Discussing Incarnational Youth Work – Part 2. It’s all semantics, right?

Thanks for tuning in. It’s incarnational youth ministry week here on YouthWorkHacks, and today I’m posting Part 2 of a 5 (yes 5!) part series discussing and critiquing the incarnational theory of youth work.

If you’re not sure what I mean by incarnational youth ministry and you missed Part 1, click here and check out the introduction.

Today we’re talking about semantics, or the meanings behind a word. Is ‘incarnational’ truly based on the Incarnation?

I know this is likely to step on some toes – sorry 🙁 – I hate challenging people and really struggle with conflict. This, however, is one of those areas where I feel something central about the Gospel is at stake. We’re all people who love Jesus, so let’s have a generous think and take stock of the words we’ve chosen to use.

When using any foundational doctrine as a basis for praxis, we should always ask whether that praxis flows healthily from the original doctrine without confusing or diminishing it.

Is incarnational youth ministry true to the original and representative of the whole? I don’t think it is.

I’m not talking about purely contextual or relational youth ministry. These are both things that I love when done well and are the nuggets of gold contained within the incarnational method. We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater after all! A lot of the basic incarnational practices, therefore, don’t really bother me.

With healthy boundaries (see part 5 on Friday), the practices are not my problem. Let’s see if I can say what is.

We all know what ‘the Incarnation’ is, right?

At a recent training event, I asked a room of twenty-five youth workers to explain what the Incarnation was and what it achieved. Some of these youth workers were experienced, well-read practitioners, others were green and just getting started.

Every single one of the responses, however, focused strongly on the same thing: The Incarnation was God revealing himself to humanity. I pushed them a little and asked why Jesus had to come as a human and not, for instance, a crocodile or a toaster. Again, every response was about relatability, empathy, and revelation. ‘Jesus came as a human so we could totally get Him and relate to Him, yknow?’

Did you see the problem?

Revelation is just one of maybe six significant theological tenants of the Incarnation, and relatability is just a small part of Revelation. Pre-existence is part of the incarnation – God himself taking on human form. Substitutionary atonement is part of the incarnation – a human sacrifice for a human problem. Hypostatic union is part of the incarnation – Jesus as still fully part of the Godhead, thus a divine sacrifice for an eternal problem. Eschatology is part of the incarnation – God restoring His headship through Jesus, the new Adam. The Incarnation is an enormously important doctrine about who God is and how He saves us. For more on this, you’ll want to check out Part 4 on Thursday.

I have actually asked this same question in rooms of youth workers over the past twelve months in twenty four different locations in the UK, and the responses, without exception, were always in the same ballpark.

Revelation is incredibly important, and I don’t want to downplay its importance in the Incarnation, but it is far from the whole – and incarnational youth ministry only really appeals to one aspect of revelvation (contextual relatability). At what point can we really say, therefore, that we are being incarnational?

I think this has now gone too far. 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 doctrine.

Am I getting too stuck on the word?

You might think I’m being petty, after all this is just semantics, right? I’m just fussing over the word.

At the purely metaphorical or practical level I don’t really mind too much. I think choosing to attribute God-specific stuff to us is usually a bad idea, so unwise perhaps, but not the end of the world. There is certainly overlap with the contextual-relational part of the Incarnation that we can work with. If there is good teaching on the Incarnation then borrowing from it in context wouldn’t be too big a deal.

The problem, however, is that this doesn’t seem to be the case. ‘Incarnational theory’ hasn’t been nuanced or qualified against the original doctrine anywhere near enough to warrant appropriation of the word.

Instead, the Incarnation has been reduced a purely revelation action that we can copy, rather than the one time, unique, and saving action of the divine. 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?

A tyre is not a car, an arm is not a body, and Posh is not The Spice Girls.

I don’t think this is intentional, but the fact remains that youth workers often read more about incarnational theory than the actual Incarnation itself as a doctrine. Guess which one is left wanting?

I’ve found that youth ministry books that use the term are very unlikely to have a full doctrinal discussion of the Incarnation, yet they still appropriate the doctrine, hijack the concept, and drain the original meaning of its power.

Without good teaching on the Incarnation prior to reading, what’s a youth worker to do?

What happens when you mess with meaning like this?

When a word has been mistakenly overused for so long without nuance, context, or clarification then that word begins to change, and without some way of retaining the original you lose its initial meaning.

When you reduce an idea down to just one of its parts without holding the sidelined pieces in tension, you end up losing the whole. In the same way a ‘car’ is not a ‘tyre’, we may have actually diluted the Incarnation, watering down our understanding of its true substance.

This is why a room of youth workers couldn’t tell me specifically how the Incarnation was part of God’s saving action, and – when pushed – they couldn’t tell me why God had to be both divine and human for salvation to work.

This is important. You wouldn’t call something ‘Trinitarian youth ministry’ just because you happened to have three projects, or ‘Creational youth ministry’ because you used lego, or ‘Eschatological youth ministry’ because you always finished late. Taking a small piece of the whole, then hijacking it is just detrimental to the original.

This is nothing less than a significant watering down of an essential piece of Christology. Honestly, I think we’re messing with how we understand the very person of Jesus Christ. Jesus didn’t come, primarily, to empathise with humanity, He came to save it! He can do that, we can’t.

We don’t become incarnate exactly because He already did.

A room of youth workers should be able to tell me why the Incarnation was necessary for the salvation of humans – they should be teaching this in detail to their young people every week. Five decades of incarnational theory being written in our youth ministry books with little contextual discussion of the whole has robbed the Incarnation of its true power.

The really big problem

When using any foundational doctrine as a basis for praxis, we should always ask whether that praxis flows healthily from the original doctrine without confusing or diminishing it. Incarnational theory uses one very small part, morphs it into a thing that we primarily do, rather than God, and then it completely bypasses the other aspects of the doctrine.

My big 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 Jesus folks. Is there not a better way that we can find to talk about the good parts of the theory in a way that doesn’t do this? Simplification is one thing – it helps us communicate what we do – but using a doctrine of the person and character of God to talk about what we do it is very shaky indeed. They’ll be more on this specifically when we look at the original doctrine in Part 4.

The problem is we’ve made it too much about revelation, forgetting the bigger picture, and too much about us, forgetting the unique work of God.

I think we need to take the Incarnation back from incarnataional youth ministry, rethink the name and redeem the original doctrine.

 

Photo by Alexandra on Unsplash
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