Archive for month: June, 2019

Fluffy bunnies, otherwise known as chubby bunnies or chipmunking, is the upfront game that involves stuffing as many marshmallows into your mouth as possible without gagging or spitting. The objective is to coherently say the phrase ‘fluffy bunnies’ – or something to that effect – with a very, very full mouth. Hilarious right?

Now, I know I’m going to come across like a killjoy, but I really don’t think fluffy bunnies should be a thing. I’m also aware that this will be one of my more unpopular posts, so I might as well go all in: Playing any game with children that 1.) poses a genuine risk to them choking, and 2.) is sincerely discouraged by doctors is just stupid, stupid, stupid.

A worthy risk?

Call me old fashioned, but the idea of restricting the airways of young people by stuffing sweets in their mouth seems to me to be just a little bit odd. The obvious question is why? Why would we play any game that purposely inhibits a child breathing? ‘Because it’s fun, Tim, you weirdo!’ Well, there’s plenty of really fun games around, so why should the fun of this particular game outweigh the risks?

Granted, I’m not a fan of wasteful food games anyway, but I’m happy to really dig my heels in here and be labelled ‘over-protective.’ I certainly do plenty of daft things as a youth leader, but there are some things you just don’t mess with. Surely we can all get together and say that a child’s breathing is one of them?

It’s quite telling that the game grew in popularity in American frat houses as a hazing, often under the influence of copious amounts of funnelled alcohol. However, even after reported deaths from suffocation playing this game – including 12-year-old Casey Fish from Chicago – Christian youth groups continue to play it.

This really freaks me out. We have many fantastic games, and a bottomless pit of creativity in the youth ministry world. Why do we keep needing to roll the dice with this one? It’s degrading, wasteful, and frankly unreasonably dangerous.

When the medics and the youth leaders disagree

Almost every site that recommends this game now comes with safety disclaimers about supervision, appropriate ages, and even the presence of CPR-trained first-aiders. While these things might be true for other games too, the risk of this game isn’t injury, it’s death. Risk of falling or breaking an arm is just not the same as the risk of choking or suffocating.

In the US, two children die every week from choking on food, and it’s the fifth biggest killer of under-fives.

Fatherly reports Surgeon Dr. Christopher Hollingsworth as saying,

Marshmallows tend to be hard to remove from the airway, because of their ability to compress and then re-expand, as well as their texture which does not slide easily in or out of the airway.

And Dr. Zubair Ahmed said,

Children playing games such as Chubby Bunny might sound harmless, but the reality is that they pose serious risks of choking and suffocation… While many parents will understand that the combination of laughter and mouths stuffed with marshmallows is not a safe activity for children, others still do not fully understand the dangers of such choking games.

In contrast, one youth worker told me ‘we’ve played it for years and no one has ever choked’, and another actually said ‘just have a leader around who knows CPR and you’ll be fine.’

Forgive me if I side with the doctors.

The inherent risk with fluffy bunnies is not cuts and bruises, its suffocation. Why would we ever defend this as ‘acceptable’?

But don’t all games come with risk?

Many of our games come with a risk of injury, but we shouldn’t be playing anything where the risk is asphyxiation.

We wouldn’t encourage games that promote putting a hand over a child’s mouth to restrict their breathing, so why would we allow stuffing things into their mouth to the same effect?

Choking is just not an acceptable risk, and it only takes one totally tragic event to change our minds, but by then it’ll be too late. The fact that one of the youth workers I talked to above said  there needed to be a leader around who knew how to resuscitate a child after playing it tells a story.

We can’t eliminate risk from our games, sure. That’s exactly why we have risk-assessments, supervision, training, consent forms, and insurance. We certainly play a few bonkers games in my groups that come with what we believe is an acceptable level of risk. Even football, for instance, obviously comes with a reasonable level of risk. That said, I’ve never seen anyone playing football score a goal and then try to swallow the ball to the encouragement of their youth worker.

Mechanical injury is one thing, but that’s not what we’re risking here. We’re talking about restricting children’s airways – surely this is off limits? What possible reason could we have that’s good enough to exploit a real choking danger for entertainment?

Let’s rethink

I think that there’s only one thing worse than ramming large expanding pieces of confectionery down a child’s throat, and that’s getting them to do it to themselves to the sounds of cheers and ridicule.

At the risk of sounding alarmist and legalistic, could we possibly rethink this game and stop playing Russian Roulette with our kids’ safety?

When something is lodged in our throats causes a blockage, our instinct is to get rid of it. This game forces our young people to fight that instinct and make the blockage even worse. When you add to this laughter and peer pressure, a sudden sharp intake of breath can very quickly turn the game into something immensely more serious. What do you do then – tell them to spit when they can’t even breathe? When their lips start to turn blue do you put your fingers in their mouth to clear the barrier? Will the Heimlich work when the sweets congeal into a gel that  turns to glue in their throats?

What controls could ever make this OK?

If – God forbid – something tragic did ever happen as a result of playing this game, how would we defend our risk-assessment to a parent? What would that conversation even look like? ‘… Yes, I know it seems strange getting children to see who can stuff the most gelatinous sweets into their mouths, but… but… well it’s fun…’

I’m guessing this may rile a few people up. Sorry, I didn’t really mean to but I really feel very strongly about this. A widespread game that poses such a serious breathing risk needs a serious rethink. If youth workers were playing this game with my kids I’d want to know why they were being so caviler with my children’s safety.

‘It’s fun’ or ‘well, none of my kids have ever choked’ or ‘we have people around who know how to resuscitate’ are just not good enough reasons for me. Sorry. Find a new game.

There are plenty of fun games in the world. Check out some of my bonkers ones here. But when it comes to choking, asphyxiation, and suffocation – let’s just rethink it!

Thanks for listening to the rant 🙂

A couple of years ago I conducted an informal survey of fifty-seven full-time youth ministers who considered themselves to be ‘incarnational’ in their approach. 66.7% of them gave out their personal phone number to young people, and 52.6% gave their personal address. Of these 59.6% said they did not give any boundaries for when a young person could contact them. One respondent said he had an open-door policy: ‘For the most part, our door stays unlocked and they know they have the freedom to come in even if we are not home.’

This post is all about the practical dangers with those incarnational methods.

As the discussion so far has had a theological focus, it seemed unwise to give too much space to the practical implications in the middle of the previous posts. As with all poor theology, however, poor practice is sure to follow.

Outlining the practical issues

Unchecked openness

Going back to the survey I mentioned at the beginning, this open door and always on assumption in youth ministry clashes mightily with the need for healthy boundaries. Forgetting for a second that we’re neither God nor parents, what is the realistic risk-reward of making ourselves potential targets of dependency while burning out in the process?

This is exactly the kind of openness that is cautioned against by person-centered therapists, precisely because of the boundaries it rejects and dependency it creates. Modern counselors are  trained to look for these signs so they won’t be this unaccountably open. We might in fact be surprised that a lot of what is specifically suggested by incarnational youth ministry is flatly rejected in modern counseling theory.

I think this might just be this one of the key reasons that many youth workers burnout and most don’t last past one contract, and I’m not alone.

Burnout

Renfro in Perspectives on family ministry says the reason youth workers burnout is ‘because our ministry models are fundamentally flawed’ (2009:10). Bertrand and Hearlson in Relationships, personalism, and Andrew Root, agree saying incarnational youth ministry ‘sets up problems of intimacy between unequal partners and exacerbates the problem of youth worker burnout’ (2013:50).

Todd Billings (who we’ve talked about in previous parts) draws a straight line more specifically between poor incarnational theology and practical complications. He says

Yet because they take the Incarnation as their “model” of ministry, these evangelicals often assume that they—rather than the Holy Spirit—make Christ present in the world… “you and I may be the only Jesus that others will ever meet” …The burden of incarnation—and revelation—is on the shoulders of the individuals. Such a theology often leads to burnout (2012:60).

Pete Ward in Youthwork and the mission of God does address this somewhat, saying that the worker needs to learn to help young people become independent of them (1997:66). Darren Pollock, however, was unconvinced and in The church’s mission to youth, he criticised Ward directly saying his leader-centric model was still likely ‘to foster burnout among leaders’ (2014:299).

Dr. Andrew Root goes further and says we are to us to indwell or inhabit the pain of another so completely that it becomes our own (Revisiting relational youth ministry, 2007:129-130). He calls this ‘place-sharing’. I wrote to Dr. Root about this and he responded saying ‘you can only be a place-sharer to about 5 young people.’ Isn’t empathizing at this complete level this with even just one person dangerous? This is especially true when that one person is at completely a different stage of life and when the openness (according to Root) should go both ways. This is a recipe for burnout for sure, but also quite close to a text book definition of abuse: When two unequal parties share their own respective weights of experience and pain and needs, what will happen to the ‘weaker’ party?

Blurred lines at home

Herein lies the problem with an unchecked incarnational model of youth ministry. It has an inherent mugginess of boundaries that creates a lot of potentially unsafe situations.

You don’t want to argue with a family member at two in the morning, because you’ll both say things you don’t mean. Always being on is something parents do for a set number of years and they make a lot of mistakes, as we all know.

That close family relationship, all-warts exposed, cannot extend to twenty-some young people twenty-four hours a day. It’s a recipe for the happening of terrible things — and it also sets a precedent for those young people. We might be inadvertently teaching them to fall into unsafe behaviours and practices with other people in their lives who perhaps they shouldn’t trust.

Safeguarding concerns

While always being open to young people is a drain on health and family, robbing the worker of their effectiveness, it also creates safeguarding vulnerabilities. Being alone on the phone to a young person at all hours, having them come into the house alone, regularly meeting in quiet spaces, and prolonged private conversations can create unhealthy levels of dependency and exclusivity. Things are easily misconstrued in concealed spaces, especially with hurting and vulnerable young people.

Personal boundaries and healthy safeguarding practices are necessities for today’s youth worker to be in their post for years to come. Longevity demands healthy practice and accountability – things that are often neglected by incarnational models of youth ministry.

An ‘always on’ youth worker is a ‘sometimes off’ husband, or a ‘partially available mum’, or ‘too busy doing ministry’ dad. We really need another way.

So, Tim, you don’t like incarnational youth ministry?

Why, no. No, I don’t. I don’t think it’s theologically grounded, logically consistent, biblically sound, or practically helpful. I think as a theory it has a lot to answer for, and that we as the next generation of youth leaders need to move away from it.

I know ‘incarnational’ is unwritten into our methods. For some of us it feels part of our blood, it’s become a key part of our ministry identity. I don’t want – in any way – for this to pull the rug out from someone’s feet.

There’s goodness to retain, therefore. We might want to consider renaming our approach as relational-contextual­ rather than incarnational, rediscover the importance of proclamation – even without having foundational relationships – and create a wider base of ministry that happens outside of our purview and inside our boundaries.

I think burnout is a main reason youth ministers don’t last long, and that one of the reasons for this is our oppressive links to incarnational theory. Let’s be more sensible, more theologically grounded, and more spiritually helpful. We can still be incredibly compassionate without giving ourselves up to the worlds of young people.

Let’s do better folks.

Welcome back to Incarnational youth ministry week. We looked at the definition in Part 1, and we unpacked the importance of the meaning of the word in Part 2. Tomorrow we’ll dig deeper doctrinally, and on Friday we’ll look some of the practical dangers with some incarnational methods.

Today we’re looking at the Bible! Woohoo!

Quick caveat. I’ve had a message from someone who was a little upset with my tone on the previous Part. I’m really sorry! I guess I came across like a bit of a know-it-all. Totally not my intention. Those of you who know me know that I hate upsetting anyone. I don’t mean to come across poor, but I do want to be clear that I think this is a really really deep problem. I really think that this needs to be challenged because it does represent a Gospel issue that cuts to the center of who Jesus is and why He came. My caveat is please trust my heart is motivated by desire to help youth ministry and honour Jesus. We’re in this together. Back to Part 3.

What we can tell from method

Incarnational theory sounds theological, not just because of the word, but because of the texts that – at least at first glance – seem to back it up.

As with any theological issue, the problem stems from how we interact with the Bible. As is endemic in youth ministry culture, I think that the problems arise from a general lack of confidence in, and competence with handling the Bible itself.

How someone uses the Bible itself should be a key indicator of the surety of their theological conclusions. What this part is intending to do is gently poke at the exegetical methods used in incarnational theory to answer the question does the Bible really support it?

Throughout the youth ministry volumes that advocate for incarnational youth ministry, three passages of Scripture are used almost exclusively: Jn. 1; Phil. 2; and 1 Cor. 9. These are all used sparingly and, honestly, in some cases just very poorly.

Before we move on to look at these verses specifically, we should stop for a moment and consider which passages are often (if not usually) used in theological discussions about the Incarnation. Sorry about list, but Ex. 25:8; Is. 7:14; Mic. 5:2; Mal. 3:1-5; Matt. 1:18-23; 3:17; 17:5; Mk. 1:24; 10:17-18; Jn. 5:18; 6:29; Col. 1:15-20; Heb. 1:1-14; 20:28; Rev. 19:11-13 all are seen by systematic theologians to be significant passages in the doctrine of the Incarnation.

Now I know that systematic theology and youth work books are different genres, but when a theorist of any stripe appeals to a well known and particular doctrine for their practice, then technically they are doing systematic theology. This is especially true if they take the same name and describe the practice as the same thing.

There are many staple Bible verses (including all those above) that incarnational youth ministry theorists don’t use at all. I don’t expect youth work books to use all relevant passages, but I think the selective way they have picked their verses is a little telling. It’s almost like they had a point ready to go, and then looked for verses that fit it – rather than the other way around.

That said, I’m not sure the verses they’ve picked actually do always support the points they make. I think their idea is too easily read into the verses, rather than derived from them. Let’s have a look.

John 1

Almost every Incarnational writer that I read (in both youth ministry and contemporary missiology) used The Message version of verse 14, which says Jesus ‘moved into the neighbourhood’ (for instance Dean Borgman, Agenda for Youth Ministry, 1998:10, and Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, 2006:131).

I’m actually a fan of the Message and this is absolutely a helpful interpretation at one level, but it’s also quite misleading and limiting at another. It is a partial interpretation of the whole, focusing on just one piece of the doctrine of the Incarnation. There are several other important aspects of the Incarnation spoken about in Jn. 1, but they get missed by this translation, and as such are all but left ignored by most of the writers I looked at.

A much better example would be Dr. Sally Nash, for instance, who uses the Message and also does a good job with the verse (as you’d expect) by pointing to the LXX to discuss the etymology of the word ‘incarnation’ as sarx egeneto (becoming flesh) (What Theology for Youth Work, 2007:13). This was a good read, but doesn’t unfortunately go beyond this revelation idea. Mostly, I assume, because of the limitations of only having 9000 words to work with.

Liz Edrington (a Young Life worker) also does a better job, spending 150 words opening both the divine and human side of the incarnation from vv.1-18. This was the most I’ve seen written about the verse in a youth ministry book, and a rare breath air of theological engagement (in Gospel Driven Youth Ministry, 2016:69-75). Her good work on the verse, however, was then not then used to formulate her conclusions. She looked closely at the text, then left it behind. Her summary was God empathised with humanity, which she called ‘presence sharing’. She then said that we are called to do likewise. This is a case of the conclusion not flowing out from the exegesis – or putting the cart before the horse.

I found very little actual textual engagement in any incarnational theorist beyond mere allusions to a purely cultural mission that we could then emulate.

You could summarise almost every discussion of this passage in incarnational books with the following line: Jesus became a relatable human, immersing himself specifically in 1st century Jewish-Aramaic culture… go therefore and do likewise to various cultures today. Todd Billings, after attending an incarnational training day, put it this way,

‘If moving into the neighbourhood and immersing oneself among the people is God’s strategy for ministry, I was told, then certainly it must be ours… But there was apparently no need to mention Jesus any further’ (Billings, Incarnational Ministry in Christianity Today, 2012:60).

In contrast, Jim Packer, when looking at the same passage on the same topic, works through each section sequentially, relating it to the broader context of John and the wider doctrine of the Incarnation. He showed actual exegesis. This resulted in a clear textual understanding of the incarnation before any applications were made (Knowing God, 1973:62).

It should be very difficult to come away from Jn. 1 without a clear sense of the uniqueness of Jesus as the Word, both eternal and creator (M. Driscoll and G. Breshears, Doctrine, 2010:212-214). Incarnational youth ministry advocates unfortunately pass over both of these aspects in their rush to make it about what we should do instead.

Making what Jesus does in Jn. 1 primarily about what we should do today is just a little bit weird. We do feature in Jn. 1, but as His creation (v.2), needing His light (vv.4, 9), and made to be His children through faith (vv.11-13). Jesus is our way of knowing God (vv.1, 7, 14, 18) and our place in this story is to believe in God by accepting Jesus. It’s not that we can’t learn from the life of Jesus, of course we can, but to focus on that in Jn. 1 and miss all the pieces about who Jesus is as our faith-given way to salvation is a tragic misreading of the passage.

Philippians 2

Packer again gives a good example of what handling the Bible carefully should look like Knowing God, 64-65). He draws Phil. 2 out exegetically to demonstrate the Christology of Jesus, as divine and born to die, drawing a straight line from the complete uniqueness of Jesus to the atonement won by His death.

This was a ‘loving act of humility’ (S. Jeffery, M. Ovey, & A. Sach, Pierced for our transgressions, 2007:133), but one which is made to show Jesus’ headship over creation by demonstrating perfect obedience to the Father (135).

Incarnational youth ministry advocates (for instance Andy Borgman, When kumbaya is not enough, 1997:xv), however, don’t spend any time on the salvation aspects of this passage.

That’s a significant oversight considering it’s the central part of the passage. Instead Borgman (and many others) used it solely as a blueprint for our own humility and work today. Using Phil. 2 without mentioning salvation won through Jesus, however, is missing the very core of its message.

Quoting this verse Pete Ward says, ‘in doing these things we will actually be doing exactly the same thing Jesus did when he became a human being’ (Liquid Church, 1992:31). No, we won’t. Not really anyway, there are aspects that we will be doing a little bit like Him would be fair, but the central place of salvation (and the central point of this passage) belongs to Jesus alone.

Billings reminds us that our place in Phil. 2:1-11 ‘means displaying a life of service, obedience, and harmony in Christ—not imitating the act of incarnation’ (2012:61).

1 Corinthians 9

This is another verse that is thrown into the mix without any real unpacking or discussion on the central ideas it contains (again, Borgman, 1997:30-31). Sometimes, things were even added to the verse to make it say it’s about us today. Steve Gerali, for instance, uses the verse by adding a likewise clause, drawing a straight line from what Paul did to what we should do, without any explanation of why. He says

‘In 1 Corinthians 9:19-22, Paul addressed what it means to become like. Paul became a student of the community and culture of those that he was trying to reach. “I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some” (v.22). Our goal is to become all things to all adolescents so that we might reach them.’ (Gerali in Starting right: thinking theologically about youth ministry, 2001:286).

In the very next chapter Paul unpacks exactly what this looks like, and it is largely about being full of grace and patience, and communicating clearly. It is not about indiscriminately immersing himself in the culture or becoming just like a teenagers to reach teenagers.

At one level that’s really unhelpful and could even be dangerous – what, for instance, would you do if you would needed to sin to enter into a particualr culture? What if you needed to flaunt safeguarding policy? At another level, however, it’s just creepy – teenagers aren’t looking for adults who dress like kids and can quote box sets, they’re looking for deep authenticity and genuine realism.

This verse is often used as scriptural basis for the accommodation principle – meaning to ‘oblige or adjust oneself to another’ (K. Creasy-Dean in Starting right: thinking theologically about youth ministry 2001:74). Richter says

‘Youth ministry must be guided by this accommodation principle. We must not expect teenagers to bear the primary burden of accommodating themselves to our agenda, schedule, and program design.’ (Richter in Starting right: thinking theologically about youth ministry, 2001:75).

The problem here is twofold. First, as A. Thiselton explains, accommodation is poor translation of the verse (1 Corinthians, 2000:706), and moves too far from the context of engaging people from a specific religious and socio-political spectrum (703-707). Second, it seems that accommodating oneself to God’s agenda is precisely what humans are called to do when accepting salvation.

There’s goodness in here, but I’m not convinced it flows out form the verse, and making it do so adds obligatory weight to our practice making muddy our boundaries. More on this in Part 5.

What does the Bible say?

To decide if something is theologically sound, we start by asking if it’s biblically grounded. To find out if something is biblically grounded we need to do more than bounce off heavily interpreted proof-texts. We need to grapple with their original meanings.

Through this exploration of the key verses used by incarnational youth ministers, we see that the Bible-reading method is to proof-text and then apply, with very little discussion or explanation of the texts in their contexts first. Exegesis is not just found wanting, it’s almost entirely absent.

I’m not saying you need to be a Bible scholar to write practically or even theologically, but all of us should start by giving more respect to the passages themselves if we’re going to use them. If, however, we are going to appropriate significant theological terms (like Incarnation), then we set ourselves up to be biblically robust.

In no case can we detect serious theological misinterpretations within the usage of these passages,  there are, however, some very serious omissions, especially in regard to who Jesus is and how He saves.

Tomorrow we will draw this out in more detail.