Saturday, January 10, 2009

Signficant Quotes

It will probably be helpful for our endeavor here to just record some quotes that allow us to react, opinionize, and explore.  As such, I am going to start with Dr. Andrew Root's book Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry:From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology ofIncarnation.  He starts with the obvious-- youth ministry is about relationships.  However, he believes that the church has had a modern idea of relationship in mind (self-chosen and constricted relationship with strings attached where teenagers are an object and goal) rather than the incarnational mode where we become a part of another's world.

In chapter 2, he begins to unpack the emergence of adolescence in the United States and how modernistic ideas of relationships supported this emergence.  Here is what he says on pages 42-44:
The common use of technical rationality and the slow decay of community and kinship structures of the family led to  new emphasis on the self-chosen relationship to proivde individual feelings of intimacy.  In a modernized world that undercuts tradition by allowing individuals to chose their own destinies, preexisting social units (like families, communities, tribes, ethnic groups, etc.) no longer have the power to determine social interactions and therefore provide intimacy.  Rather, in a modernized world the individual must negotiate all meaningful relationships on his or her own terms.  Where in the past people could not escape such social units, in  modernized world mobility and diversification allow people the freedom to individually choose friends and lovers.... Relationships are individually negotiated zones of shared intimacy.... In a modernized world, then, the self-chosen relationship the relationship cut free from all social obligations, became the road to intimacy.  Only in a modernized world can direct attention be given to self-chosen relationships, because only here is relational interconnection optional and open to selection.  Therefore, we could define the self-chosen relationship as the frightening freedom to individually negotiate and sustain all your significant relationships of meaning and identity.... The turn toward the self-chosen relationship in the middle decades of the twentieth century would have extensive ramifications on the adolescent population.
After WWII, society expected adolescents to participate in secondary education.  But the high schol functioned as much more than an educational institution, becoming rather a common institution for all citizens in a particular community.  Football games, plays and homecoming queens were of community-wide interest, providing a distinct identity in cookie-cutter suburbs throughout the country.  The influence of the high school also meant the expansion of teenage life.  No longer did adolescents enter into an exclusive peer culture only during the school hours; now the distinct world of the teenager was a twenty-four-hour commitment.  Sports practices, weekend dances and community hangouts made leaving the teen world impossible.  Adolescents became more than a stage of life, it was a way of life.
Here are some initial thoughts on my part: 1) If Christianity is also a way of life, then are there aspects of the "church", "baptism", and "eucharist" that challenge this adolescent way of life and the way of life of the modern self-chosen relationship?  2) If we are truly being incarnational, how will our pitching our tent among adolescents and this culture shift the way that we are "church" and minister?  3) What aspects of the old world of family and institutions do we need to push for a re-emergence and what aspects of this modern world do we just need to accept as a part of our current situation that won't change?

Friday, January 9, 2009

Eight Elements of a Biblical Worldview

Kinnaman and Lyons in their book unChristian outline the qualifiers for how they define a person to have a deeper faith (p75). These were the qualifiers they used in their study for which the book presents the findings; they found that people who believe these things live substantively different lives. The eight qualifiers that show a person to operate from a biblical worldview are that a person believes:
  1. Jesus Christ lived a sinless life
  2. God is the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe and he still rules it today
  3. salvation is a gift from God and cannot be earned
  4. Satan is real
  5. a Christian has a responsibility to share his or her faith in Christ with other people
  6. the Bible is accurate in all of the principles it teaches
  7. unchanging moral truth exists
  8. the moral truth is defined by the Bible

Questions:
  1. To what degree do you feel these eight elements are taught in ministry settings, events, or books?
  2. Discuss the validity and feasibility of using these eight elements as the basis for a curriculum plan.
  3. In what ways could these elements be embedded into all aspects of ministry?

Problem: Lack of Volunteers

Situation: The leadership of West End Church describes their church as far too “staff driven” with a strong desire to become more “lay driven.” But they have historically struggled to recruit and train volunteers. They have tried soliciting help through the newsletter, the bulletin, e-mail messages, even begging during the Sunday services but the vast majority of volunteers continue to come from the small pool of faithfuls who have served for years. Often, those who do volunteer complain of being overloaded and burning out.

The youth ministry is no exception to this pattern. The short-term volunteers who served in the youth ministry couldn’t wait until the new youth director was hired, allowing them to step back from their volunteer work. Within months of his arrival, the new youth director realizes that all of his youth ministry volunteers have resigned, leaving the church with less hours invested in the ministry than before the staff person was hired. This youth director, a “kid magnet” filled with energy and creativity feels overwhelmed, recognizing that he now must not only minister creatively to youth but must build an organization at the same time.

When the youth director suggests to church leaders that some programs might need to be cut in order to give him the capacity to develop a volunteer team, he meets with strong resistance and well-meaning suggestions that he simply “learn to delegate.”

Questions:
1. What do you see as potentially being the root cause(s) of this situation?
2. What are some recommended solutions for this problem?
3.
What processes should be set in place to prevent this from happening again?