How Youth Ministry Can Change Theological Education -- If We Let It

By Eerdmans

Since 1993, forty-nine theological seminaries have created opportunities for high school students to participate in on-campus High School Theology Programs (HSTPs) that invite them to engage in serious biblical and theological study. Many of the young people who take part in these programs go on to become pastoral or lay leaders in their churches. What has made these programs so successful — especially given the well-documented “crisis of faith” among young people today?
 
In this book thirteen contributors — many of whom have created or led one of these innovative theology programs — investigate answers to this question. They examine the pedagogical practices the HSTPs have in common and explore how they are contributing to the leadership of the church. They then show how the lessons gleaned from these successful programs can help churches, denominations, and seminaries reimagine both theological education and youth ministry.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Mar 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781467444736

Book preview

If only a few of the ‘right people’ in theological education read this book, it won’t change anything. But if enough church leaders and the people who care about them read it and talk about it and remember our call together, it will make a big difference.

— David McAllister-Wilson

Wesley Theological Seminary

We have long underestimated the capacity of adolescents to engage and thrive in theological education run by talented teachers who believe in them enough to open the door of the theological and take them forward. This book makes us reimage the possibilities of our ministry among the young — and among ourselves as religious educators.

— Mike Carotta

author of Teaching for Discipleship

How Youth Ministry Can Change

Theological Education — If We Let It

Reflections from the Lilly Endowment’s

High School Theology Program Seminar

Edited by

Kenda Creasy Dean and Christy Lang Hearlson

With

Elizabeth W. Corrie

Katherine M. Douglass

Fred Edie

David Horn

Andrew Brubacher Kaethler

Jeffrey Kaster

Anabel Proffitt

Judy Steers

Brent A. Strawn

Anne Streaty Wimberly

Jacquie Church Young

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.

© 2016 Kenda Creasy Dean and Christy Lang Hearlson

All rights reserved

Published 2016 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

www.eerdmans.com

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Dean, Kenda Creasy, 1959- editor. | Lilly Endowment’s High School Theology Program.

Title: How youth ministry can change theological education-if we let it : reflections from the Lilly Endowment’s High School Theology Program Seminar / edited by Kenda Creasy Dean and Christy Lang Hearlson, with Andrew Brubacher Kaethler, Elizabeth Corrie, Katherine M. Douglass, Fred Edie, David Horn, Jeffrey Kaster, Anabel Proffitt, Judy Steers, Brent A. Strawn, Anne Streaty Wimberly, Jacquie Church Young.

Description: Grand Rapids, Michigan : Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015039466 | ISBN 9780802871930 (pbk. : alk. paper)

eISBN 9781467445207 (ePub)

eISBN 9781467444736 (Kindle)

Subjects: LCSH: Pretheological education. | Theology — Study and teaching. |

Lilly Endowment’s High School Theology Program. | Church work with youth.

Classification: LCC BV4163 .H69 2016 | DDC 230.071 — dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039466

Unless noted otherwise, all Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the 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.

pp. xv and xvii, Quotations from On the Pulse of Morning from ON THE PULSE OF MORNING by Maya Angelou, copyright © 1993 by Maya Angelou. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

p. 49, Figure from Kolb, David A., Experiential Learning: Experience as a Source of Learning & Development, 1st, © 1984. Printed and Electronically reproduced by permission of Pearson Education, Inc., New York, New York.

To Craig Dykstra

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Part One

A More Excellent Way: Vocational Discernment as a Practice of Christian Community

1. Taste Tests and Teenagers: Vocational Discernment as a Creative Social Practice

Kenda Creasy Dean and Christy Lang Hearlson

2. Calling as Creative Process: Wicked Questions for Theological Education

Kenda Creasy Dean and Christy Lang Hearlson

Part Two

More Than a Job Fair: Creating Cultures of Vocational Discernment

3. Catalyzing Community: Forming the Community as Catechist

Anabel Proffitt and Jacquie Church Young

4. Give Me Mentors: Pedagogies of Spiritual Accompaniment

Anne Streaty Wimberly

5. Holy Noticing: The Power of Nomination and Commissioning for Missional Formation

Katherine M. Douglass

6. Taking It Home: Separation and Reintegration as Teachable Moments

Christy Lang Hearlson

Part Three

More Than Summer Camp: Adventures in Vocational Practices

7. Getting All Turned Around: Truth, Disruption, and Reorientation in High School Theology Programs

Andrew Brubacher Kaethler

8. Fuel My Faith: Pedagogies of Theological Reflection in High School Theology Programs

Jeffrey Kaster

9. The Formative Power of Awe: Pedagogies of Worship and Wonder

Fred Edie

10. Prepare Me for a Worthy Adventure: Pedagogies of Pilgrimage in Adolescent Formation

David Horn

11. Let Me Try: Experiential Learning in the Theological Formation of Young People

Judy Steers

Part Four

More Than Teenagers: Vocational Discernment in the Lives of Program Staff, Faculty, and Theological Institutions

12. Becoming Christ’s Hands and Feet in the World: The Vocational Formation of Staff

Elizabeth W. Corrie

13. Teaching in a New Key: The Pedagogical Formation of Theological Faculty

Brent A. Strawn

14. Hitting It Out of the Park: Why Churches Needs Farm Teams

Kenda Creasy Dean

Appendixes

A. Research Methods for the High School Youth Theology Program Seminar

B. Members of the High School Theology Program Seminar (2011-2013)

C. Theological Programs for High School Youth, Lilly Endowment Inc. (active in 2014)

Index

Foreword

The book you are about to read tells the story of a gift — a gift given to nearly twenty thousand high school age young people from all across the United States. It is the gift of a good, strong taste of serious theological study and inquiry.

It sounds at first like an odd kind of gift. Why would anybody, much less a high school sophomore, junior, or senior, want to study theology? Theology sounds arcane, abstruse — the kind of thing only obscure religious intellectuals would ever take seriously. But that’s a myth. For theology is the study of God — an inquiry that asks who God is and what God does, and what God’s existence, presence, will, love, and call mean for each of us and for all of us, and, indeed, for all creation. It turns out that, in one way or another, most human beings, including children and youth, are deeply interested in matters such as these.

The church is a treasure-­house. Contemporary Christians have inherited, both from their forbears in ancient Israel and from the church’s own worldwide life and experience since its earliest days, the most incredibly profound and powerfully life-­changing story about God ever told. And that story has engendered a vast storehouse of resources and reflection on all the fundamental questions human beings ask. Sadly, however, far too few Christians today have ready access to this treasure. And very few teenagers know it even exists. If they are fortunate enough to go to good schools, many American teenagers are given access to our cultural and intellectual inheritances in math and science, language and literature, history and the arts. But even our best schools teach almost nothing about religion — and theology is beyond the pale. Further, with few exceptions, our churches have failed as well to unwrap this hidden treasure.

But I was lucky. No, I was blessed. As a teenager, I was a member of a congregation that took its youth seriously, as theologians. We were given an early taste of what it was like to read serious and challenging theological and biblical texts, and to ask hard questions about what they meant for our own lives. Our ministers knew the treasure-­house intimately, and they put it into play in their preaching and teaching and other interactions with us. They made it clear that these peculiar gifts had power to help us as we struggled to navigate the course of our daily lives during the turbulent years of the 1960s. That experience planted a seed, which many years later came to fruition when I was invited to lead the religion grant-­making program of Lilly Endowment, a charitable foundation located in Indianapolis. That seed grew into the theological programs for high school youth that this book both describes and explores.

Since 1993, forty-­seven theological seminaries have created opportunities for young people who are still in high school to come to their campuses and enter the treasure-­house of theological and biblical study with seminary professors as their guides. They live in community with one another for extended periods of time. They engage together in worship and service. And they experience a larger, broader, more diverse church than most of them have ever known or imagined.

How Youth Ministry Can Change Theological Education — If We Let It tells the story of this grand experiment. Kenda Creasy Dean and Christy Lang Hearlson introduce us to the enterprise as a whole. Nearly all the following chapters are written by people who have actually designed, created, and/or led one of these programs. As you read, you will find that while all of the programs share a basic, fundamental purpose, they are quite different in their theological emphases, pedagogical dynamics, and organizational structures. Further, you will find that each chapter focuses on some particular aspect of the enterprise as a whole. The result is a rich smorgasbord of wisdom and insight gleaned both from the authors’ deep engagements in their own programs and years spent in conversation with one another.

Theological programs for high school youth have been and continue to be an amazing gift to the thousands of young people who have participated in them as well as to the church and the world. As you will learn, large percentages of these young people — some now in their late twenties and thirties — have become significant Christian leaders, both as pastoral leaders in the church and as active church members whose strong sense of vocation has guided their career choices and commitments to work in service to others.

This book is a gift as well. It dispels the myth that theology is inaccessible except to a few. It displays the truth that once they have gotten a full, rich taste of it, teenagers truly do hunger for theology — and for the robust, compelling, intellectually demanding life of faith it reveals to them. Moreover, this book can help the whole church figure out how to do a lot more of this — not only in seminaries but in a wide variety of other contexts as well. It describes in considerable detail the variety of ways the church can enable its people — young and older alike — to enter the treasure-­house and encounter the beautiful, powerful, life-­giving resources that await them there.

When Candler School of Theology at Emory University launched the very first theological program for high school youth on July 4, 1993, its director, Don C. Richter, invited me to give the opening address to the young scholars (that’s what they call them), their teachers and mentors, and the staff as they gathered for its opening convocation. Don asked me to tell the story that lay behind the idea for this new venture and to say something about my hopes for all of them as they embarked on this adventure. What follows is what I told them.

Choose Life!

Well, here you are! I’ve been looking forward to meeting you for about fifteen years. I am delighted to see you. I have wondered who you would be. I have wondered what your names would be . . . and where you have come from . . . and where here would be . . . and why you would have come . . . and what you would be feeling and thinking now, at this moment . . . and what would happen while you are here . . . and what it would all lead to — for you and for the world.

I greet you this way because your very presence here today is the beginning of the fulfillment of a dream for me. I don’t want to make too much of that, but I thought you would like to know it, because it explains why I am here speaking to you tonight.

For about fifteen years, I have been hoping that a gathering like this would take place somewhere, sometime. My hopes for this have their beginnings in my own youth. When I was in high school, I received two great gifts. One of those gifts was four summers on a college campus as a participant in a music institute for youth. It was a wonderful experience, in which a whole flock of kids from across the state of Michigan came together each summer to play and sing great classical music, and to learn how to make that music from the best teachers who could be assembled. The work was hard, the discipline strenuous, the anxiety levels occasionally high, the experience of living like college students exciting, and the music . . . and the discovery of our capacities to make such beautiful music together . . . well, that was unbelievable.

That was one gift. The second gift was theology. I graduated from high school in 1965. During the four years I was there, the civil rights movement was in full sway, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the war in Vietnam was stoking up, and the Beatles were revolutionizing rock music. In the midst of all this came a minister who thought we young people could use a strong dose of the best thought the Christian faith had to offer — at least if we were ever going to be able to make sense of what was going on all around us, much less of our own lives. The interplay between the greatest historical and contemporary Christian theology, on the one hand, and the tough questions our lives were putting to us, on the other: that was the gift he gave us.

Among the things this pastor got us high school kids to do was read theology. Not the easy stuff or the uncontroversial stuff, but some of the hardest, most challenging books of the time. Two books in particular stood out for me then. One was Honest to God, a book I’m sure you’ve never heard of. Written by John A. T. Robinson, an English bishop, this book called for a re-­thinking, top to bottom, of Christian doctrine. It was the same re-­thinking that was going on in the theology schools, though almost nobody in the churches at the time knew it. We did. We read this book with a sense of wonder and excitement. Others simply blasted it as heretical. We loved it because it made us think through what we really believed and showed us how the questions we had anyway were precisely the questions Christianity had long been about.

The second book was Letters and Papers from Prison. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, its author, had been executed by the Nazis a few weeks before the end of the Second World War. They had put him in prison and then finally hung him because he was involved in the resistance movement against Hitler. A Christian deeply committed to peace, he had come to the morally tragic conclusion that Hitler had to be killed, and so he participated in a plot to assassinate him. Letters and Papers from Prison is a collection of letters, sermons, journal entries, and fragments of larger writings that Bonhoeffer wrote while awaiting his trial and execution. In reading this book, I met, for the first time, a person who loved life — loved not just his own life, but Life itself — so much so that he was able to die for it. And I saw, though I hardly understood, what made it possible for him to live that way.

That time was the beginning of my discovery that there exists a huge, wonderful, powerful, moving, life-­changing literature called, for lack of a better name, theology. It’s made up not only of essays on doctrine like Honest to God, but also of poems and songs and plays, of letters and journals and autobiographies, of long histories of the great adventures of whole peoples, and of brief pamphlets that provide moral advice and spiritual direction. Some of it is as contemporary as the latest movie. Some of it goes back centuries.

Do you know that all of that is there for you? Has anyone told you? Has anyone made it available to you? Don’t let them hide it away! Make them give it to you! Force them, if you have to, to open it all up to you!

These were two gifts I had received: the gift of a summer youth institute and the gift of theology. They are gifts that I treasure still. They are gifts that set my own life on a course. They are gifts I have wanted others to have as well. And somewhere along the way, it hit me that these two gifts could be brought together into one — that there might sometime be a new kind of institute, one where people like you, still in high school, could go to a college or seminary campus for a month or so, be with great teachers and other kids who care about similar things, have a chance to read and study and discuss the sorts of books that had meant so much to me, and to connect all that with what was going on in the world around them and within their own lives and hearts.

That’s why I’m here tonight, and why I’m so very pleased to meet you and to wish you well. But why are you here? And what will you do here? And what will come of your having been here?

I don’t know what lured you here. Maybe you are not entirely sure yourselves. Over the next few days, you will have opportunities to say to one another a little bit about why you came. And over the next several weeks, you will discover more and more why you came as what you came for begins to happen.

You are the first. This Institute has never happened before. No one knows what it will be like, for it is not made yet. You will make it. You are the people responsible for bringing it into being. Why you came, what you will do here, and what will come of your having been here are all questions that have no answers at the moment. They are questions whose answers are to be made through the activity of creating your life together here.

And this is precisely as it should be, for the activity of creating a life together is right at the heart of what theology is. This great, wonderful literature I have been talking about is the literature that arises out of the process of creating a particular kind of life together, the kind of life together that really faces the big questions of Why are we here? What will we do with our lives? and What will come of our having been here?

Frederick Buechner once said that, at its heart most theology . . . is essentially autobiography. Aquinas, Calvin, Barth, Tillich . . . are all telling us the stories of their lives, and if you press them far enough, even at their most cerebral and forbidding, you find an experience of flesh and blood, a human face smiling or frowning or weeping or covering its eyes before something that happened once.¹

I think that’s right. The written stuff, the sung stuff comes from actual life. And you don’t get what it’s about until you dig for the life in it and the life behind it. And the fact is, it’s the life that’s the important thing — the life lived, the life created. Theology is much more than what’s written. Theology is ultimately the process of creating a way of living.

Furthermore, that way of living is never just individual or private. It is a way of living together, of creating life in community, of creating public life. It is the process of creating new life together in the midst of all the life that is going on within you and around you. This is what you are being called to do here at this Youth Theology Institute.

I understand that you have all been given Maya Angelou’s inauguration poem, On the Pulse of the Morning, to read and think about. That poem makes us remember the deepest, farthest part of the created world — the very earthen-­ness of the Rock, the River, the Tree. Each of these is a witness in its own way to the coursing of life through the eons — and to the destruction and dying that has come along with it.

The Rock, and the River, and the Tree each plead with us — with all of us, whoever we are, wherever we come from — to choose something. To choose to stand up and in the open, rather than to crouch in the bruising darkness. To choose to rest beside flowing waters and to listen to their melody, rather than to thrust perpetually under siege in armed struggle. To choose to let down roots in fertile soil shared by many whose names are different from our own and whose arrivals have been by various routes. To choose to Lift up your eyes upon/This day breaking for you. To Give birth again/To the dream.

The poem puts choices before each of us and before all of us together, and tells us something about what is at stake in choosing. I expect you may read this poem often in the weeks to come. As you do, I hope you will listen carefully to each other to learn what each of you hears in it, sees in it, brings to it, brings to you as you read it together. Because you come from different places and have diverse insights and gifts, you can help each other to find rich treasures that none of you can discern on your own.

I also hope you will read this poem in the light of the people you meet and the things you see and do in the city of Atlanta. Let this complicated, richly various public place illuminate the poem; and let the poem focus your attention and prod you to understand features of the city and its peoples that you otherwise would miss.

Finally, I hope you will lay this poem down side by side with other poems and texts, older ones that I am sure Angelou herself remembered when she wrote her poem. As you think about the Rock in Angelou’s poem, think also about the Rock portrayed in the Book of Deuteronomy whose work is perfect, and all his ways are just (Deut. 32:4). As you think about the River in Angelou’s poem, remember too the rolling waters of justice and the ever-­flowing streams of righteousness for which the prophet Amos yearns (Amos 5:24). When you see in your mind’s eye Angelou’s Tree, ask what that Tree has to do with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:9, 17) or that tree upon which hung a condemned Jew whom many called Lord. When Angelou wrote her poem, she had these other images in mind as well. Her poem leaves all the hints we need to prove that to us.

What are you doing here? What will happen? What will it mean? A poem like this will expand your life when you read it together in this place. Included in your reading will now be the insights and experiences, the feelings and hopes of everyone here that you read it with and everyone you encounter in this city. People who are strangers to you now, whose lives are unlike your own, whose homes are quite different, whose worlds are foreign territory — all this will become part of you through your reading of this poem alongside the stories and the poems about the other rocks and rivers and trees that litter Scripture and the literature of the Christian people. Your own lives and the lives of these strangers sitting near you will mix with the lives — the passions, the fears, the adventures, the struggles, the terrible sufferings, and the huge joys — of peoples whose lives and faith have given birth to your own.

Maya Angelou’s poem pleads with us to choose. Choice like this has been laid upon people before. The time came when a vagabond people weary of forty years of desert wandering climbed upon a rock, encountered a great river, saw a new vista, and prepared to enter a new land and a new future. The man who had led them, Moses, was old and would not be able to go with them. But before his people went on without him, Moses called them together and, like Angelou, said choose. But choose what? Choose life, he said:

See, I have set before you this day

Life and good, and death and evil . . .

therefore, choose life. (Deut. 30:15, 19, KJV)

Choose life! Choose life and good, not death and evil. What does that mean? How do we do it? A poem, a biblical text can urge us to do so. A poem and a text read in the company of strangers who more and more share their lives with one another can begin to illumine the way. A poem and a text read together while you go out into a public’s life to watch how the choices of life and good and death and evil are made every day and to learn from those who have figured out, more or less, where life and good are to be found — all that can press the questions hard and enormously enrich the resources with which to answer them. But finally, a poem, a text read in this particular company of strangers striving to become community in public, while keeping in close touch with the rich and wonderful stories, prayers, poems, and ideas of generation upon generation of people who tried to know and worship and be faithful to God — well, that is, I think, itself a way of choosing . . . a way of choosing life.

Theology, I said, is ultimately a process of creating a way of life together that answers such big questions as Why are you here? What will you do with your life? and What will come of your having been here? That is what you are being called here to do right now and to keep doing after you leave. This theology institute for youth was once a dream not made. It had no faces, no lives to do the choosing and creating. Now it is yours to make real. The horizon leans forward/Offering you space to place new steps of change, says Maya Angelou. Therefore, choose life, says Moses. Both of them are saying these things to you, my friends. God bless you!

* * *

I am deeply grateful to Kenda Creasy Dean for leading the project and assembling the team that has produced this valuable resource. I have long admired the directors, staff, and faculty who have mounted and led these programs and have thoroughly enjoyed the opportunities I have had to be with many of them. I am especially grateful for those who have taken the time and employed their talents to write so eloquently about what they are doing in these programs and why. Every theological school that has mounted one of these programs has taken a big risk and made a significant investment in an endeavor that might not always have seemed in their own best institutional interest. But they have made an enormous contribution to the whole, and I am grateful for the vision and commitment to the larger good their leadership exemplifies. James L. Waits was the first to take on this experiment when he was Dean of Candler School of Theology, and Don C. Richter was the School’s first director of its Youth Theology Institute. They were pioneers. Finally, I am profoundly grateful to Tom Lake, Tom Lofton, Clay Robbins, and Christopher Coble of Lilly Endowment for the support, encouragement, investment, and leadership in the grants programs that launched and have helped sustain these programs and this book project.

When I read this book and encounter these programs, I see a vision come to life. I hope that the new terrain these trailblazers have marked out will encourage and help you to create new paths of your own in the contexts where you live and work, so that for generations to come young people may receive and absorb the gift of theology as an indispensable dimension of their lives and faith.

Craig Dykstra

1. Frederick Buechner, Alphabet of Grace (New York: Seabury Press, 1970), p. 3.

Acknowledgments

This book, even more than most, is a group effort. Above all, thank you to the young people whose voices punctuate these pages, and to countless other youth whose experiences have informed the High School Theology Program Seminar. To the teenage participants, program alumni, young adult staff, counselors, and peer mentors we interviewed, and to those we observed and read about: thank you. You are this book’s inspiration.

This book is the culmination of a two-­year research project that stretched out into almost four — which means there is a very long list of people to whom I am indebted. At the top of that list are Craig Dykstra and Christopher Coble of the Lilly Endowment, whose incomparable vision for the vocational formation of teenagers gave rise to the High School Theology Programs themselves. Craig and Chris’s conviction that we can do better when it comes to adolescent faith and leadership formation has now influenced an entire generation of young leaders who are actively changing the way we think about the church and the theological education it requires. Until now, Craig Dykstra has not been thanked in print for the way High School Theology Programs — which sprang from Craig’s own fertile vocational imagination — have helped change the landscape of American youth ministry. Meanwhile, it was Chris Coble who brought this particular project to life. As project director, I benefitted ( with embarrassing regularity) from Chris’s unflagging enthusiasm, clear vision, gentle guidance, and endless patience. Craig and Chris are the original champions of the HSTPs. Neither this book nor hundreds of young church leaders’ ministries would have taken shape without them.

Projects like this one are accomplished largely through the work of unsung heroes — heroes like our intrepid project associate, Kristie Finley, who somehow viewed managing logistics as ministry, who herded cats and sent gentle nudges and brought chili and affirmation to our meetings. Kristie was assisted by our fearless project assistant Ashley Higgins, and later by the unflappable Brian Tanck who filled in after Ashley moved over to the research side of the project. Jennifer DiRicco, administrator for the School of Christian Education at Princeton Theological Seminary, offered technical magic, moral support, and a wry sense of humor at perfect intervals, while Chanon Ross and Abigail Rusert of Princeton’s Institute for Youth Ministry — whose brilliance and hilarity dazzle me daily — created numerous vehicles for disseminating project findings throughout the youth ministry community.

Few people will appreciate the hundreds of hours logged by the research team, youth ministers, and doctoral students who met faithfully for more than twenty months to design and execute a research plan, carry out the project’s primary interviews and site visits, and help interpret relevant data. Our collective gratitude to the teenagers and program directors who agreed to be interviewed for this project knows no bounds. Those gathering this data — Stephen Cady, Katie Douglass, Marcus Hong, McLane Stone, Nathan Stucky, and Wendy Mohler — gave this project insight and levity as we ploughed through hundreds of pages of transcripts and archival material. (Unless otherwise cited, all quotes from program participants come from interviews conducted for this book.)¹ Only one team member had any experience with High School Theology Programs prior to this research (Marcus Hong attended an HSTP as a teenager), but they all became ferocious advocates of the programs they visited. One team member even changed his own vocational direction as a result of being inspired by the quality of youth ministry these programs made possible.

Special thanks go to the program directors and practical theologian consultants who contributed to this research as part of the seminar itself. Christian educators Reginald Blount, Drew Dyson, Jeff Keuss, Gordon Mikoski, and Don Richter helped us contextualize the pedagogical approaches of the HSTPs in larger discussions about Christian formation underway in practical theology. In what can only be described as an act of generosity and affection, biblical scholar Brent Strawn joined the team in time to attend our writing retreat, adding a chapter to this book so the perspective of an HSTP faculty member could be represented.

It was the program directors, however, who had the most to lose by being yoked to a project director who was, by design, an outsider to the HSTP network. These people — theological educators and passionate advocates for young people — showered me with grace (and substantial forgiveness) as they opened their programs, their writing, and their hearts to a relentless process of pedagogical scrutiny and theological reflection with peers. Andy Brubacher Kaethler, Beth Corrie, Fred Edie, David Horn, Jeff Kaster, Anabel Proffitt, Judy Steers, and Anne Streaty Wimberly — on behalf of their many colleagues who direct HSTPs — have given themselves to these ministries whole-­cloth, and they held nothing back when it came to contributing to this research project. We started as colleagues and wound up as friends, and my admiration for their work on behalf of youth and the church defies words. It is no overstatement to say that these eight individuals have changed the church through the thousands of teenagers who, thanks to them and to the programs they have designed, have named and responded to God’s invitation to become church leaders and change-­makers.

Three more people must be mentioned, because without them this book would not exist. Ted Jordan became an accidental editorial assistant for this project, but his passion for and experience in youth ministry gave him special sympathy and insight for this work — and when we discovered his keen eye for detail and gifts as an editor, we immediately signed him up. Ted joyfully read and critiqued several versions of the final manuscript before it became, with his help, final.

Jon Pott, former Vice President and Editor-­in-­Chief of William B. Eerdmans Publishing, has taken more than one chance on a risky youth ministry manuscript, and Jon signed this book as one of his last projects before a much-­deserved retirement from a celebrated publishing career. Most people consider Jon an editor, but we have discovered his secret identity. He is a theological educator who uses editing to mentor and shape young scholars and church leaders. Those of us involved in the High School Theology Program Seminar hope this book will continue Jon’s legacy.

My own hero in this project is Christy Lang Hearlson, who originally signed on as associate editor but very quickly became much, much more than an associate. Her lucid, clear-­eyed critique of drafts — first and final — resurrected more than one dead paragraph, including my own. An ace practical theologian and theological educator in her own right, Christy has the gift of understanding the potential of an author’s ideas better than the author does, and she knows how to clear away the brush so those ideas can be fully appreciated. Above all, her vision for what this book could contribute to theological education was a continual inspiration to me and to the rest of the team. This is why she is listed as this book’s co-­editor.

Finally, on behalf of all the authors in this book, these most important thanks: for all of the friends and loved ones who sacrificed time with someone dear so he or she could finish a chapter, for all of the students whose papers were graded more slowly than they should have been because this manuscript was unfinished, for all of the dishes left undone and homework left unchecked because a deadline was upon us: thank you, beloved ones, for cheering and forgiving us, and for teaching us about God along the way.

Kenda Creasy Dean

Princeton, NJ

1. Though not formally a member of the research team, Craig Gould added significantly to our research, especially in regards to Catholic programs.

Part One

A More Excellent Way

Vocational Discernment as a

Practice of Christian Community

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of