The Godbearing Life, Revised Edition: The Art of Soul Tending for Youth Ministry

By Kenda Creasy Dean, Ron Foster and Megan DeWald

A generation ago, The Godbearing Life charted a new course for youth ministry to fuel the faith both of young people and the adults who minister with them. It is founded on the truth that we are all Godbearers to one another, and therefore youth ministry is more about people than programs. Youth ministry is ministry that invites young people into deep soul work and spiritual friendships.

Like the original, The Godbearing Life, Revised Edition is conversationally written, grounded in scripture, and grows out of all three authors' own pastoral experience. The update addresses the profound shifts in society and ministry over the past twenty-five years—from the interconnection of technology to the professionalization of youth ministry. This book reimagines the means of Godbearing youth ministry in a post-pandemic digital age in the twenty-first century while holding on to the fact that young people are continuously transformed by the message.

The Godbearing Life, Revised Edition offers a new generation of church leaders the same depth of spiritual wisdom that shifted the ground for youth workers two decades ago. The basic message is this: young people need adults who practice faith alongside them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Upper Room Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780835819985

Kenda Creasy Dean

Kenda Creasy Dean is an ordained elder in the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference (United Methodist) and professor of youth, church and culture at Princeton Theological Seminary, where she works closely with the Institute for Youth Ministry. She is the author of several books, including OMG: A Youth Ministry Handbook, Practicing Passion, The God-Bearing Life and Almost Christian.

Book preview

PREFACE

This project was born out of two convictions. The first: Young people are looking for a soul-shaking, heart-waking, world-changing God to fall in love with; and if they do not find that God in the Christian church, they will most certainly settle for lesser gods elsewhere. The second conviction: So will we.

The risks facing teenagers today bear solemn testimony to the church’s failure to see young people as little more than notches in the belts of our church attendance statistics. Young people are looking for something, Someone, capable of turning their lives inside out and their world upside down. Most of the time we have offered them pizza. We are painfully aware that we have sold them short. We have tended their schedules more effectively than their souls, and we have the data to prove it. In the meantime, our own wells have run dry. We are running out of ideas. And steam. And hope.

Ministry, especially youth ministry, was never intended to be a service profession. Ministry is the grateful response of God’s people, whose activity in the world and with one another suggests a new way of being alive. Ministry is not something we do to someone else. It is a holy way of living toward God and toward one another. Somehow in the din of modernity, this distinctive way of life—sometimes called the sanctified life, Christian perfection, or holiness, depending upon your theological perspective—got lost along the way. We traded holiness for effectiveness, charisms for careers, soulfulness for savvy. In the meantime, young people got lost or abandoned. So did many adults.

This book is our attempt to rechart a course for youth ministry that fuels the faith of young people and the adults who love them. It is also a not-very-well-disguised attempt to rechart a course for ministry period, in similar directions. Our own involvement in this project evolved out of friendship and a mutual passion for God, youth, and the church. We (Kenda and Ron) met by chance between the business sessions of the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church in 1991 and discovered a shared a sense of vocation that tries to bring these passions together. Ron serves a congregation in Severna Park, Maryland, as a pastor; Kenda, a youth minister-turned-academic, teaches at a Protestant seminary in New Jersey. Over many years we have relied on our friendship to help each other stay spiritually honest and theologically grounded, both because of and despite our job descriptions.

In 2016, Megan DeWald came into our world. Megan began working at the Institute for Youth Ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary, the school where I (Kenda) teach. Besides being a brilliant writer, Megan shared our passions for youth ministry, Christian formation, and the church. She made The Godbearing Life required reading in the certificate program she runs—which means she’s assigning it to youth pastors who weren’t even born in 1998 when The Godbearing Life was originally published. Given the massive changes in both church and culture over the past two and a half decades, Ron and I were flattered and a little amazed that people found the book relevant to their ministries today. But Megan’s students thought of the book as a classic—which is a nice way to say that it was meaningful but dated. Megan and her students frequently compare their ministries to the world assumed by The Godbearing Life and note how much ministry has changed.

Of course. And just as obvious (though easy for us to overlook) were the ways that Ron and I had changed as well. When we wrote The Godbearing Life in the late 1990s, both of us were young pastors who were growing our ministries and our families at the same time. Now we are at the other end of our vocational lives, which has given us some wisdom and perspective and (in Ron’s case) some grandchildren that we didn’t have when we started. A year ago, my daughter Shannon—now a seminarian—read The Godbearing Life and circled every reference or section that sounded like it came from another planet. ("Mom: Malls? CDs? TripTiks? What the heck is a TripTik?!!") Some of my exegesis raised her eyebrows. Her copy of the book looked like a paper I would flunk.

Megan was kinder but no less certain that it was time for an update. As it turned out, our editors at The Upper Room had been thinking the same thing, and they approached us about making it happen. Knowing Megan’s elegance as an author—and the fact that she is a full generation younger than we are (and a ton of fun to work with)—we asked our editors if we could add Megan to the book and put her in charge of making it accessible to new generations. Not only could she translate words like TripTik but also add content to help youth pastors put this book in conversation with the present moment. You now hold the product of that work, and we could not be more honored by how it turned out. All three of us hope these pages will continue to generate faithful and fruitful conversations for a new generation of leaders who love and minister with young people.

We have all worked together and separately on behalf of youth and the church; and while we write with shared convictions, we also write with different voices and experiences. We chose not to homogenize our writing styles, which allows us to convey our individual perspectives more candidly. We chose not to interrupt personal stories with parenthetical names of the authors because we find it to be rhetorically clunky. As a result, you may experience some stylistic speed bumps and narrative shifts, but that seems more honest than interrupting a story. We hope these bumps slow you down long enough to insert your own perspective into the conversation.

We are grateful for the many people who have enthusiastically supported this project from its origins in the late 1990s until now. Special thanks belong to the participants in the Princeton Forums on Youth Ministry and the Institute for Youth Ministry’s Certificate in Youth and Theology program. Many of the ideas in this book originated in our teaching for these programs, and the feedback of certificate program participants especially have shaped this updated edition. We are also grateful for the unwitting support of the waitstaff at the Ball Park Restaurant and the staff members of Bel Air United Methodist Church, who had no idea they were serving as midwives to this project during our many meetings at these halfway stops between our homes in the years before Zoom became a (somewhat) viable substitute for face-to-face meetings. We also offer our begrudging thanks to the internet for making those drives unnecessary for the current edition.

Special thanks also go to Amy Vaughn, Emily Anderson, Laurel Brown, and Dave Stum, colleagues who offered honest feedback on this book-in-process, and to Dayle Gillespie Rounds and Mike Selleck who gave the original final draft a perceptive once-over. The current version would not have been possible without the support of Abigail Visco Rusert, Princeton’s Associate Dean for Continuing Education and former Director of the Institute for Youth Ministry, who held Megan to her promise to complete this project and made sure she had the space to do it. These people are treasured conversation partners in our lives and our ministries, people who exemplify the Godbearing life for us. Alice Caltrider, Pat Dinsmore, Tom Brown, and Paul Barrett provided critical and good-humored secretarial and research support that grounded the original version (twenty-five years ago, Paul devoted a perfectly good summer to spelunking in the library for footnotes—most of which were cut from the final version). Today he is a pastor who, over the past two decades, has raised up countless Godbearing youth ministers on his watch, many of whom have inspired Godbearers of their own.

Above all, thanks must go to the young people who have pastored us over the long course of our ministries. We have been loved and shaped by the extraordinary faith of young people in and beyond our congregations who have fearlessly shot down our most valued ideas, pushed us with questions we would rather avoid, and set us on fire with their passion for God. And to the beloved ones who share our lives, especially Holly and Kevin, Brendan, Shannon, Christine, Sara—and now grandchildren Charlie, Andrew, and Owen—your loving support has been this venture’s vital ingredient. We love you even more now than when we first began. You are Godbearers, every one.

INTRODUCTION

A PARABLE FOR A PARADIGM SHIFT¹

Nothing worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime.

—Reinhold Niebuhr

One night while watching Gunsmoke , my Appalachian grandmother threw a log in the fireplace and told me the secret of fire: See those flames? she said. That’s just compressed sunshine, finding its way out. That tree spent its whole life absorbing sunny days, and now it’s giving ’em all back.

To this day, I can’t toss a log on a fire without admiring its generosity, entrusting to me all the sunny days it ever knew. Of course, this strategy never ends well for the log. In sharing its sunshine, the wood becomes exhausted, used up, burned out. This, we tell ourselves, is the natural course of living things: You are dust, and to dust you shall return (Gen. 3:19). You soak up your sunny days; you give them back; and then you’re done: a God-absorbed life, well lived.

After more than thirty years of ordained ministry, I have logged enough hours in the soot and embers of pastoral life to think differently. This is not the life scripture promises. A holy life is not an exhausted one, even for people in ministry with youth. The most effective youth ministers I know, the ones with blazing faith that points beyond themselves to Christ, are on fire with Jesus, not for Jesus. Their ministries stand the test of time not because they have zeal for God but because they have God; or more precisely, God has them, and they radiate divine light because of it. Christ somehow lives in their bones and in their bloodstreams; they welcome him into their lives the way children welcome Christmas and new puppies. As youth workers, they can no more avoid embodying Christ with young people than they can avoid exhaling. They are more midwives than middle managers, people who jump-start life with God and inspire us (the word comes from the Latin to breathe in). Through them, we experience the whack of God, those life-thumping moments when we are struck by God’s presence; and, as our involuntary gasps provide an opening, God’s life-giving Spirit rushes into us with a breath so soul-expanding, so shot through with divine love, that we cannot possibly hold it just for ourselves.

More God

As humans left to our own devices, being on fire depletes us while breathing enlivens us. Both burning and breathing are central images in Christian spirituality, and the ancients would not have considered trading one for the other. Burning and breathing both require oxygen that we cannot manufacture. To burn with God’s passion in youth ministry—in all ministry—requires recognizing that whatever light or warmth we have to offer depends on God burning within us. Ministry leans on the mysterious paradox of divine consumption: When we are used by God, we are not used up.

It is a leap of faith to be sure, but it is a necessary one. As Barbara Brown Taylor warns, what threatens the church more than bad preaching or institutional self-preservation—or any of our usual gripes—is a tendency to intellectualize faith, tucking it far away from our bones and our bodies and our tear ducts. (This habit is especially noticeable in many predominantly White congregations, whose theologies were shaped by the Enlightenment’s love of reason and tendency to reduce faith to a series of ideas.)² Given the glut of data already clogging the brains of young people in the Digital Age, the last thing they need is more ideas about God. What they need—and what we all need—is God, Incarnation, God in human skin, by which God saves the lives of those . . . who have run frighteningly low on the bread of life, who are dying to know more God in their bodies. Not more about God. More God.³

The embarrassing truth is that I’ve spent more time as a minister looking for ideas than I’ve spent looking for God. Like a lot of youth leaders, I am an ideas person. I have millions of ideas. Not little ones either. I can take a perfectly good small idea and whip it up into mammoth proportions in no time.

When I started in youth ministry, the most popular youth resource available was called The Ideas Series (like I needed another one). I worked hard at maintaining integrity in my ideas about youth ministry. I never built a program around the egg-in-armpit relay. I tried to involve youth in the total mission of the church, emphasizing worship and avoiding gimmicks without theological purpose. I recruited young people for service projects, peer counseling training, covenant discipleship groups, and our congregation’s homeless shelter team. I devoured literature on the problems facing contemporary youth.⁴

Pastoring, Not Programming

Then one Sunday an eighth grader accidentally pointed out that God had not called me to do youth ministry. In the first edition of this book, I told the story of thirteen-year-old Michelle who, week in and week out, asked me for prayer requests that she could lift up on my behalf. I was accustomed to asking teenagers, How shall I pray for you this week? but Michelle turned the tables and remained relentlessly faithful to her mission. Somehow, Michelle had gotten the message that she had a flock to tend as well, and her flock included me.

It dawned on me that what Michelle had responded to, out of our array of youth activities, was the simple question of a pastor, not an elaborate program of a youth leader. So I began to try pastoring youth instead of doing youth ministry—a shift in my self-understanding that proved to be as disorienting as it was freeing. There were subtle changes in my calendar. I quit showing up at youth group meetings and started showing up at school cafeterias and coffee shops. I asked others to plan the beach retreat and signed on as a driver so I would have six hours locked in a car with three talkative tenth graders. I started paying real attention to the ministry I had with youth from the pulpit and at the mall (back when those were a thing), as well as in the traditional youth ministry venues of Sunday school, youth group, and confirmation. I played my first video game and learned that a tenth grader would talk about vocation while flying starships on a screen (he wanted to be a fighter pilot like his dad). After another teen’s father lost a long battle with cancer, half a dozen of his friends and I walked and talked for ten miles to raise money for cancer research. I invested heavily in teaching youth—and myself—how to pray.

Above all, I began spending the bulk of my relational ministry helping young people, even those who didn’t attend any particular church, develop a vocabulary of faith. I quit beating around the bush and asked them up front: What’s going on between you and God? How goes your spiritual life? We worked to discern the difference between a language of deep faith and the shallows of spiritual small talk, and we found ways to risk using that language to describe ourselves and our place in the world. Together we tried to notice and critique the theology present in the hallways at school, in the kitchen at home, and in the nagging omnipresent question of both young people and Jesus Christ: Who do you say that I am?

Truth be told, we continued most of our regular youth activities at church. But I came to see them as subversive acts, vehicles that I hotwired to smuggle Christ into culture. It’s not that God needed me to do that; Christ still enters the world without a shred of help from me. But it is also true that God loves an invitation; given an inch, God takes the mile, rushing into the world through any crack we pry open for the Holy Spirit. I tried mightily (if haltingly) to get my own practices of prayer in order so that I could honor with real depth the prayer requests of these young people. I found excuses—lunch at McDonald’s, hammering nails during a service project, long walks of consolation—to ask youth about their prayers and about what they thought God was up to in their life. Every single teenager willingly talked.

No New Normals

This all happened well over thirty years ago. American life in the church rotates on a different axis now, and these days it feels difficult to locate the center at all. We thought the cataclysmic events of the early 2000s meant adjusting to a new normal—only to witness an avalanche of trauma in the years since that made normal impossible to gauge. In 1999 we were stunned by an inconceivable school shooting at Columbine; today, lockdown drills are as routine for our kids as yearbook photos. We spent years trying to process the collective trauma of 3,000 lives lost on September 11, 2001—and then in 2020, we watched the death count from COVID-19 (in the U.S. alone) exceed that number every day from December through February. At the turn of the millennium, we decried our division into red and blue states; now we wonder if we’re even living on the same planet, let alone in the same country. We are emerging wearily and warily from stay-at-home orders and online worship services, from protests and counterprotests and a homegrown attack on the US Capitol. Everyone seems angry and afraid, and the Earth itself keeps erupting into flames. First there was the new normal, then "the new new normal, and now, perhaps, we’re wondering if normal" is even a concept worth preserving.

Yet we still believe that what mattered to teenagers twenty or fifty or a hundred years ago matters to teenagers today, even if they use different language and technologies to express and meet those needs. Imagine, for instance, an average American teenaged girl (who is likely named Emily, according to the Social Security Administration’s records on Gen Z). Before the COVID-19 pandemic, an average day in Emily’s life included over five and a half hours of leisure time, with about three hours of that time spent looking at screens. Along with nearly 95 percent of her friends, Emily has access to a smartphone and describes herself as almost constantly on the internet. Emily says she uses her phone to pass time, connect with others, and learn new things, and she uses social media apps like Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok to communicate and keep an eye on cultural conversations and trends. She says that her parents make sure she gets at least seven hours of sleep a night, but she still wishes she got more sleep, spent more time socializing, and spent less time on homework. Emily doesn’t have a part-time job like her parents might have had at her age, but she is responsible for a list of household chores—which she rightly observes is longer than her brother’s.⁵

Despite the clichés of moody teens and suffering parents, Emily—like most American teenagers—says she enjoys spending time with her mom and dad. She values her close relationship with them, respects their opinions, and feels certain that they care about her. While she tires of listening to adults express concern about the amount of time she spends on screens, she is actually just as involved in extracurricular activities as young people were fifteen years ago. Along with nearly every teenager she knows, Emily is especially engaged in sports. But her extracurricular life is not mindless activity. She and her friends see themselves as activists who take part in, and sometimes lead, movements that push for justice, peace, and equality. They’ve participated in school strikes to demand action on climate change; they’ve organized local protests against systemic racism; they’ve marched to end gun violence; they’ve created and promoted new vocabularies that honor different abilities and identities. They’ve insisted on their humanity, and, in so doing, they’ve deepened all of ours.⁶

Perhaps the biggest difference in Emily’s experience compared to teenagers a generation ago is not so much how she spends her time but the way she feels about how she spends her time. Anxiety is a constant companion; one in three of Emily’s friends who are girls, and one in four of her friends who are boys, feel anxious about their day either every day or almost every day. Like 70 percent of her peers, Emily sees depression and anxiety as major problems for young people—even for those who do not personally live with mental health conditions. Among young people ages twelve to seventeen, rates of major depressive episodes have increased every year since 2004, and among LGBTQ+ young people, the already alarming statistics become staggering. Most LGBTQ+ youth—seven out of ten—felt sad or hopeless for at least two weeks in the past year, and more than half of transgender and non-binary youth have seriously considered ending their own lives. Emily is far more aware of this threat than her parents would have been at her age. Death by suicide is now the second leading cause of death among young people ages ten to twenty-four—a rate that is nearly 60 percent higher than in 2007.⁷

Facing these sobering realities, if we were to ask Emily what are the biggest problems facing her generation, she’d probably say the following: (1) anxiety and depression, (2) drugs and alcohol, and (3) bullying and cyberbullying. She might also name gangs, poverty, and/or teen pregnancy, depending on her context, and she’d probably name loneliness as a major problem among her peers, since a third of them report feeling completely alone—despite being part of the most technologically connected generation in history. Nearly 40 percent of her peers would say they feel like they have no one they can talk to—a rate that is consistent even among her friends who participate in religious groups. About half of Emily’s peers have been involved in some kind of religious youth group. About 60 percent have participated in religious education, and two in five attend worship services at least once or twice a month. Half of her religiously involved friends say they participate because their parents make them; the other half say they do it because it’s what they want to do.

None of this surprises religious youth workers. For years youth ministers have noticed what data now verifies: The older Emily and her friends get, the less often they will attend church. Indeed, half of them will leave their faith behind with their graduation gowns. While sociologists believe that the number of so-called nones—people who claim to be religiously unaffiliated—will continue to rise, the data is more complex. For instance, despite their loosening religious affiliations as young adults, 85 percent of Emily’s friends will say they believe in God (or a universal spirit). All of this raises questions for youth ministers who have grown accustomed to young people leaving formal religious life. What if God is moving in Emily’s life and in the lives of her friends in ways churches have not yet learned to recognize? What if the rise of the nones and religious disaffiliation’s siblings—relativism, pluralism, and globalism—does not signal the death of the Church but are instead ways in which God is working to make all things new?⁸

The Aweless and Anxious Generation

Anyone who works closely with young people quickly recognizes an undeniable link between social distress and spiritual famine. Two decades ago, we wondered how to pastor a generation that traded social survival for moral suicide, youth for whom adolescence meant navigating a gauntlet of choices in a culture and economy that profited immeasurably off their devotion and dollars. Now, we wonder how to pastor a generation facing daily existential threats (including—but not limited to—mass shootings, extreme weather events, systemic racism, global pandemics). It is little wonder that mental illness has skyrocketed among young people; our concerns with moral suicide have necessarily taken a backseat to the crisis of actual suicide.

Overall, those of us in churches feel the weight of our inability to influence America’s young people significantly, especially youth who have been marginalized. In 1995, almost three out of four religious youth workers said reaching out to youth who were living in significant physical and/or emotional jeopardy was important, but fewer than one in ten of us thought we did this well.⁹ Twenty-five years later, the consequences of this long-term disconnection have come to roost. Public trust in organized religion has dropped to 36 percent, and in one survey, only 8 percent of young people selected religious leader as an adult they could turn to in times of need.¹⁰ The risks and challenges confronting American teenagers are compounded by an unprecedented number of options they must navigate: Soccer or basketball? YouTube or Netflix? College or job experience? Going to sleep or going viral? Curating an image or getting experience? Living with mom or with dad? Taking care of their peers or taking care of themselves? The options are endless and exhausting.

Variety and choice—including the increasingly popular choice to opt-out—describe American young people’s religious experience too. Today’s teenagers have friends, both in-person and online, from many religious traditions in many parts of the world, generating profound theological and ethical questions. Young people in churches find themselves asking, what Jesus—the Way, the Truth, and the Life—means when your best friend is Jewish or Muslim or atheist. If all roads point to God, is Christianity necessary? If God loves all people, regardless of religious tradition, why should I bother with one that asks me to lose my life to gain it? If Jesus is the true Savior, why is the world still in such need of saving?

What is excruciatingly clear is that evangelism cannot merely rest on dispensing palatable Christian information. Believing in God is not the issue; believing God matters is the issue. Information is not in short supply; discernment is. Overwhelmed by options and the chronic stress that comes from having to choose among them, contemporary young people lack a compass to the stars, a way that points through the muddle of human possibilities to the transcendence of God. The signature qualities of young people in the twenty-first century are not lawlessness and rebellion but awelessness and anxiety. With so much vying for young people’s attention, the path to transcendence disappears beneath a bramble of competing claims on the soul, along with the looming specter of existential threat. So go ahead, youth say to the church, impress me. When everything is true, nothing is true. And anyway, the world’s on fire, and you don’t seem to care enough to put it out. So, whatever.

Christians turn to faith communities to help us quiet the din of our lives to hear Christ’s call clearly. Faithfulness grows in the presence of people who practice discerning One voice among the many and who, by attending to Jesus Christ, find themselves transformed and marked as his followers. Catechesis means forming youth for a life, not a religion. In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Christian faith offers a center that holds and a hope that sustains us, not just one more option we choose or product we consume.

As a result, pastoring young people in the Digital Age forces us to ask new kinds of questions. What does relational ministry look