For years we’ve been using the word ‘relationships’ as the silver bullet; the key to understanding young people and unlocking the highest potential of our youth ministries. But do we really know what we mean when we say ‘relationship’?

Caveat: Before I go any further, I’d want to affirm the utterly essential place and practice of relationships in youth work. We worship a relational God who created us with unbelievable capacity for connection, and a deep-seated need for it. In fact, you can trace almost everything that’s wrong in the world to a lack of healthy relationships with others. The heart behind this post then is: yes relationships are immensely important, so let’s be clear about what we mean and pursue them as healthily as we possibly can! This is one of those areas where being too broad and nonspecific can actually be quite damaging.

I wonder then, if ‘relationship’ just might have become a bit too much of buzz word in youth ministry?

Starting simply, relationships can be good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, abusive or constructive. Relationships in ministry can be authoritative or authoritarian; or can be cooperative or communal. Not all relationships are the same, and not thinking about how they might be different can cause some very real issues.

Going a little further, in settings like school, family, church, or youth ministry, relationships are rarely between equal parties. There are different relational expectations, different vulnerabilities, and different safeguarding boundaries between teachers and students, parents and children, leaders and young people. They should be equal in terms of value, dignity, and respect – however, they might not be equal in functional terms like life-experience or positions of power. Trying to squash out theses difference can be quite harmful – even abusive.

I think that maybe we’ve begun to use relationship (singular) a little too much as a theory rather than relationships (plural) as a reality. The former is often too broad and abstract, whereas the latter requires us to get specific and personal. Simply saying ‘we are relational youth workers’ or ‘we do relationship-driven youth ministry’, doesn’t necessarily mean much in isolation.

There have been some popular youth work books published in the last fifteen or so years that have driven a muddy, and I think unhelpful, narrative on relationships that have resulted in a more unclear concept of what we mean by relationship. Three particularly questionable ideas that are part of this narrative are:

1. Relationships, unequivocally, are the end in themselves and having any other objective than ‘relationship’ is manipulative.
2. Relationships should include equal vulnerability and exposure of both parties.
3. Relationships are designed to make young people feel loved.
   

I believe these can actually be damaging or even abusive when looked at carefully.

An end in themselves?

Starting with 1.), ‘relationship’ as an end in itself is a semantic nightmare. Relationships always have subtext. We have relationships for companionship, love, guidance, nurture, fulfilment, belonging, structure, experiences, passions, shared convictions, and to help form us to grow. In fact, all relationships are by their very nature formative and healthy relationships help us grow well.

Having a relationship to have a relationship is simply non-sensical. There are always reasons for relationships, and always aspirations for relationships too. Draining all purpose or influence from a relationship necessarily drains the thing itself to become either a thing that is not a relationship, or a shallow or even an unhealthy relationship.

For us as Christians, surely one reason we build relationships is to share the life-giving message of Jesus. However, some authors see even this as manipulative. Dr. Andrew Root, for instance, sees remotely any kind of potential influence in relationships as unhealthy, and thus any youth ministry that is trying to influence a young person to become a Christian as depersonalized and dishonest (2013:113-114).

Authors like Root (and Root himself) don’t, however, differentiate been healthy and unhealthy influence. I have a wonderful relationship with my wife for instance. This relationship includes healthy influence; simply put – she helps me be a better person and less of a jerk! This works because the relationship has been built on trust, respect, and dignity. Healthy relationships, therefore, can provide healthy influence.

A more extreme scenario might be talking someone down from the ledge before they attempted suicide. This would also be an example of healthy influence. Many of us would argue that this is exactly the type of influence we exercise by trying to help young people know the gospel.

Root and others like him do provide an important cautionary tale about manipulating young people through inauthentic relationships. Yes – I’m with them on that. However, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater! Relationships are by their nature influential and contain a variety of moving goals. Our job is to build them with love, grace, trust, respect, and dignity so they grow healthily.

Equal vulnerability and exposure?

Some argue that true relationships are where both parties fully experience and inhabit each other’s deepest pains, sufferings, and vulnerabilities as equal partners. If we want to apply this to youth ministry, however, then expecting a teenager to be an ‘equal partner’ and carry the baggage of a much older youth minster is a recipe for relational abuse – if not actually abusive in itself.

One of the problems here is that the only examples often used in books and blogs sharing this idea are between equal partners (marriage, friendship etc.). This is simply not the relationship a young person should have with their youth leader.

Some of this has come from the parenting language of a few research pieces that came out about a decade ago that made a big deal of young people looking for parenting figures. Youth leaders jumped on this as a way of developing more parent-like interests in their young people.

I think we read this data correctly, but that we found incorrect ways to address it. I believe that the church should be like surrogate families, but youth leaders should not be surrogate parents. This level of engagement creates all kinds of issues.

Always being on is something that 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 also sets a precedent for those young people, allowing them to fall into unsafe behaviours and times with other peo­ple in their lives who perhaps they shouldn’t trust.

While always being open to young people is a drain on health and family, robbing the worker of their effectiveness, it also creates safeguarding vulner­abilities. 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. Surely, we want these relationships to last more than a year or two too?

Even in this scenario, however, a parent is not a functional equal party with the child. So this move in the last few years towards treating relationships with young people as functional equals is even more exposing for both the young person and the youth leader. Young people should be treated with dignity and respect, but that doesn’t mean they can handle the immediate extra weight of an entire adult experience.

Put another way, it’s healthier if we think about being friends to young people, rather than being friends with young people.

Relationships should make people feel loved?

In 1970, a film adaptation of Erich Segal’s novel ‘Love Story’ made famous the line ‘love means never having to say you’re sorry’, but it took another 34 years and an 8-year-old called Lisa Simpson to point out ‘No it doesn’t! This movie is drivel!’

There is a growing trend today that says perception is reality. Love, therefore, gets held to ransom by the loved. It’s measured in the eye of the beholder. Imagine for a second that we decided that something was only food if we liked its taste. I really don’t like taste of celery, but because I don’t like it doesn’t make it not food. I really do like the taste of PlayDoh, but I don’t think that makes the neon pink putty into food, just because I have weird taste buds.

When it comes to love, we have begun to say things like ‘if I didn’t feel it right, then you didn’t do it right!’ If people don’t feel loved by our love, would it necessarily mean, however, that we’re loving those people ‘wrong’, or that our love is in some way defective, damaged, or deficient? It could but doesn’t have to the case.

When we love someone then, we don’t simply ‘feel’ towards them with some kind spasmodic force. Feelings will accompany what we do, but they are not the whole. When we love somebody, we serve them, help them, lift them up, support them, stand with them, are present to them, and we protect them. Occasionally we might even withdraw from them out of love.

Understanding love languages as a part of personality types can help us communicate better with people and be more sympathetic. This is not the whole story though and needs to be balanced with a much fuller philosophy of who people are and what love is.

We really want young people to feel loved. Of course we do! But that can’t be the main goal or measure of loving relationships. After all it’s entirely possibly to make someone feel loved, but not actually love them at all. We cannot let truly loving actions and relationships be held to random by the feelings alone, especially if by doing so we would be required to sacrifice healthy relationships in order to ‘make them feel it.’

We should be loving but we cannot attempt to manipulate how people think and feel and still claim to be developing healthy loving relationships.

When relationships are not enough

‘Relationship’ as an abstract, non-specific concept is not enough. We need to pursue a particular type of relationship practice that honours and develops multiple healthy relationships as a result.

The real question, then, is how are relationships pursued and for what purpose do they serve?

Relationship practice should include healthy boundaries, careful loving influence, open and clear goals, multiple parties’ involvement, ongoing honest accountability, and creative and understood purposes.

It should also flow more readily out of relational theology. Questions on the relationships within the Trinity, between God’s people, and to us through revelation, all bear on this idea. This is why it’s really odd to separate ‘good relationships’ and ‘right theology.’

The heart behind this post is yes relationships, but if we’re going to relentlessly relational work in our youth ministry – and we should – then let’s do it as well and healthily as we possibly can!

Gough out.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash