Discussing Incarnational Youth Work – Part 1. What is it and what’s my problem?

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.

This week I’ll be posting five posts – a whole series – discussing some of my struggles with incarnational youth ministry. This is “Incarnational Youth Ministry Week” here at YouthWorkHacks.com and I really hope you find it useful.

Each post will walk you through some of my theological and practical struggles with the incarnational theory in youth ministry. We don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater as there is a lot within incarnational theory to celebrate. My hope, however, is that we can find a method that retains the good and useful, but disregards the dangerous and misguided.

This won’t be a full critique; I have a journal article going through peer-review at the moment that will offer more in the way of that. With that in mind, these five posts should be read as a first step, rather than a last word.

What is incarnational youth ministry?

I first heard the phrase ‘incarnational’ in a dimly lit room, while sat across from a very patient youth ministry professor. He was on an enormous cushy couch while surrounded by walls of books making this the closest thing that I’ve ever had to true Freudian therapy!

I had gone to see this professor because I had just realised that graduating from College as a trained Church Pastor at age twenty-one was going to leave me unemployed. Instead I would have to ‘settle’ for youth work for a while. This kindly prof was graciously helping me understand just how tragically under-prepared I was for this change in direction. I hadn’t read anything on youth ministry by this point and I was looking down the barrel of impending job interviews. He asked me the question: what do you know of the incarnational method? My answer was simple: nothing.

This may have been the first instance, but it was far from the last. As I quickly learned, Incarnational youth ministry runs through almost every western method of and approach to youth ministry since the late 1940s. I didn’t know that’s what it was called but I had lived through it myself as a teenager and as a volunteer.

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).

Who could object to that, right? But let’s keep going. The thought behind incarnational ministry is that as God became human and immersed himself into a specific culture (M. Moynagh, Emergingchurch.intro 2004:43), so the worker today must adapt themselves and immerse themselves – both contextually and relationally – in order to bring the gospel to young people in their own cultures (Steve Gerali in Starting right: thinking theologically about youth ministry, 2001:290). They must become something other than what they are to become like those they minister to – in fact they must be ‘incarnate’ and become just like them. Young Life in the 1940s called this ‘earning the right to be heard’. In Burn’s 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).

Do we both mean the same thing when we say ‘incarnational’?

Incarnational youth ministry might be your ‘thing’, in which case this post is for you. It also might just be what you call your thing but isn’t really what your thing is. Let me explain.

Sometimes, when youth workers say they’re doing ‘incarnational’ youth ministry they are actually just doing basic relational driven ministry (focused more on individuals), or contextualised ministry (focused more on the specific cultural context of young people), or a mixture of both. Sometimes (especially in Britain), it just means they’re doing some form of detached ministry. You might want to rethink the ‘incarnational’ label for reasons that we’ll get to but I’m fine with those options – carry on!

Incarnational ministry as a theory definitely includes those things – its two main moving parts are contextualisation and relationship building – but it technically goes much much further.

Incarnational youth ministry as a model and as an assumed ethos has gone largely unchallenged in youth ministry culture. It appears in almost every youth ministry book explicitly or implicitly as the only way to do it.

The problem is that it sounds theological, ‘incarnation’ right? John 1:14; 1 Cor. 9:19-22; and Phil. 2:1-11 all seem like legit scriptural support beams. More than this, its proponents have many stories of how their openness to young people’s lives, and their cultural engagement in young people’s world has created immense opportunities for the Gospel.

To challenge this has been somewhat taboo. It’s the third rail of youth ministry. Step on it and you die.

Deep breath. Foot raised…

I don’t think incarnational youth ministry is theologically grounded. At all. I think it represents a serious misreading of those verses, selective reading of others, completely bypassing classical Incarnation texts, and a misappropriation – dare I say hijacking – of a significant truth about God’s person. These issues will be the themes of discussion coming in Parts 3 – 4.

I don’t think it’s healthy either. Not for young people, for youth culture, for church integration, and – perhaps most tellingly – not for the longevity of our youth workers. You’ll read more about this on Friday in Part 5.

So, I’m breaking the seal, opening the packet, popping the pringles, and stepping on the rail.

This week I will post four more parts to outline my issues a bit more fully. They will be:

• Part 2: It’s all semantics, right?
• Part 3: Doesn’t the Bible back it up?
• Part 4: What does the original doctrine have to say?
• Part 5: What dangers can it cause?