The youth ministry idol of new

Youth Ministry sits on the the cutting edge of contemporary missionary theory, and fresh expressions of church theology. We pride ourselves on being innovators, creatives, and revolutionaries.

Throw a new year into the mix and we have a skittish spasm of fresh ideas, along with a fidgety, impatient sense of ‘let’s change everything – right now!’

The new year is often the time that we change all the programs, layouts, teaching themes, leaders, logos – everything. We support this random change of track by pointing out that youth culture itself changes every five minutes, and that we have a missional responsibility to be on trend or even ahead of the curve. We need to stay fresh, or we’ll go stale.

We do like new don’t we? Hence the postmodern mantra, new year, new me.

This should leave us with a pertinent question though: What was wrong with the old me? When it comes to our personal new year resolutions the answers might come easily. I’m too out of shape, too disorganised, too isolated, too social, etc. I gotta fix all of the toos. It’s great to work on self improvement, but also easy to forget that we just spent a year teaching on the value of identity in Christ that isn’t caught up in these things. Mixed signals perhaps?

When it comes to youth ministry, these mixed signals go into a blender. We – sometimes completely tactlessly – take what we and our teams have poured our lives into, screw it into a ball, and start all over again. All for the sake of something new.

When you start something new to replace something you’ve been doing a while you create some baggage, and leave a wake of confusion. What, for instance, happens to the legacy of your ministry, the value of the hours of tears and hard work that went into it, or the period of necessary settling before an idea really starts to work. When you keep starting something ‘new’ you consistently devalue what was before.

The thing is though, God works with journeys, with time, and with settlement. He honours toil and dedication, and he loves constancy and consistency. Oddly, these are all the things young people value too.

Sometimes we do need to make big changes to our youth ministries, or start something completely new, but there should be a lot of caveats first, such as:

• Did we really give this time to settle and form?
• Are we adding yet another shaky inconsistency into our teenagers lives?
• Have we properly identified, addressed, and worked the issues?
• Are we properly resourced for this ‘new’ thing?
• Did we bring everyone with us?
• Did we try to bring people with us?
• Are we avoiding a real issue by bouncing off it?

New can be an idol. In a Youth Ministry world of fresh ideas, cool stories, and funky logos it’s all too easy for us to be caught up and surrender the high ground of constancy, for the rivers of skittish change.

Let’s send down some roots this year – give our world and people the time they need to form and settle, and seek fresh encounters with God where we are at with who we are with.

Let’s maybe give the old a chance.