Awakening Youth Discipleship: Christian Resistance in a Consumer Culture

By Brian J. Mahan, Michael Warren and David F. White

Youth ministry has increasingly lost touch with its origins in the way of Jesus and the social practices intrinsic to Christian discipleship, and has instead substituted layers of "Jesus talk," middle class values, fun and games, and doses of "warm fellow-feeling." Awakening Youth Discipleship articulates the history of this domestication of youth and ministry. Mahan, Warren, and White tell a story of the ways in which our society has colluded to shape a domesticated adolescence. The authors believe a Christian response to this challenge must be multilevel, addressing the problem at three levels--society, church, and individual. The authors propose reclaiming practices of discernment that both engage congregations in social awareness and involve individuals in discerning fuller vocational opportunities than those allowed by popular cultural norms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jan 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781630874322

Brian J. Mahan

Brian J. Mahan is the former director of the Program in Religious Education at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, and author of Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose: Vocation and the Ethics of Ambition (2002).

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AWAKENING Youth Discipleship

Christian Resistance in a Consumer Culture

Brian J. Mahan / Michael Warren / David F. White

with a foreword by Don C. Richter

AWAKENING YOUTH DISCIPLESHIP

Christian Resistance in a Consumer Culture

Copyright © 2008 Brian J. Mahan, Michael Warren, and 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, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

A Division of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

ISBN13: 978-1-55635-136-5

EISBN13: 978-1-63087-432-2

New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Mahan, Brian J.

Awakening youth discipleship : Christian resistance in a consumer culture / Brian J. Mahan, Michael Warren, and David F. White. With a foreword by Don C. Richter.

xii + 126 p.; 23 cm.

ISBN13: 978-1-55635-136-5

1. Youth—Religious life. 2. Youth (Christian theology). 3. Church work with youth. I. Warren, Michael. II. White, David F. III. Richter, Don C. IV. Title.BV4447 .M33 2008

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Foreword

Brian Mahan, Mike Warren, and David White are troublemakers.

I mean that as a compliment.

Maria Harris, of blessed memory, writes about the ministry of troublemaking in her 1981 classic, A Portrait of Youth Ministry.¹ Troublemaking is how Maria describes diakonia, the Greek word for service that gave rise to the office of deacon in the early church. Serving in the name of Christ, deacons shared food and money with suffering, poor, and neglected people. Throughout history, deacons have been troublemakers when their ministry calls attention to systemic injustice, oppression, and inequality. Standing in solidarity with those on the margins, deacons stir up trouble for those who sit comfortably in the centers of power and privilege—including those of us who serve the institutional church.

Brian, Mike, and David stir up trouble by standing in solidarity with young people who are idolized yet sidelined by a consumer society, lauded yet too often domesticated by the church. These three coconspirators don’t serve up standard, predictable youth ministry fare in the following pages. They don’t dish out a smorgasbord of glitzy games with a side of seven habits of highly effective youth ministers. Instead, these authors invite us to join them at table for a nourishing feast of insights and life-centering conversation about what it means—for adults as well as for teenagers—to be faithful followers of Jesus in our day and time. They’ve spent years thoughtfully preparing this meal for us.

Mike Warren has been in the kitchen a long time. I met Mike through his writings before I met him in person. Three decades ago, when the entire field of youth ministry was taking a developmental journey with teens, the voice of one crying in the wilderness proclaimed, Pay attention to the social contexts of youth, to the cultural scripts we give them, to the ways they are manipulated by the media, the marketeers, the military! Mike is indeed a modern-day John the Baptist, urging us to repent from viewing adolescence as an exotic life stage, regarding young people as consumers rather than as persons. Mike calls us to name and resist all life-draining cultural captivities in light of gospel grace and freedom.

I met Brian and David in person before getting to know them as scholars. Courageously, perhaps foolishly, they both signed on as faculty for the fledgling Youth Theological Initiative, which I directed at Emory University (see chapters 5 and 6). Over the course of several seasons, I witnessed their passion for exploring theology with seventeen-year-olds. They probed Walter Wink’s analysis of powers and principalities; they reflected on the ethics of ambition; they made pilgrimages to serve and worship with communities throughout Atlanta; they even slogged to a Braves game through a hurricane. Through it all, Brian and David became conversation partners, close colleagues, confidants.

Brian is a modern-day Evagrius, that fourth-century monastic who portrayed the eight deadly thoughts—later called the seven deadly sins—that impede all disciples in their faith pilgrimage. When Brian describes our penchant for invidious comparison, for instance, he recalls that ancient tug of envy (invidia), the insatiable craving for what others have that we ourselves lack. As you’ll see in these essays, Brian’s charism is to eschew abstraction and call attention to the particular details of one’s own spiritual struggles. He reminds us that saints cultivate virtue by acknowledging the persistent allure of vices that weigh down their souls. He invites us to join with youth in honest, humble confession that leaves us crying and laughing at our silly strivings.

David taught me to view the passions of youth in relation to prophetic pathos, God’s own passion to repair the world. David’s careful historical research describes how over the past century, the energy and talents of young people have been anesthetized by the broader culture, especially media culture. Like Toto in the Wizard of Oz, David pulls back the curtain to demystify the great and powerful wizard of contemporary social forces that hold youth in thrall. He does so by asking big questions, such as Who benefits from the ways teens are socially constructed as adolescents? How have teens been disconnected from life-giving work that makes a difference and brings joy? What practices can faith communities nurture to remedy the loss of apprenticeship between teenagers and adults? Artfully and playfully, David engages these big questions with youth by drawing on pedagogues such as Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal.

In a lineup of the usual suspects in youth ministry, you would likely skip over Brian, Mike, and David. These guys are white males, they’re over fifty, and they make no evident effort to be hip or with it. They are who they are, transparent and without pretension. And they look rather harmless. But when you listen awhile to what they say, you’ll realize they are troublemakers. They stir things up, pointing out who gets access to life-giving resources, power, and privilege . . . and who does not. They don’t play the trendy youth ministry game, dropping the latest buzzwords. Yet young people always seem to be at the center of their attention. You might describe them as life-long advocates for youth, exercising what Maria Harris calls the ministry of advocacy (kerygma) as well as diakonia. And you would be right.

So pull up a chair to the table. Join the conversation. The first course is ready to be served.

Don C. Richter

March 14, 2007

1. Maria Harris, Portrait of Youth Ministry (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2004).

Introduction: Practicing Resistance

How should the Church engage young people in vital partnership with Christ, as Christ’s disciples in the contemporary world?

This is not a new question. It is nonetheless a question that must be posed anew for each generation. In our own time, there is little doubt that the ubiquity and power of the culture of consumerism—so evident in mass media, in the marketplace, in our own habits of being and doing—threatens to obscure the scandalous beauty and sublimity of the gospel, as well as its power to challenge business as usual—the status quo.

In moments of private rumination or while commiserating with others ministering to youth, we sometimes find ourselves asking if resistance is really possible, if in fact we might only be going through the motions.

Shortly before his death, the eminent youth minister Mike Yaconelli expressed his own doubts on the matter: Young people flock to Christian concerts, cheer Jesus at large events, and work on service projects. Unfortunately, it’s not because of Jesus; it’s because they’re young! Yaconelli says, The most important function of youth ministry is longevity. Long-term discipleship.²

But what is to be done? How, in the face of the quantitative superiority of the deformative power of the culture of consumerism (and militarism), can we truly encourage young men and women to embrace Christian discipleship fully, passionately and, as Mike Yaconelli challenges us, for the long term?

Awakening Youth Discipleship addresses itself to these questions. The six essays and talking chapter that follow are the product of ongoing conversations among the three authors, conversations that started nearly a decade ago during annual meetings of the Association of Professors and Researchers in Religious Education (APRRE) and continued with meetings over the last few years at St. Ignatius Jesuit Retreat House in Manhasset, New York; at Glastonbury Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Hingham, Massachusetts; and at Simpsonwood, a Methodist retreat center in Norcross, Georgia.

The consensus animating our conversations is a shared sense of the need to both complement and move beyond current communitarian-narrativist approaches to youth ministry. Theorists, including Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas and John Westerhoff, have given renewed attention to formative Christian practices such as Sabbath-keeping, hospitality to strangers, forgiveness, testimony and most importantly critical reflection on Scripture and tradition. These practices have served to place Christian community back at the center of Christian formation and have provided a bulwark against the hegemony of consumerist society.

It is our contention, however, that the individual and communal practices of sacred remembering central to communitarian-narrativist pedagogies need to be complemented and extended by practices of discernment and disciplined conversation—practices that actively deconstruct cultural distortions.

To the communitarian-narrativist practices of anamnesis, centered as they are in the retrieval of traditional practices of sacred remembering, should be added the ascesis of individual and communal practices of resistance, practices that encourage Christian youth to actively dehabituate themselves from the toxic images and beliefs of consumer culture. Taken together, such remembering and resisting constitute what Daniel Berrigan has called the upside-down hermeneutics of Jesus Christ.³

2. Mike Yaconelli, The Failure of Youth Ministry, YouthWorker Journal (May/June 2003).

3. A paraphrase from a statement of Daniel Berrigan’s, from his Steadfastness of the Saints: A Journal of Peace and War in Central and North America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985) 22.

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PART ONE

Consumerism in the Cultural Context

David White’s two essays, The Social Construction of Adoles-cence and Pedagogy for the Unimpressed, provide a theoretical backdrop for the volume as a whole.

In the first essay, David illustrates how various social structures throughout history—especially economic and political ones—have influenced social constructions of adolescence, which have in turn spawned misleading and harmful assumptions about youth and youth ministry, many of which remain in force today. David’s detailed and closely worked historical overview also provides the scholarly groundwork for challenging the widely held assumption that current pedagogies aimed at domesticating youth, and youth ministry as well, are inevitable and irreversible.

In his second essay, David builds upon and extends his theoretical analysis by introducing several practices of resistance that engage youth in studying the complex social, cultural, and economic systems that impinge so powerfully and incessantly on their lives. These practices of resistance, though essential, are not conceived as ends in themselves, but as serving to free youth to respond more fully and compassionately to the deep call of God upon their lives.

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1

The Social Construction of Adolescence

David F. White

Contemporary Context of Youth and Ministry

A look at the public face of contemporary youth ministry reveals that there are available more resources, books, curricula, videos, and conferences than ever before in the history of the world. Youth ministry, like contemporary Christian music, has become a significant industry in the U.S. In this youth ministry market we see high energy, high visibility, and high budget programs, promising high yield youth ministry. And for some, and in a certain way, this seems to work—we have even learned how, for example, with enough resources to attract great numbers of young people, to get them to make professions of faith. And yet, a recent report of the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) indicates that sixty percent, or the majority of American teenagers—who are overwhelmingly mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic—hold attitudes toward religion described as benign positive regard. In other words, they believe religion is good, but inconsequential.¹ As the project’s principle investigator, Christian Smith, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, put it, Most religious communities’ central problem is not teen rebellion but teenagers’ benign ‘whateverism.’ ² Most of these youth call themselves Christians, regularly attend worship, and are involved in Christian education and youth ministry programs. But they have virtually no religious language to prove it, nor do they understand central doctrines of historically orthodox Christianity. The version of Christian faith they have internalized does not, for the most part, influence the shape of their lives, their relationships, or perspectives on vocation. This NSYR report represents something of a wake-up call to those doing youth ministry as usual, and a challenge to reconsider what counts for most congregations as youth ministry.

While a better plan for more effective youth ministry is far from clear, one clue to our way forward involves understanding the relationship of Christian faith to culture, including how culture clarifies or distorts the gospel, and whether we should celebrate or resist the cultural milieu in which we minister with youth. And importantly, historical perspective is necessary if we are not to simply reify our current cultural forms, imagine them as normal and appropriate, as the way the world has always been. If we ignore the historical development of cultural institutions, the stories of their rise to prominence and the particular influences that shaped them, we may assume as normal such social institutions as slavery, racism, misogyny, classism—or adolescence.

Since the invention of the social institution of adolescence over a hundred years ago, adolescence has rarely been questioned, apart from the rise of developmental theories that have largely served to establish it as normal in the popular mind. And, until recent years, the bargain of adolescence—dependence and education now, responsibility and independence later—has worked reasonably well for many, due primarily to its brief span and the certain reward of middle-class employment. However, recent cultural developments have made problematic this unwritten treaty with youth. These developments relegate most youth to institutions in which they have less than full power for longer than any age cohort in the history of the world, leaving them considerably less free to make their distinctive mark on history, and are quickly shaping them as passive consumers rather than active agents and shapers of history. Further, cultural observers recognize a subtle hostility toward youth, in which youth are unfairly blamed for everything from rising rates of violent crime to high rates of teen pregnancy.³ In recent legislation, more than fifteen states have criminalized youth behavior once considered experimental, such as public mischief, minor vandalism, and gang affiliation, placing increasing numbers of youth alongside adults in courtrooms and prisons.⁴

Unfortunately, these and other troubling social conditions do not remain outside the church door, regardless of our resolve to ignore them, but they impact our church youth and our youth ministry. Discussions of church youth ministry are often framed too narrowly and assume as normal the social location of adolescence. As a result, the church has often adopted approaches to ministry that further domesticate and marginalize youth. As a society and as the church we have too long neglected questions like these: How and for what purposes was the institution of adolescence