An open letter to a smart person who likes being a smart person from another smart person who also likes being a smart person.

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Dear smart person

Hello smart person, I’m a smart person too. Isn’t that great? I have a high IQ, top marks, and regularly use the words ‘paradigm’ and ‘praxis’ in clever sounding sentences. I also own a fern.

I really like being a smart person – it’s a significant part of my identity. When I was growing up, I was bullied for being ginger, skinny, and mostly ginger. I also knew, however, that I was smarter than the bullies. This is why on my last day of High School I purposely crashed the school computer network, including all of their accounts.

When my ‘smartness’ gets shaken, however, so does everything else about me – like a house of cards built on a bowl of jelly. When people around me don’t ‘get it’, or reduce ideas down to minimal complexity for the sake of a smart-sounding soundbite, I want to throw my abacus right out of the pram! When other smarter people out-smart me by their clearly superior smartness, then I want to throw myself out the pram.

Sometimes it’s just hard being smart. Here, therefore, are a few tough life lessons for fellow smart people from a smart person.

1. Smart doesn’t need to equal arrogance. I find this really hard (see everything above)! However, you can dial up one without dialling up the other. It’s possible – trust me!

1, again… but said better. Smart people don’t actually need to be jerks.

2. A smart thing to do is to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. A really smart thing to do is surround yourself with people who are smarter than you and disagree with you. If you’re the smartest person in the room, you probably need to be in a different room.

3. Being smart has very little to do with being right. It has a lot to do with being considered. Being smart has even less to do with being in charge.

π. Being smart sometimes makes you very stupid. And that’s ok.

4. Properly smart people ask more questions than they give answers. They also like to think about their answers before they give them.

5. Smart people usually like nuance not absolutes.

6 through 10. Smart linguistic thinking is different to smart critical thinking, which is different to smart social understanding, which is different from smart proactive thinking, which is different from smart reactive thinking. This is different from smart abstract thinking, which is different from smart mechanical analytical thinking. This is different to smart thinking under pressure, which is different to smart problem solving, which is different from smart creative solution finding (honestly). This is different from smart observing clearly, which is different from smart tracking ideas clearly, which is different from smart opening ideas up, which is different from smart narrowing results down. This is different from smart doing well with details, which is different from smart being a ‘big picture person’. You get it? Being smart doesn’t mean being ‘smart.’

11. Smart thinking has as much to do with the theory and method of thinking (epistemology) as it does to the contents of what is being thought. It’s smart to know that not everybody does this.

12. Smart people need to be patient! Very patient. Silly Patient.

13. Smart people understand that others are probably being very patient with them.

14. Smart people will be very lonely people if they can’t learn to be compassionate people. They will also be lonely if they can’t develop a – sometimes silly and pointless – sense of humour and know when to switch off.

15. Smart people know when to switch off.

16. Smart people know when to switch off.

17. Smart people know there is someone smarter than them somewhere in the world, and will find that smarter person, kill them, and eat their brains. Really smart people know there is someone smarter than them somewhere – and will deal with it.

18. Smart people know that they don’t need everyone to know they are a smart person (I’m really working on this… although this letter probably isn’t helping).

19. Smart people don’t need to make other people feel stupid. In fact, if they’re being smart then they really shouldn’t.

20. Smart people use their brains to change the world along with the rest of the world who are using their own gifts. They don’t just comment on it from their keyboard in their pyjamas.

That reminds me, I’ve got stuff to do.

Thanks folks!

Sincerely

Smart person.

 

 

Photo by Olav Ahrens Røtne on Unsplash

My response to the Steve Chalk – Phil Moore debate

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This was first published on Premier Christianity. Read it here.

Back in 2004 I attended a public debate held by the Evangelical Alliance in London. The purpose of the event was to discuss the atonement as presented in Steve Chalke’s book, The Lost Message of Jesus.

Steve didn’t so much defend his book as he talked passionately about social justice and widespread judgementalism in the church. It was a masterclass in winning over a hostile crowd. It was incredibly hard to disagree with a man who had sat by so many bedsides, visited so many prisons, and who spoke so passionately about the love of God lived out. Anything said against him was an unreasonable attack against an immensely likeable figure. Even then however, as a young theology student, something about Steve’s approach bothered me.

Yesterday I watched the recent episode of Unbelievable? where Steve Chalke debated Phil Moore over the themes of Steve’s new book The Lost Message of Paul.

As Steve’s book is largely a popularised version of the New Perspective on Paul, I was hoping the debate was going to dig into questions about the accuracy of scripture, the reality of hell, the nature of faith, and what exactly salvation is. I have a real interest in these topics and was looking forward to a lively debate on the issues. I was sadly disappointed. What prompted me to write this, was not the content but rather the manner of the debate itself, and specifically how Steve carried himself.

Coming out swinging

To be fair to Steve, some of Phil’s early swings were overreaching. He made an entirely unreasonable remark about the cover of Steve’s book, for instance. At the beginning, Phil came across a little aggressive and he made some sweeping statements that he was never fully able to shake off. With an opponent like Steve, you’ve got to be very careful not to shoot yourself in the foot with a misplaced word. It was a poor start from Phil, and one that perhaps prompted Steve go in guns blazing.

Steve dominated the discussion, and I mean dominated. He took at least 80 per cent of the airtime, interrupted almost every sentence Phil began, and regularly hijacked partially made points to springboard off into something else entirely. Phil struggled to articulate his arguments under the constant onslaught of brash, lengthy interruptions and possessive, arresting noises.

Justin had his hands full to say the least. I have never seen a guest take the show away from him like this. Steve, just like a media-hardened politician, controlled the narrative.

Controlling the narrative

Steve said several times that he wanted a “conversation”, however he continuously tried to hold both sides of it. He attempted to get Justin to move on from a point when he got close to the ropes, and he hijacked the times Justin attempted specifically to give Phil a moment to frame an issue. On several occasions he immediately started speaking when a question was very pointedly addressed to Phil. He even told Justin not to “butt in”! At one point, Phil called him on this saying “you want a conversation as long as no-one disagrees with you” and when Phil tried to find common ground, Steve cut across with “endorse the book then.”

It was painful. Steve simply couldn’t keep quiet for more than just a few seconds. It felt toxic and uncomfortably authoritarian. He neutralised the moderator, silenced his conversation partner, and got on with his own agenda. Frankly, Steve came across as a bully. A very defensive bully, but a bully, nonetheless.

Fighting study with soundbites

I don’t know Phil, but his scholastic credentials outstrip Steve’s by some margin. This was a genuine opportunity, then, to critically converse on the contentious themes of the book in front of an engaged audience. Rather than respond constructively to the few points Phil managed to raise, however, Steve suggested that Phil’s problem was that he hadn’t read widely enough. It was a case of “your point isn’t worthy of discussion because you haven’t read all the nonspecific stuff that I have.”

At other times Phil was dismissed more cavalierly by name-calling, a few of which were “liberal”, “imperialistic” and “capitalist”. For someone who constantly criticises the judgemental nature of the church, Steve was labelling Phil with all kinds of broad generalities and then hanging him with them.

Emotional overreaching

Some of Phil’s other comments were used as dangerous springboards into some rather wild rebuttals. At one point, Steve refuted a textual comment on a Greek phrase as discussed by Martin Luther as oversimplified. But rather than say why he thought this, or contrast it with a more complex idea, Steve bounced off to Luther being republished by the Nazis. He came very close to suggesting that the imperialist misreading of Paul (which Phil was apparently complicit in) was largely responsible for the murder of millions of Jews. Dangerous, dangerous ground! At very least it was attacking the person rather than refuting the point.

Steve regularly reached for big guns and tugged heartstrings in ways that are just not appropriate when ‘weaponised’ (using his word) in a debate. Within the very first few moments in response to “why did you write this book?” Steve had brought up suicide, misogamy, and Apartheid, as well as the phrases “weaponised” and “used to crush people”. Not long after that he reached through a point to label Phil’s ‘type of church’ as alienating women and LGBTQ+ communities – a point that came up at least once more without adding anything to the conversation other than arbitrarily putting Phil on the unpopular side of every issue.

A missed opportunity

Rather than show Phil any respect for stepping up, and without asking a single genuine question, Steve wrote him off as a product of his upbringing who simply hadn’t read enough. He wouldn’t even allow him the grace to articulate his own thoughts without constantly hijacking and painfully interrupting.

Rarely do I call people out publicly, but we must consider the amount of influence Steve has. Steve’s commitment to social action and his incredible success in that arena has afforded him a sizable platform. However, a greater platform comes with greater responsibility.

Steve, your social action – as amazing as it is – doesn’t put you above brotherly accountability. I would suggest that you need to consider the manner in which you engaged with this conversation. You came across – at least to me – as judgemental, authoritarian, egotistic, and rude. The lack of respect for someone who had stepped up to discuss these ideas did not serve your position or reputation at all.

Even in high energy debate, there are ways brothers and sisters should talk and listen to one another. Maybe it’s worth a phone call to Phil?

 

 

 

Should we hold youth meetings in church buildings?

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Historic church buildings are an important British heritage, and a legacy of the established church of Christendom. But are they the best place for a youth event?

When Millennials were the young people of the day, the answer would almost certainly have been no. The arguably masculine authoritarian architecture mixed with the over-spilling soreness of growing up with GenX and Baby Boomer parents who were made to go to church by their parents have been a dead turnoff for many. This is largely why the youth events of the 90s we’re moved to school halls and community centres, and why many Millennial church plants have gone to pubs and houses.

But we don’t work with Millennials, do we?

Are GenZ as freaked out by our ancient church buildings as we were growing up? Or are church buildings just another detached source of intrigue in the same way a Mosque or a Temple would be? Are they, as Mark Griffiths might say, ‘three generations removed’ from the bitterness of the anti-church generations? Are we at risk of reading our own prejudices into the cultural whims of today’s teenagers? Are there perhaps benefits to running youth events in church buildings now?

As with all things culture and history – it’s probably not that simple! Let’s start with some important background.

History, Wealth and Power

Throughout Christendom historically, the Church has asserted itself on the landscape by imposing centralised places of worship. Back in the 4th Century, Roman Emperor Constantine not only enabled Christians to worship publicly, but also gave them resources to do so. He returned property that was previous confiscated by Emperor Diocletian, granted tax exemptions, and built basilicas throughout the empire – often financed by pillaging pagan temples. This planted seeds that largely continued throughout Europe until now.

In Britain today, the established Church of England is still one of the wealthiest landholders with a £2 billion property portfolio and 100,000 acres of land across England and Wales. This makes up a significant portion of their £6.7 billion in declared assets. Their investments have returned almost 20% and are up from £4.3 billion in the last ten years. The Church also enjoy generous tax benefits on these holdings. Early Christendom advocated the Jewish practice of giving alms for the remission of sins which ensured a continual flow of wealth to the church that continues in some form today. ‘Even the most humble members of the Christian community were involved in this perpetual mobilisation of wealth.’ (Brown, 2013, The rise of Western Christendom: triumph and diversity, A.D. 200-1000 p.69).

The cultural conception that “church just wants our money” comes from a quantitive reality; one that is arguably an easier position to argue than “churches serve the poor,” however true it might be. Throughout the Middle Ages there was a stark contrast between the wealth within and the poverty outside imperialistic church buildings. The steps of Cathedrals today, especially in larger European cities, are still peppered with the poor and homeless.

In 2015, Housing Justice lobbied the Church of England to sell its underused properties to respond to the housing crisis, issuing a report stating, ‘The Church cannot speak out on this or any other issue without putting its own house in order.’

Church = The Building

‘Church’ has become synonymous with buildings rather than the gathered body of believers. There is an implicit idea that to meet with God means you must go to an established church in a recognisable building, and to be a Christian is to simply be a regular church attender in said building. In 2015, however, the Church of England reported 1926 closed and repurposed buildings, making the God who resides inside seem irrelevant, inanimate and diminishing.

Even when at the height of relevancy, the aesthetically beautiful and imposingly grand structures only speak, at best, to part of God’s character, or allowed for limited expressions of worship or activities. Ever tried to move some pews for a game of dodgeball?

Church buildings themselves can serve as a monument to an apparently dying religion. They are often crumbling structures which are locked for all but an hour a week surrounded by smaller memorials to the deceased. Inside, older British churches have uncomfortable, formal and awkward interiors that do not exist in any other public building save perhaps a courtroom, theatre, or overcrowded classroom – each designed to give credence to just one voice at a time.

Problems increase when examining the symbols used throughout the buildings, much of which is in memory of someone other than Jesus, including the often-imposing wall of military paraphernalia. The cross is sometimes absent, replaced with coded Christograms such as IHS or XP. The absence of the cross uncovers darker problems, as for some cultures and students of history it represents conquest, not loving self-sacrifice.

Church buildings and symbolism create a plethora of problems for the relationship between church and society today. They can misrepresent Gospel values, exhibit irrelevancy, disable participation, and are sometimes seen as a testimony to mistreatment and imperialistic exclusivism. Although newer church buildings are less of an issue than the many older listed buildings, they are still often built with the same values, and may therefore still trigger the same responses in society.

Do young people care about any of that?

Well, frankly, some will and some wont. However, even if they don’t explicitly care about it, this reality still exists in the zeitgeist that they are growing up in.

That said, it’s not the whole picture.

Institutionalised church has also been an immense source for good in the Western world, and many excellent community-driven churches today still meet in exactly these buildings. A sense of wonder, mystery and the right kind of holy reverence can be modelled by them artistically, helping us with some forms of our worship. As in all things of course, the heart will bleed through the stones, and a genuinely loving church will look loving, even dressed in its granddad’s old suit.

With all that background in mind, here’s a few thoughts on church buildings, venues, and young people:

Authentic people create quality spaces

Young people are attracted to authenticity and genuineness, no matter what it’s dressed in. In the same way that young people respond better to a good listener than they do to someone who has binged the same boxsets, young people will go to events that strike a chord with their values.

Under the traditional attractional models of youth ministry, the venue itself needs to have either an inherent coolness or be an inherent blank canvass. So, cinemas became great youth ministry event venues, and coffeeshops became fabulous regular project spaces.

If young people today can feel the genuineness of the people running it and can find empathy with those people, then they’ll probably rock up anywhere accessible that we hold an event.

Physical spaces are approaches though digital corridors

Much of GenZ’s community building is now done completely separately to actual physical spaces. Relational capital is largely built online through social media spaces. If you can develop a healthy online presence that reaches into the worlds and circles that young people move in, then they are more likely to sound out the venues you use that flow from that.

There’s something in exclusivity here too. If you found a real space through personal online invitation, there’s a feeling of personal importance and specialness that comes with it.

Ancient spaces are expected for mysterious philosophy

The Christian faith is no longer a societal ‘given’ when we’re talking about British religion. It’s not the only classically religious worldview on offer, and possibly not even the most obvious. The little that our young people know about the Christian faith does come with a few interesting expectations.

One of the only things that most young people know about Christianity is that it’s old; so they are expecting something deep, rich, and ancient. With that comes intrigue and interest. And because we’re not trying as hard as we would have been with Millennials to distance ourselves from ‘traditional’ Christian stereotypes, trying to avoid an ‘old’ expectation is not as high a priority as it used to be.

So why not use it? Young people are often looking for a refuge from the fast-paced, modern, inauthentic consumeristic world they live in. We can provide that through relevant authentic ancient spaces that demonstrate a steady depth to the God we worship.

So, are church buildings always a no no? Food for thought, eh?

 

Photo by Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash

Bringing the Bible to Life for Young People – by Tim Adams

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This week, Communications Manager for British Youth for Christ, Tim Adams, tells us about their incredible new resource, ‘The Good News Bible: The Youth Edition’, that was created in partnership with the Bible Society.

At Youth for Christ, we passionately believe that the Bible is foundational to seeing young people’s lives transformed by Jesus. Gen Z is undoubtedly the most biblically illiterate generation in history, so new interactive ways are needed for them to engage with its central truths.

This is why we’ve produced a youth edition of the Good News Bible, in partnership with our friends at the Bible Society. We’re blown away at the response so far, including winning the Christian Resources Together 2019 ‘Bible of the Year’ award!

Good News Bible, The Youth Edition is jam-packed with creative, interactive sections on key subjects, including (among other things) relationships, mental health and exams. It also has over 400 individual interactions throughout. As well as being the incredible Word of God, every other page gives a creative way to best unpack it. This could be a paragraph to colour in, a link to a YouTube video, or a challenge to help young people learn more about what they are reading. [Check out a sample here.]

This award-winning new edition connects directly to our young people’s world. It brings the Bible to life because it allows them to engage (or re-engage) with it in exciting, fresh, creative, thought-provoking, active and visual ways.

Youth for Christ Church Resources Director, Dan Lodge, speaks of his excitement at the recognition the Bible has received. He says, “It adds to the stories we’ve heard of young people coming to know Jesus and falling in love with God’s Word through it.” What’s more, it’s already been translated into other languages so that young people across the globe can engage with it.

Our hope is that this edition will enable a whole generation of young people to connect with the Bible. The results could be phenomenal!

Do you know a young person who struggles to connect with the Bible? Someone who could engage with an interactive edition of God’s Word? Why not buy them a copy or pick up your own Good News Bible, The Youth Edition here.

Tim Adams is the Communications Manager at British Youth for Christ. He is a writer and nerd, whose interests include evangelism, apologetics and biblical theology.

Teenagers and Bereavement: Helping young people process loss

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The reality

Child Bereavement UK report that 70% of schools have a bereaved pupil on their role at any one time, 92% of all young people will experience a significant bereavement before they’re 16, and a parent of a dependent young person dies every 22 minutes.

This is not something that ‘might’ come up at our youth projects. It will come up. Are we ready for it when it does?

When it gets real

After being in youth ministry for just a couple of years, I remember getting a phone call at 6am from a local school in London to explain that a very popular sixteen-year-old boy had tragically lost his life in the night. He had been out with some friends, came home late, and – complicated by an undiagnosed heart problem – choked on vomit in his sleep. I was asked to attend a memorial assembly that very morning, then asked if I would stay behind afterwards to ‘counsel’ some of his friends.

I got up, donned my suit, and headed through the morning London traffic with no idea what to expect. The assembly was heart-breaking. Two thousand students, many openly weeping, a confused and unsure shell of a head teacher trying desperately to find words of comfort, and the boy’s parents, fresh from the hospital on the front row in each other’s arms. It got very real very fast.

You first bucko

When young people are hurting in our youth group, or – tragically – when one of our young people passes away, we get hurt. We too are bereaved. We too are going to feel it and need to work through stages of grief and come to terms with loss. We will feel it too.

Counsellors and missionaries have professional ‘debriefing’ sessions, where they can methodically move burdens away from themselves. After counselling, the counsellor themselves will share the stories from therapy sessions with their supervisor to relieve the weight.

We too need to make sure we are not isolated. Pastors, line-managers, mentors, and friends need to be in place to help us process hurt too. If we don’t do this, we won’t be much help to the young people themselves.

What does loss feel like to a young person?

This is really tricky because every young person is very different. Consider that a 2-5 year old might struggle more with the abstract idea of permeance or finality of death; a 5-8 year old might start processing that permeance, potentially leading to separation anxiety; a 8-12 year old may begin to grapple with their own mortality and fears linked to what if it happens to them; whereas an adolescent is more likely to ask abstract questions (futility of life, etc.), in relationships to their own experiences. Death is a huge abstract concept to process and different ages and people are going to be working through different things – and this is before the personal side of losing someone they love.

For many young people we work with, death might be a completely alien concept – so even those on the outsides of the ‘blast zone’ of personal loss might still be feeling some form of grief quite strongly.

Young people are reported to feel all kinds of emotions including numbness, sadness, fear, tiredness, anxiety, calmness, worry, weirdness, guilt, injustice, confusion and even peace. It’s important for us to remind them that they’re not broken or weird if they are feeling something other than ‘sad’.

With that in mind, young people experience loss and grief much like the rest of us, the difference however, is a developing young person is missing the context of greater life experience in order to frame those emotions.

Our job then is not to manage or steer emotions, but to provide a healthy structure so they can experience them freely and healthily in a safe and secure way.

Does it ‘get better’

This depends on a lot of things – especially closeness to the person lost, however, as a general rule of thumb, loss doesn’t just ‘go away’ but we do ‘get better’ to some degree. Reality changes, and with proper help we are able to move through and beyond, rather than just move on.

It’s interesting how many people start to feel guilty when the hurt changes shape or diminishes somewhat. It’s important for us to encourage them that it’s not disrespectful, dishonourable, or forgetting – it’s just growth and that’s healthy.

A lost person will always be part of our lives, and their absence will always feel ‘wrong’, however that feeling of loss and wrongness does move from the constant central focus so we are able to live on healthily.

Some practical thoughts

What NOT to say to a bereaved young person

Hopefully these are obvious, but let’s say them anyway:

He’s gone to a better place… (it might be true, but the question it raises is ‘so why is that place not here with me!?!’)

Everything happens for a reason… (what could possibly be the reason for…?!)

Time heals all wounds… (Actually no it doesn’t. Healing requires time, but that’s totally different)

Try not to cry… (Why the heck not? It’s an entirely sensible, apt, and healthy thing to do!)

Be strong… (So it’s weak to grieve now is it?)

Let me tell you a story about my loss… (How about you just acknowledge my hurt for a while?!)

A few more things to avoid

Focusing on yourself rather than them

Denying the seriousness of the event

Devaluating their feelings

Telling them not to think or talk about it

Making assumptions or oversimplifications

Over-reacting (from your own anxiety or fear)

Withdrawing

A few things you SHOULD say

I’m sorry for your loss

I love you

I don’t have the right words, but know that I care

I don’t know how you feel, but I’m available to help

How can I support you?

My favourite memory of your loved one it…

Saying nothing

Many people have reported that the most helpful thing during their time of loss and grief was just a present friend. Someone who just came to be with them, hung out with them, or just sat with them in silence.

The power of presence when it comes with warmth and compassion is both palatable and powerful. Don’t underestimate the power of just being with someone who is hurting.

Grief is exhausting!

It really is! Your mind, heart and body all dial up to 11 and work hard to process this new reality. Off the back of that, patterns and habits start to fall away.

With this in mind we should gently encourage young people to keep eating, drinking, sleeping, socialising (somewhat), and exercising. Even just going for ten-minute walks is important.

Going back to school

It’s important to go back to school sooner rather than later, but it does need to be managed carefully. We can work with the family to help a bereaved young person manage their return well though. This might included:

Half days

No exams / homework

Permission slips to step out of lessons for a break

Who tells the students?

What about the funeral?

It’s important to give young people the choice about whether or not they want to go. Trying to keep them from it because it might be too painful could cause resentment later but forcing them to go might mean confronting things that they didn’t feel ready for.

This choice should be made off the back of clear information. Explain exactly, bluntly, and clearly what is going to happen and why. Encourage questions without pushing and ask them if there is any way they would like to add to the service. This could be reading a prayer, laying some flowers, or picking a song.

If the loss affects you too then you should also make the choice for yourself whether to go, however It might be appropriate for you to ask the family what their expectations for you are. When I have been, I have sat at the back, payed my respects, then let people come to me if they want to, rather than swooping in as the superstar youth pastor.

In the youth club

Prepare the groundwork beforehand by talking about death in teaching topics, creating an open community, and encouraging conversation and questions.

Don’t’ taboo tradition to the point where you downplay any kind of ritual. Ritual can be immensely helpful to help young people grieve and find some sense of closure.

I once went to the school to help during the death of a pupil. I, and a couple of local counsellors and pastors, went to a temporary classroom to be available to chat. The students were also told that it was ok to write some messages or stories on the walls inside if that would help them.

Over the next couple of hours, we saw hundreds of students come through that building, almost all of whom left a message. By the afternoon every piece of wall, inside and outside, the carpet, the tables, the chairs, and the ceiling were covered (and I mean covered) by writing:

There were funny stories of times when friends had gone out and done stupid things together.

There were shared dreams and aspirations of what they wanted to be when they grew up.

There were heart-wrenching, deepest apologies – the guilt of which you cannot imagine.

Myself and the other counsellors walked around like lost sheep. We tried, very carefully, to talk to some of the young people; but that’s really not what they wanted. I shared a hug with a young lad I knew from my youth club at the time, tears lining his face. I had no idea what to say and no idea what to do.

You learn about these times in college and through books, but nothing prepared me for it. I remember tangibly thinking, God please help me take my youth ministry more seriously.

Of course, this is not youth work going wrong, this is youth work working! This is youth ministry at its most pertinent. The creativity of the school gave the young people an uncommonly valuable way of moving thorough their pain as a community. It was amazing. I was there, at best, to facilitate the safety of the activities and the tone of the room. God was obviously, however, in their midst.

This is the power of ritual. Light a candle, create a memorial book – do something tangible.

Resources

I want to plug a friend’s workbook. It’s a practical booklet that you can work through one-to-one with bereaved young people. Grab a copy here.

There are phonelines like Cruise Bereavement, Childline, and Samaritans; and websites like Hope Again, Winston’s Wish, RD4U and Youth Access. These are all helpful. However, I strongly encourage you to familiarise yourself with local groups and networks.

Finally, don’t forget the GP, who can often connect a hurting young person up with groups and therapy that we just don’t have access to.

Finally finally, pray. God is the one who understand bereavement in a way we never could, and he comes with hope and love the likes of which we could never show. Leave it with Him!

 

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Have you ‘google tested’ your youth ministry?

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A few months back I was invited to speak on pioneering youth work projects in a small city. Before I got there, I did what I call ‘the switched on parent test’. I googled a bunch of words and phrases a parent might do when moving to a new area to find stuff on for their kids.

In this particular city, the best any church or faith based project did in response to my search terms was page six of google’s results.

Now that google uses far more accurate location-driven alorithms, we’re not fighting the global web of information quite as hard. With this in mind, search engine optimisation (or SEO) is no longer a mind-boggling pit of despair! Just having clear, consistent information on websites and social media is enough for your work to show up in local searches.

So does it?

I challenge you – right this minute – to ‘google test’ your project. Don’t google the name or building of your project; instead do some cold searches that a parent might do when moving to your area.

So, for instance – using say, Blackpool, as the example – try (with your own town) each version of:

  • [Youth / children’s / young people’s / teenage / teenager / school aged / kid’s] clubs in Blackpool
  • [Youth / children’s / young people’s / teenage / teenager / school aged / kid’s] work in Blackpool
  • [Youth / children’s / young people’s / teenage / teenager / school aged / kid’s] projects in Blackpool
  • [Youth / children’s / young people’s / teenage / teenager / school aged / kid’s] organisations in Blackpool
  • [Youth / children’s / young people’s / teenage / teenager / school aged / kid’s] hang outs in Blackpool
  • [Youth / children’s / young people’s / teenage / teenager / school aged / kid’s] sports clubs in Blackpool
  • Things to do for [Youth / children’s / young people’s / teenage / teenager / school aged / kid’s] in Blackpool
  • Where can I send my [Youth / children’s / young people’s / teenage / teenager / school aged / kid’s] in Blackpool

etc.

Does your church or youth project feature on the first two search results pages? If not, it’s time to make some changes! Here’s just few things you can do:

Make sure you have web presence. This might mean a website or blog, but almost certainly (for parents) it means a Facebook page or group. Make sure that all your sites and accounts point back to each other.

Utilise other web presence. Submit your information to the council, school online bulletins, local ‘what’s on’ social media groups, and of course church websites.

Update regularly, or at least consistently. Google knows how to pick up on sites that don’t have activity, and they shift them down the rankings. Make sure you are adding regular updates; ideally weekly. At very least, try and do updates at the same time each time (eg. lunchtime on a Friday every fortnight).

Share, share, share! Have your friends, followers, and team regularly share your updates, or tag you in on their own. Keep conversations moving, and always respond to comments (even if it’s just ‘thank you’).

Stay safe. Make sure you’re aware of best safeguarding practices around young people online, and have the correct permissions to share photos/videos of young people.

Keep your eye out. The google test can also find places where people are already talking about you, but you didn’t know. Maybe there are complaints, questions, or reviews on forums or sharing sites. I once discovered we had a tripadvisor site this way! Engage with these spaces, and point them back to yours.

Caveat – it’s not the only way!

Of course google isn’t the only way to tell parents about what you’ve got going on, and none of this really speaks to telling the young people themselves. However, why not make the best of every opportunity?

A switched on parent who is moving to a new area – or have kids about to start secondary school – are going to be searching for ways to connect their children with organisations and groups. Let’s at least be part of the menu they’re selecting from!

 

Photo by Agnieszka Boeske on Unsplash

A ‘Facilitated Model’ of Youth Ministry

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Over the last couple of years, I have dialled up my public opposition to the model of youth ministry known as ‘incarnational.’ I certainly don’t regret this as it’s a largely unchallenged idea in the youth ministry world that has a shaky foundation at best, and real negative consequences for our work. This idea has been a given, and it needs another side in the conversation.

I’m aware, however, that some people really just mean relational, or contextual youth ministry when they say ‘incarnational’, and I’m mostly fine with that. Not everyone has read the books that push it, and many have only heard bits of the idea through conferences and training days that use the name. I also guess that some more experienced proponents of the model have matured the idea into healthier and safer practices. Although if the ‘updated’ incarnational model as presented by Dr. Root is anything to go by, I’m not too sure that’s true.

I get that incarnational ministry sounds right but having a theological sounding name doesn’t necessarily make something theologically sound. Although I too believe in ‘doing ministry like Jesus did it’, I’m not really sure Jesus did do it like incarnational theory sometimes suggests, and – if I’m really honest – I’d rather build a model that reaches for all of the Bible, not just bits of it.

If you’ve not read my longer posts outlining the issues, I think the concept of incarnational youth ministry misuses the Bible, hijacks a well-established and important theology diluting it in the process, and encourages exceptionally unhealthy practices. Bottom line: I’m tired of meeting people who ‘used to be a youth worker’ but burned out after trying to live the way incarnational theory suggests. An ‘always on’ youth worker, after all is a ‘sometimes off husband’, and an ‘always available’ youth worker, is a ‘less available mum’.

You get it, I’m not a fan. It’s gotten to the point, however, where it would be very easy for me to be known more for what I’m against rather than what I’m for, which would be rubbish, and if you know me personally, I hope you’d agree that that would be out of character!

In some sense, I haven’t wanted to suggest an ‘alternative’ model for youth ministry, rather I’ve tried to harmonise what I feel are the better parts of the more popular models of youth ministry (namely the funnel, hub, intergenerational, and indeed incarnational).

My instinct was that if we instead started with the Bible itself, rather than our praxis, then we would end up with an amalgam of the better parts of each popular model and shake off some of their more questionable features. We would then have some form of ‘alloy’ youth ministry, one that blended the helpful and disregarded the dodgy. This was one of the central features of my book, Rebooted.

Of course, what I have unwittingly done is in fact suggested a different model in a roundabout way, rather than just a youth min alloy like I hoped. So rather than beating any more around the bush, I thought I would spell out the basics here, and even give it a name.

Facilitated Youth Ministry

I know this isn’t a particularly sexy sounding phrase. I played with mediated youth ministry, but that’s only part of the story, and I thought about enabling youth ministry, but that’s weird for other (I hope) obvious reasons.

Facilitated youth ministry, or if I may be so bold, the facilitation model, is driven by the central premise that a youth worker’s primary function is to facilitate ministry for young people rather than simply deliver it. The youth worker’s role is to facilitate the movement of truth, compassion, discipleship, worship, and mission between young people, the church, and the broader community. The youth worker is the junction box not the electricity.

This requires skills like mediation, management, direction, discernment and oversight at least as much as the ability to communicate with teenagers. A facilitator needs a keener awareness of boarder theology and a passion for more than just young people. The need to be church builders, not rebels.

Facilitated youth ministry begins with the idea that young people were not segregated in the Bible. The youth group didn’t cross the Jordan separately, the youth group wasn’t exiled in their own camp, and the youth group wasn’t taken out of temple services to play Mafia. Young people are no less a part the church as anybody else.

There are times and spaces in the Bible way young people are separate, but even then there is always significant overlap with the whole people of God, and this relationship is always facilitated by a handful of parents and elders. There’s our facilitating youth worker!

The responsibilities given to the church, also directly apply to young people. If we wait until they ‘grow up’ before we introduce them to what God asks of them, it is more likely they’ll just grow out of it. Young people are looking for mission and adventure, after all. Why not give it to them?

Before we go further, it needs to be said that the ultimate responsibility over young people is not the youth worker, but the church pastor. That’s what the Bible teaches. This means Bible Colleges need to broaden their curriculums, pastors need to learn some new skills (and maybe new attitudes), and youth workers need to team up more closely.

With that in mind, I’m going to try and give a few pillars to this model here but will write more broadly on it as time goes on.

Facilitating discipleship

In this model, the youth worker seeks to create relationships between young people and many Christians. Through some form of mentoring, small groups, service, and participation, the young people are looked after by a variety of older Christians throughout different areas of their lives. This should be the biggest part of a church-based youth worker’s timetable.

One young person could go sailing with a married couple, get help with homework by an old Maths teacher, serve on the worship team under a spiritually aware a music director, learn to cook with a homegroup, read the Bible in MacDonald’s and with a student, and still not go near a youth group. This isn’t to say youth groups aren’t important, but they are no longer the nucleus of discipleship or spiritual growth. Although our models might leave room for this, a facilitator makes it their primary role.

If a youth worker spent more time finding and facilitating these relationships – knowing and training people, making introductions, periodically checking in – then each young person would have much broader and deeper experience of spirituality, without becoming overly dependent on one person or group.

Not only is this healthier for both the young person and the youth worker, it will subtly train the church to be much more accessible to young people. It’s also more clearly what we see in the Bible.

Facilitating community

There is significant difference between a classical youth club and genuine youth community. A club is entertainment-driven; it’s about providing the young person with an experience that they can consume. As a result, clubs exhaust leaders, strain resources, and create an ‘us-and-them’ culture. Sessions are spent enforcing rules and energetically managing people’s moods. This is why clubs are incredibly homogenous, and only tend to attract one type of young person.

A community on the other hand, is much more interested in integration and mutual service. In a healthy community, relationships police each other, everyone is involved in providing aspects of what happens, it overflows the bounds of the meeting spaces, is less likely to form cliques, and is spontaneous enough to adapt to the real needs of the people within. Clubs are attractive because of the system; communities are attractive because of the people.

A youth work facilitator knows how to integrate young people together – to help them like each other, not just like the leaders. Their time isn’t spent on making a club that attracts the biggest number of young people, but instead creating a safe space where young people integrate healthfully. This also works for a wider age bracket, and is more inclusive of different types of person.

A huge part of this is adjusting our youth work philosophy to help the young people to take responsibility over their own culture. The facilitator helps them develop an environment where each person is cared for by the environment itself. This involves peer mediation, more open communication, and asking individuals specifically to look after people who struggle, including those with additional needs.

Games, teaching methods, seating layouts – everything – needs to be adjusted to help grow a community, not a club. This takes very careful steering and organic growing, not top down leading. It’s facilitated not dictated.

Facilitating truth

As youth workers we have a habit of teaching our favourite bits over and over again. This isn’t helped by the last thirty years of youth work resources basically orbiting the same questions and Bible stories. We are told in the Bible, however, to teach the whole council God, and we know that every piece of God’s truth is truth for everyone.

Facilitating truth is looking far and wide in the Bible and creating teaching plans and methods that help a young person grow from birth and into adulthood. Ideally, each young person should know broadly about the character of God, the nature of the Gospel, and the responsibilities of a Christian.

Most of our resources and curriculums, however, don’t last more than three months, and don’t sequentially go deeper in maturity. The maturity level stays the same with a new topic until the circle begins again. It’s a stair-master, not a ladder.

A term that I would like to see us use more, therefore, is growth pathway.

A growth pathway is a likely track a young person might take on their spiritual journey and what they will learn in that time. A pathway for a young person who starts coming to a group at age 14, for instance, will be different to a young person who has been bought up in a church. When a young person ‘graduates’ youth projects, they should be transitioning into the next stage which, if you’ve been facilitating discipleship (above), should be quite smooth.

This means working closely with children’s workers and parents, but also student workers and senior pastors. You should roughly know what to expect when your youth group gains a young person from Children’s ministry, and who you’re passing on too. This takes the sudden jumps out of the equation, and means you lose less young people in the process.

Facilitated youth workers are able to recognise potential growth pathways and how to connect each young person individually into the life of the church. This form of ministry is far more adaptive and specific – and as a result, far more relational and compassionate. This means you don’t have to move at the pace of lowest common denominator but can help different young people thrive within their own growth pathway. This all comes back to facilitating discipleship.

Facilitating mission

We heard it said that the best person to reach a young person is another young person and there’s a lot of truth in that, however we will insist on doing it for them! The great commission says go make disciples of all nations, however, I think we subversively send the message that this only applies after you turn 18 and the youth group will no longer do it for you.

The question here is how do we facilitate evangelism among the young people themselves? What is it they really need? Is it better training, more engaging clubs, funnier talks? It genuinely could be any of these things, but I’m suspicious that it goes a lot deeper than this.

All mission is driven by the same relationship with Jesus. When we’re excited by Jesus, we tell people about Jesus, just like when I am excited by the pizza served at my local kabab shop, I tell everyone I meet that it’s better than Dominos.

Facilitating missions starts by helping young people develop deeper maturing relationships with Jesus and as a result take greater responsibility for the great commission in their own lives. This isn’t guilting young people into ‘saving their mates’. It is, however, helping them see the great commission as something that applies specifically to them and asking them how we can help them to fulfil it.

It’s calling them to an adventure and a mission that’s real, not just cool sounding.

Facilitating worship

Worship in Israel was an all age affair. Whereas teaching largely happened in specific groups, worship was practised as a whole body. All age for us usually means a children’s service with a little bit for everyone and hardly anything for anyone.

When we ask young people to participate in worship, that should mean more than just giving them a token thing to do. For young people to truly participate in worship we have to give actual responsibility within worship.

The youth work facilitator’s role here is to help young people integrate into all the worshipping activities of the local church. This means helping them enter into the groups and teams in the same way that an adult might. A facilitator supports them and knows how to help other people support them to, without actively having to lead them in those spaces themselves. This involves safeguarding and accountability, but it comes back to facilitating integrated ministry.

When young people participate as an integrated member of the whole community of faith rather than a token, ‘aw isn’t that nice’ occasional addition, then the whole church start to develop a genuine pattern of authentic all age worship. Worship will reflect the needs and desires of those leading the worship, the more diverse that group is, then the broader the needs that are met.

Facilitating resources

This should be a smaller point, but it’s worth adding. We should always step out in faith, but that doesn’t mean over-reach and burn through our resources. The job of a youth work facilitator is to carefully steward the resources available across the whole church. This could actually be a lot more than is usually available, because we would not just be recruiting cool-sounding people for a club!

Not every specific church can tick every potential ministry box, which is why the Church (big c) is supposed to work together as one body. Rather than trying to do everything, find one or two things to do and do them really well.

For someone wanting to have a crack at facilitated youth ministry, I’d suggest dropping your gathering-styled projects to one a week – look for a way to cultivate a healthy community in that space, and then start plugging your young people one by one into the wider church. Start to train mentors and prepare the other ministry teams (even if that’s just ol’ Olive the organist) to accept young people. Go with young people into new spaces and start to wean them off you and carefully into new relationships. Perhaps most importantly, however, start talking regularly with your pastor about all of this – if you can’t get them on board, then it’s just not going to work.

A model of facilitation

A youth work facilitator’s job is to facilitate the movement of truth, compassion, discipleship, worship, and mission between young people, the church, and the broader community. This has do be done in close relationship to the pastor (after all they are ultimately responsible, not you).

A facilitator is a conduit that helps young people grow deeper with God, deeper in themselves, and deeper within the church community. A facilitator helps a young person grow individualised roots that will last, and that are not dependent on ‘youth friendly’ stuff, or a single individual.

A facilitator will need to be integral to the life of the church, actively involved within its ministries, and have a real passion to see the whole body grow not just the young people. They will need to be specialists in youth culture for sure, so they can help the whole church understand young people better, but primarily their time should be spent in facilitating healthy church-wide ways to integrate young people into the whole community of faith.

In the Bible youth-specific ministry is the responsibility of the whole church, carefully facilitated by a few people. Driving at this today means youth workers need to know how to utilise the whole church to reshape itself and help everybody grow together.

So, is this a new model of youth ministry? Or is this just a very different model of church? You decide. Thanks for reading this far!

 

Photo by Elaine Casap on Unsplash

Discussing Incarnational Youthwork – the reader’s digest version

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Back in June I wrote a 5-part series on Incarnational Youth Work. This was, in itself, a reader’s digest version of a forthcoming journal that’s being published later in the year by Brill.

It strikes me, however, that 6926 words over five posts still wasn’t that digestible or ‘blog friendly.’ So here is a reader’s digest version of that reader’s digest version!

As with any reader’s digest, please don’t take this as the final word. It’s a summary with less nuance; it’s a formula without showing the working; it’s fast food, not Michelin stars! If you want a bit more meat, check out the originals, and if you want a lot more meat then grab the Journal, and if you want my alternative, then buy my book! (Cheeky plug? Yup.)

What is Incarnational Youthwork?

The definition of incarnational youth ministry begins with the idea that we’re doing mission and ministry as Jesus did mission and ministry (W. Black, An Introduction to Youth Ministry, 1991:209).

The thought behind this is as God became human and immersed himself into a specific culture so the worker must immerse themselves – both contextually and relationally – in order to bring the gospel to young people in their own cultures today.

They must become something other than what they are to become like those they minister to. They must be ‘incarnate’ and become just like them. Young Life in the 1940s called this ‘earning the right to be heard’. In Jim Burn’s own words, ‘as the ministry of Jesus was incarnate in the Gospels, so our life must be incarnate in youth ministry’ (in Josh McDowell’s youth ministry handbook: making the connection, 2000:35).

Sometimes, when youth workers say they’re doing ‘incarnational’ youth ministry they are actually just doing relational ministry (focused on individuals), or contextualised ministry (focused on cultural context), or a mixture of both. The two main moving parts of Incarnational ministry are contextualisation and relationship building – but it technically goes much further.

The Semantic Problem

The Incarnation itself means something very specific. It has lots of moving parts, but incarnational ministry only focuses on one part: Revelation. God came into our culture to reveal himself to us so we can build relationship with Him, therefore go and do likewise.

I don’t want to downplay the importance of revelation, but it is far from the whole. With only a small part of the Incarnation at play, can we really say that we are being incarnational?

The Incarnation has been reduced to revelation that we can copy, rather than the one time, unique, and saving action of God that we worship. When meanings change this much semantics become very important. We don’t talk about Trinitarian or Atoning or Salvific youth ministry – why then would we let the Incarnation be fair game? Words and meanings are important! A tyre, after all, is not a car, an arm is not a body, and Posh is not The Spice Girls.

Reading the Incarnation through the tinted and very specific lens of incarnational theory has resulted in a generation of youth leaders who can’t articulate the main moving parts of the Incarnation itself.

When using any foundational doctrine as a basis for our work, we should always ask whether we are confusing or diminishing the doctrine. Incarnational theory uses one very small part, morphs it into a thing that we primarily do, rather than God, and then completely bypasses the other aspects of the doctrine.

My big problem here is that if we read more youth work books than theology books (or dare I say the Bible) we end up thinking of the Incarnation through the lens of incarnational theory and thus diluting who Jesus is and what He did. It’s no less than messing with the meaning of Jesus.

The Biblical Problem

Throughout the youth ministry books that teach the incarnational model, three Bible passages 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.

There are many key Incarnation Bible verses that incarnational youth ministry theorists don’t use at all. 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 are all very important.

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 their point. This is the wrong way around.

Jn. 1:14

Almost every Incarnational writer uses The Message version of verse 14, which says Jesus ‘moved into the neighbourhood’. I’m a fan of the Message but this is misleading. At best, it is a partial interpretation of the whole.

It should be very difficult to come away from Jn. 1 without a clear sense of the uniqueness of Jesus as both eternal and creator. Incarnational youth ministry writings 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 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.

Phil 2:5-11

This teaches that Jesus, as divine, was born to die. It draws a straight line from the complete uniqueness of Jesus to the atonement won by His death. It is about ultimate humility that shows Jesus’ headship over all creation.

Incarnational youth ministry writers, however, don’t spend time on the salvation aspects of this passage, which is a significant oversight considering it’s the central part of the it. Instead it’s used as a blueprint for our own humility and work today.

1 Cor. 9:19-22

Incarnational writers often add a ‘likewise clause’ to the verse. ‘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 next chapter, however, Paul unpacks what this looks like, and it is largely about being full of grace and patience and communicating clearly. It is not about indiscriminately immersing ourselves into a culture or becoming just like a teenager to reach teenagers.

This could even be dangerous. What would we do if we needed to sin, or flaunt safeguarding to enter into a particular culture? At another level it’s just creepy – teenagers aren’t looking for adults who dress like kids and can quote box sets, they’re looking for authenticity.

The Theological Problem

The Incarnation has always been understood by theologians to be a one-time action of God. It has six essential moving parts:

Pre-existence – Jesus is God. He existed in eternity, in the Trinity before he was ‘enfleshed’ in Jesus. He ‘was’ before he was Jesus.

Hypostatic union – Jesus was both divine and human – at the very same time. He was both fully. Two complete, distinct persons, fully united as one.

Humility – Jesus, the pre-existent God, humbled himself to both human reality and ultimately death. It’s not just about eventual depth, but initial height.

Atonement – Jesus came to save us, and He needed to be both human and God for this to work. As human, Jesus was the required sacrifice for sin (2 Cor. 5:21). He was a human solution to a human problem. As God, Jesus was able to become both perfect sacrificial lamb (Lev. 16) and High Priest (Heb. 4:14-18). This made His sacrifice eternal! ‘For Athanasius… Jesus’ atoning death was the central purpose of the incarnation; the immortal Son of God needed to become man to die’ (Athanasius, 318, 1993:35, cf.:26; also check out Steve Jeffery, Ovey and Sach in Pierced for our Transgressions, 2007:172).

Eschatology – The Incarnation makes Jesus the undisputed King of the world. He is the new head of humanity being the first born of the new creation. Where Adam got it wrong, Jesus got it right (Rom. 5).

Revelation – The communication of God to His creation, first as the ultimate human to humanity, and secondarily as a 1st Century Aramaic-Jew living in that particular culture.

Incarnational youth ministry misses five out of six aspects of the doctrine of the Incarnation, and seriously dilutes the sixth. That’s like 85% of the doctrine!

The Incarnation is primarily a unique work of God. It is not one that we are actually directly instructed to imitate because realistically to do so would be idolatry. We can work with it and even learn from it, but we can’t dress up in it like a onesie or a superhero costume.

The Practical Problem

Incarnational youth ministry has an inherent mugginess of boundaries that creates a lot of potentially unsafe situations.

Unchecked openness

This model encourages an open door / phones always on policy. 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-centred therapists, precisely because of the boundaries it rejects and dependency it creates. Modern counsellors 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 counselling theory.

Burnout

Renfro in Perspectives on family ministry says the reason youth workers burnout is ‘because our ministry models are fundamentally flawed’ (2009:10). Todd Billings draws a straight line 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).

Dr. Andrew Root 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). This is a recipe for burnout for sure, but also quite close to a textbook 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 between work and home

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.

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

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.

Conclusion

Incarnational ministry has become something of the prosthetic spine of youth work. It’s spinal, in that it runs right through the structural centre of many of our approaches, but it’s prosthetic because it’s a poor substitute for the real thing. To challenge this has been somewhat taboo. It’s the third rail of youth ministry. Step on it and you die.

That said I don’t think incarnational youth ministry is theologically grounded. I think it represents a serious misreading and selective reading of the Bible. It bypasses how that Incarnation has been classically understood and misappropriated – dare I say hijacked – a significant truth about God’s person for a cool sounding term.

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. We might want to consider re-naming our approach as relational-contextual­ rather than incarnational, rediscover the importance of proclamation, and create a wider base of ministry that happens outside of our purview and inside our boundaries

 

Photo by Will O on Unsplash

Reflections on the hardest year of my life

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I recently wrote a celebration and thanks piece about my book. All that I wrote is true – but now for the other side of the coin.

Last year was hard. Not just a little hard, but hard. Very hard, stupidly hard.

I started a full-time Master’s degree, while still working full-time as a local Youth for Christ director, then was offered a publishing contract for a new youth ministry book. All that sounds quite cool eh? No. No it wasn’t, it was stupidly hard.

Let’s start with the MA. I wanted to set myself up for a PhD, so needed to finish quickly and finish well. It was important to me to achieve a distinction, however, my first essay received a lower mark than I hoped meaning all my others needed to be brilliant. As a full-time student, living three hours off campus and juggling a very busy full-time ministry job, I had (at most) half the time the other students had and no regular access to the library.

This meant long trips away, a lot of driving, sleepless nights, hours of photocopying, and very little time to reflect properly on each assignment. I had to learn a new way of writing and adjust myself to a marking scheme that I wasn’t conversant with.

Then the book. I’m massively pleased with Rebooted, and I’m so glad I got the opportunity, however I needed to write it alongside all my essays. By the end of the year I’d written over 300,000 words, and in quite different tones. Moving easily between ‘book tone’ and ‘essay tone’ is impossible! It’s like drumming to two different beats in two different time signatures. This is even harder when you want your heart to truly be available in a book that you’re hoping people will emphasise with.

When the book was released it became quickly apparent that there is little to no market for youth work books in the UK. So, then began 9000 miles of driving to promote it in person. Hours on the motorway, speaking to small rooms of people I didn’t know. Very little familiarity or comfort living out of my little rusty van.

Adding to this we moved house, my blog crashed and had to be rebuilt from scratch, and I was frantically trying to raise £5000 sponsorship doing Britain’s Largest bungee jump. Some close friends also had some very real struggles that really needed me to be present in.

I had these rare opportunities, however, so I poured myself into these experiences. Poured myself!

The breakdown

When I received my dissertation back on the MA, I had actually achieved a very high grade and earned a Distinction. There was so much relief that I actually wailed out loud. I’ve never done that in my life before. Then came the breakdown.

By the end of the year I melted down completely. I couldn’t read more than a few words, I couldn’t write anything – I couldn’t even piece together short sentences – I had a constant headache, my short term memory was shot, I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t hold on to the threads of a conversation – even with my wife. I had walked right into a textbook stress-induced cognitive breakdown.

For someone who had always been ‘smart’, losing this part of myself was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced. I really didn’t know who I was anymore. My identity felt lost. It lasted for about three weeks before it started to get a little better, and it has taken me most of the year to get past it completely. This was the second time in my life that I experienced real burnout, and it turns out I was no more prepared for it this time around.

My health got worse. I have a difficult condition where my body doesn’t absorb energy from fats naturally, which means I have to eat very carefully – and I need to eat quite a lot. I lost a lot of weight and had a dangerously low BMI. Similar to being obese, being dramatically underweight places a lot of strain on a body.

Finally, (phew), I’ve had insomnia for most of my life, so was living off three to five hours of sleep a night.

Full circle

The biggest thing that took a knock in my life was my ministry. I wasn’t nurturing people well and I took my eye off the ball in a number of projects. For the sake of my book and my degree, my heath and my ministry suffered. Praise God, both are now recovering well!

The results of this season have amazing! I have loved meeting people and I’ve grown hugely as a person (and mostly as a husband), and now – through a lot of life changes and hard work – my health is at an all-time high.

I was given an unconditional offer to study for a PhD. An offer, however, that I’ve decided to defer for a year, oddly enough!

I’m now refocused on my local work, my health, and the shape of my heart.

So, this is a gentle warning, please brothers and sisters, take care of yourself!

Before I did all this, I always wanted to be an author – and I’m guessing I’m not alone? I just wanted to share this little story as a window into that process.

Of course, writing a book is doable, and it’s incredibly valuable too, but please look after yourself! What I’m doing with my young people will have a more lasting impact than my book ever could, and I want to be doing this when I’m old and grey.

I’ve found very little prestige or romance in being an author, and my greatest joys and successes still come from being a local youth pastor.

If you want to write a book, do a degree, or step into a parallel adventure – don’t just wing it, think seriously about how it will fit into your life.

Thanks 🙂

 

Photo by Eric Rothermel on Unsplash

 

YouthWorkHacks shortlisted for ‘Most Inspiring Leadership Blog’

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I’ve once again been utterly blown away to receive a nomination for the Premier Digital Awards, and then to have been shortlisted in the category of Most Inspiring Leadership Blog.

Incredibly, youthworkhacks has won this award three times since 2016!

We’re so blessed to have been shortlisted among so many worthy online warriors. Do check out their pages. They are:

7minutes.net

Nick Wright

The Additional Needs Blogfather

and The Far Above Rubies Collection

It’s been a privilege to represent Youth Ministry over the last few years, but the competition is really tough this time! Best of luck to everyone 🙂