Discussing Incarnational Youthwork – the reader’s digest version

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 1^st 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