read this book, not just for the sake of the young people in your lives, but so that you too might reawaken your own commitment to live a life burning with desire, joy, compassion, and care.

Mark Yaconelli

Acknowledgments

A couple of decades ago, the Lilly Endowment inaugurated a pilot project at Emory University, which came to be known as the Youth Theological Initiative (YTI), with the purpose of exploring alternate approaches to ministry with high school youth. The result was a sort of lab school, an academy in which young people might explore theology in the context of beloved community. While today several seminaries offer advanced degrees in youth ministry and youth ministry scholars have their own guilds and journals, in the early 1990s there was only a small handful of scholars in mainline seminaries researching questions related to youth and ministry—and I was one of them. From 1994 to 1996 I served on the faculty of YTI, and in 1998, with a grant from the Lilly Endowment, I formed a similar theological program for high school youth at Claremont School of Theology. When the Claremont grant ended in 2001, I was again hired by Emory’s YTI, this time to conduct research with high school youth who attended the summer academy, the fruit of which appears in this volume. Over these last two decades, a now considerable cadre of scholars has passed through YTI, in various roles—as mentors, researchers, teachers, and directors. Many now serve on faculties at other seminaries; all have been deeply influenced by their work at YTI; and several have written books about research growing from their experiences at YTI. If and when the history of youth ministry in this era is ever written, it will be deficient if it does not include the story of the scholars whose commitments were shaped at YTI. While this book was influenced by my experiences at YTI, it represents only a glimpse of the grace granted in my experiences and friendships there. For the rest of my life I will likely be trying to express how YTI has shaped my research interests, my vision of teaching, my friendships, and my faith.

This book is dedicated to that cadre of scholars who supported, challenged, befriended, and heard each other into speech all those years ago, and still do today. While there are by now too many to name, I especially want to thank Brian Mahan, Tim Van Meter, Helen Blier, Reggie Blount, Katherine Turpin, Melissa Wiginton, Melissa Snarr, and Joyce Mercer. I also want to thank Dori Baker and Fred Edie, whose own research has intersected YTI and whose friendship has made YTI better. I am especially grateful to those brave souls who directed YTI with intelligence and grace through the years: Don Richter, Mark Monk-Winstanley, Faith Kirkham Hawkins, and Beth Corrie.

Preface

And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.

Acts 2:17

"And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.¹

Throughout history, dreams have been viewed as a medium of privileged communication and insight, as a special lens that brings into focus mysterious and complex features of our lives. Dreams rarely communicate in purely literal terms (a cigar is rarely a cigar), but they point toward something trustworthy that cannot be grasped by sheer will and intellect. In the Old and New Testaments, God guided God’s people through dreams. Aboriginal Australians understand Dream Time as the place of perpetual creation, providing a glimpse into the true nature of the world. Freud theorized dreams as the "royal road to the unconscious" by which we may come to understand our inner desires and conflicts. These and other theories situate dreams as an arena in which we may glimpse truth regarding such questions as who am I, what is the true nature of things, or where is God leading. Dreams, whether sleeping or awake, are spaces in which we may see more clearly the way to our future.

For the purposes of this book, we are less interested in sleeping dreams than those visions forged in the imaginations of the young. Here we use dream as a metaphor to characterize the process by which young people construct visions of the lives for which they were meant. As young people negotiate (dream) who they will become, they envision themselves in future work and relationships, their professional, civic, and leisure commitments. Much like sleeping dreams, the alchemy by which young people imagine and construct a life is fraught with mystery, drawn from fragments of their biological makeup, innate temperament, familial and cultural formation, epiphanies of desire, compassion, joy, and responsibility, and the stories and practices offered by the community—all joined to form a unified (if provisional) sense of identity and purpose.

Dreaming is historically, personally, and theologically significant. People who do not submit to hard-bitten pragmatism are accused of being dreamers, yet no historic innovation ever came to pass apart from the free play of dreaming. Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech is perhaps the most notable example of how social innovations originate as dreams. From fragments of Scripture, personal experience, historical reality, and hope for a better world, King produced a vision that had enormous implications not only for his own life, but for the history of Western civilization. King’s dream provided a vision, amidst the turmoil and social complexity of the 1960s civil rights era, that gave clear guidance to a generation, and gives us guidance today. In the realm of science and technology, we need only recall the Wright brothers, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs as innovators who dreamed new worlds into being. The social, economic, artistic, literary, and political worlds progress by the work of those who dream.

Christians believe that God created the world in order to enjoy it, hence to display its splendor and in all things to glorify God and to enjoy God forever. Joy is the meaning of human life—joy in thanksgiving and thanksgiving as joy. When humans give glory to God and rejoice in God’s existence and our own, this by itself is meaningful enough. Whoever lays hold of the joy that embraces the Creator and their own existence lives beyond the prevailing ideologies that promise us meaning in life, only to abuse us for their own purposes. An individual’s self-representation in dreaming his or her life is an echo of God’s own pleasure in creation. Dreaming constitutes the free space for joyful creation. To be authentic—to author one’s own life—is to dream the alternatives and make deliberate choices. If a life is to be lived authentically—joyfully responsive to one’s unique charisms and history, and not merely subject to the plans of others—then space for the dreaming of alternatives is crucial. If, for example, Dr. King had finally allowed his life to be determined by normative racist scripts, then we would not perceive him as a heroic expression of faithful joy. His dream of a just world revealed a person not content to accommodate the fears and prejudices of others, but one who lived with dignity, responsive to suffering and joyfully alive and hopeful for a better world.

Further, dreaming is not mere whimsy for those who refuse to adjust to the way the world is; it is the realm in which the Holy Spirit beckons the world into its true identity in God. The Christian gospel is caught, for a time, in a dialectical tension between cross and resurrection, between the suffering of the world and the hope that all creation will be resurrected to its true purpose. We stand in this tension, allowing our hearts to be broken along with God’s and our selves to dream of the world’s redemption. In this time after the Christ event and before the completion of all things in God’s kingdom, the Spirit is forever lifting us into solidarity with those who suffer and empowering us by hope for loving partnership with God’s mission on behalf of the world. Coincidentally, the imagination of adolescents meets the hope of the Christian gospel that does not merely see things as they are, but as they are becoming in God’s mustard-seed kingdom.

Yet, today the dreams of youth are contested territory. American young people are urged in songs, television shows, and movies to hold on to your dreams, pursue your dreams, or never let your dreams die. Often, such advice invokes visions of fame, wealth, or status, and the lifestyles of celebrities are idolized, while a good life that enlarges the heart is forgotten. Lost in this push for excess is a vision of life grounded in the goodness of ordinary gifts, such as those that connect us to others, God, and our best selves. When dreams are colonized by scripts of wealth or celebrity they fail to provide faithful glimpses into the world God intends. Today, whether as a result of diminished economic opportunity, paralysis before the myriad choices represented in today’s market culture, or the inevitable failure of consumerism to deliver what it promises, many young people have come to eschew the dreams of American culture, and some have lost faith in dreaming altogether—they have lost hope that life holds purpose. Still, as this book will show, virtually every child, adolescent, and young adult is able, with support, to identify some commitment—a gift, interest, or cause—that makes life worthwhile, some nascent dream, however hidden, that life can have meaning.

Dreaming is not only distorted by the consumeristic dreams of self and world, but dreaming is also at risk because Christian theologians have failed