On a Wednesday night in February of 2010, I asked our youth a seemingly simple question: Who is Jesus? They answered with things like, “best guy in the entire universe,” “awesome,” “ultimate psychiatrist,” and “helps me play video games.” The most popular answer was “my best friend,” given explicitly by at least three youth before we all just kind of agreed that Jesus was all of our best friend. These answers all show that our youth had a generally positive impression of who Jesus is, which is good, but they are not particularly biblical, nor are they spiritually or theologically deep answers.

They also gave some standard, ‘textbook’ answers, but were unable to speak about them at any length. They said that Jesus is, “the Son of God,” “our Savior,” “Son of David,” “miracle worker.” These answers are obviously much more biblical and have some theological and spiritual depth to them, but further conversation revealed that our youth were unable to elaborate, explain or articulate what these answers mean or why they were significant for their day-to-day lives. Our youth seemed to be quoting “right answers” as if they were learned by rote rather than personally held convictions that they truly owned. The only possible exception was one girl who said that Jesus “saved my life by dying on the cross and forgiving my sins.” She said that in the middle of everyone claiming Jesus as their best friend, and right afterwards our conversation quickly steered back in that direction. But that evening I wrapped up our discussion by highlighting this answer, and wondering aloud why only one of them had given it.

Two years later, in February of 2012, I asked the same question again: Who is Jesus? Answers included “The Son of God,” “Savior,” “the only pure one,” “makes us whole,” “the one through whom God completes our lives and relationships,” “fills our emptiness,” “makes our lives whole.” But more importantly, our youth were able to elaborate on all of these answers, giving them much more color and demonstrating a deeper kind of knowledge. This time around they weren’t talking about Jesus as their best friend or psychotherapist, and they weren’t just rattling off textbook answers either. But even that wasn’t quite enough for them: the conversation pushed onward to what it looks like to follow him. “Jesus gave it all, so we should be willing to give it all…following Jesus looks like the cross.” “Following Jesus looks like love – Jesus on the cross is ultimate.” We had a real, substantive conversation about who Jesus is in which our youth demonstrated the ability to talk about Jesus at length, and in their own words!

Two years apart, same question, totally different conversation. The National Survey of Youth and Religion, conducted just a few years ago, found that while adolescents in the United States are eager to share their opinions on a wide range of issues, almost all of them are incredibly inarticulate when it comes to their faith. I am really excited to report that our youth are growing in this area. Don’t get me wrong – we’ve still got a long way to go. We’re learning to “talk the talk,” but that doesn’t mean much if we’re not also learning how to better “walk the walk.” But regardless I think our church has something to celebrate – our youth are asking great questions and they’re really seeking God as their Answer. We’re making some observable strides along the road from faith learned by rote to faith they can really own as truly and authentically their own – what some people call “sticky faith.” This can only be described as an act of God’s grace. And by God’s grace we’ll continue learning and growing together toward the kind of Christian faith that lasts.

As a part of the candidacy process for ordination in the United Methodist Church one is required to type up and submit answers to a number of different questions and prompts. As I approach my meeting with the District Committee on Ordained Ministry on Thursday, February 23, I will be posting a few of my responses here. The third of these responses (and the last one I intend to post on this blog) follows, below. 

¶ 311.2.a.iii Write about your beliefs as a Christian.

I believe that the God who created all things took on flesh and walked the earth in the person of Jesus Christ. I believe that Jesus is the Word of God, the fulfillment of the Old Testament’s history of Israel, the full enactment of God’s faithfulness to the promises he made to his people, the assertion of God’s Reign on earth. I believe that Jesus displays the power and the wisdom of God in the weakness and foolishness of his death on the cross. I believe that Jesus’ innocence, his faithful obedience, was affirmed when he rose from the dead. I believe that in Jesus’ death and resurrection sin was defeated and death itself died. I believe that God has poured out his Holy Spirit on the whole world to bear witness to this Good News about what God has done in Jesus.

I believe that God has called-out the church to be witnesses of these things —- to partner with him in the sharing of this News and in the performance of this Reign through the power of the Holy Spirit. I believe that to bear witness to Jesus as Lord means to renounce all other lords as ultimately false and to follow after his pattern of Lordship by feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, showing hospitality to strangers, clothing the naked, and visiting the sick and imprisoned. I believe that living life towards this God who has come to love us his enemies in the person of Jesus means to live by a similarly radical kind of love toward God, toward neighbor, and toward our own enemies. I believe that holiness is becoming consumed by this kind of love, overwhelmed by its fulness and completeness, and graciously perfected and overcome by its practice. I believe that the Holy Spirit works on us through certain ‘means of grace’, central among them being the practice of baptism, whereby the church welcomes one into its covenant community of worship and witness, and holy communion, whereby the church takes up particular discrete acts of Jesus, gives thanks to God through them, breaks bread to remember what Christ has done for us and to rehearse for the Wedding Supper of the Lamb, and shares a common table as an act of holy hospitality and as spiritual food to empower our ongoing worship and witness. I believe that to follow after this Jesus, to walk on his way, is the only good and true and beautiful way to live, the only genuinely, fully and originally human way to be.

I believe that the same Jesus will one day bring his Reign into its fulness, at which point we will answer for our sins, but he will wipe away our tears, make all things new, and come to dwell fully and completely with humankind in a New Earth. I believe that whatever this looks like, however God freely determines to wrap this whole drama up, it will be Good, and Holy, and Righteous, and True. And I believe that living our lives together and with the fellowship of the Holy Spirit between the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of all things that his own resurrection foretells is what gives us the courage to live counterintuitive lives of faithfully hopeful love as described above.

¶ 311.2.a.i: What is the most formative experience of your Christian life?

I could answer this question by talking about my church growing up, or the amazing and encouraging friends that God has blessed me with, or my experience in seminary and how it was probably exactly what I needed right when I needed it – all are wonderful gifts from God. But I think at this point I’d like to say that the most formative experience of my Christian life has been my current job as director of youth ministries at Aldersgate UMC in Santa Fe, TX.

This charge is strengthening my faith. I loved seminary, but writing an exegetical paper on a passage from Isaiah (for instance) is much easier to me than convincing a roomful of skeptical 9th graders that God has done something dramatic and beautiful -— even exciting -— for us and for our world, and that God wants us to participate in the continuation of that drama, beauty and excitement that he’s still doing today. It’s not that I don’t already have faith, or that I don’t already believe these things that I teach. I most certainly do. But the exercise of having to explain my faith and why I’m so excited about it, and having to do so in different words and from different angles, has been deeply formative for me. It’s as if my mouth having to form the gospel is teaching my heart all over again how to love it. Having to explain why the good news is so good enhances and enlivens that goodness for me. Talking about how exciting God’s reign is has made God’s reign even more exciting.

Further, being at Aldersgate encourages me to pray. There’s nothing that has encouraged prayer more consistently and humbly in my life than my being responsible for the spiritual formation of this small band of young people. Jesus claims that there’s a lot at stake here. Evidently messing this up might end worse for me than if I had a millstone tied around my neck at the bottom of the sea. But I’m also humbled and driven to prayer by the simple fact that I love these teens that I get to work with, and I care deeply for the families with whom I interact. And so I give thanks often, and I intercede on their behalf. What a gift!

Lastly, my time at Aldersgate continues to grow my love for Christ’s church. Churches are messy. Sometimes we fight or bicker. Sometimes we spend way to much time talking about things that are really just silly distractions. And sometimes we do a terrible job of loving each other, not to mention our neighbors and our enemies. But sometimes the church gets it. Sometimes we catch a vision, if only a fleeting one, of God’s mercy and grace, and sometimes we even act on that vision. Sometimes we live out our allegiance to God’s Reign instead of trying to fortify our own reigns. Sometimes, if just for a moment, the church lives into her calling by really and truly worshipping God, and by really and truly living into God’s mission for which he’s sending us out into the world. Church is messy, sure. But by a miracle of grace God nurtures and shapes these messy bodies into what will become his bride. Aldersgate can be messy. And yet somehow God still manages to offer us his Sanctifying grace. And that has been deeply formative for me.

Check it out.

I’ve written posts over there though, and that sort of counts.

He came down to earth from Heaven,
Who is God and Lord of all,
And His shelter was a stable,
And His cradle was a stall;
With the poor, oppressed, and lowly,
Lived on earth our Savior holy.

And our eyes at last shall see Him,
Through His own redeeming love,
For that Child so dear and gentle
Is our Lord in Heav’n above,
And He leads His children on
To the place where He is gone.

The King came. But the King didn’t come to kings, other rulers, smaller lords or governors. The King didn’t make his entrance in the halls of power, didn’t visit the wealthy or the religious or the righteous. This King entered the world as a stranger and an outcast whose parents were forced to travel across country so caesar could have a better idea how big his empire was and how best to tax it. Then this King was born in a barn because his parents couldn’t even find a hotel room.

And that’s the drama of the incarnation. The King of kings and Lord of lords doesn’t enter our world in the company of the well-to-do. Indeed if he had that might have reinforced their pretension. Worldly kings and lords don’t tend to appreciate other kings and lords, except perhaps as peers. But this King is peerless, and is famously underwhelmed by the lifestyles of the rich and famous (with apologies to Robin Leach). And so, in a scandal to our values, in an offensive disruption of the things we prize most, this King appears as a “dear and gentle” child.

I don’t want to overstate my point – this kid who was born in the company of cattle to a relatively poor couple was also supposed to descend from the line of king David. But David himself came from humble beginnings – short, young, shepherd chosen above all his older brothers. David, however, gradually moved away from those beginnings and eventually took on the role of the classical king that he was chosen to counteract (cf. the Bathsheba incident and the census). But this new King, God’s true and ultimate King, represents a totally new vision, a vision he never corrupted nor ever will corrupt (in spite of how regularly his later followers would corrupt it).

The scandal of this King’s birth, the scandal that “With the poor, oppressed and lowly, / Lived on earth our Savior holy,” is eventually carried forward and brought to a climax when this King, this Prince of Peace, is publicly executed by lesser (false) kings in order promote a lesser (false) peace.

May we remember this season that we are not our own king, and that the kings we revere are at best pale imitators of the True King. And may we live in the light of the scandal that this effectively homeless child is the “Lord in Heav’n above”, and that this is, in the words of the angel in Luke 2, “good news of great joy that will be for all the people.”

Writing about Wesley is hard. He uses a lot of expressions that I find archaic, and the ways he deals with some concepts rubs me the wrong way. Two related examples. First, his usage of ‘heart’ is difficult for me because I’m worried about how it might be participating in the popular dichotomy between “head” and “heart” – between emotion and cognition – that I find troubling because of the ways that it ignores desire’s essential involvement in how and why and what we think (and all of that’s involvement in how and why and what we do).

Second, Wesley employs concepts of “outward religion” and “inward religion”, a dichotomy that is easy enough to understand but arguably more troublesome than the aforementioned. My fear here is that the inward will become the realm of Christianity and the outward, ‘more serious’ stuff will become the responsibility of some other more ‘practical’ power, be it politics, pocketbook, personal preference, etc. We can tuck God safely away in a little ‘inward’ box and justify some pretty un-Christlike things. See pretty much anything written by JH Yoder or Michael Gorman if you’re not sure what I mean. The gospel isn’t ‘fire insurance’ it’s a whole new life – a new creation – here and now. And that’s radical, disruptive stuff.

But my concerns are pretty contemporary, and Wesley is not a 21st century man, he is a 18th century man. And so I think he largely predates these misconceptions, at least in their modern form. In fact, I think these misconceptions actually came out of the mixture of Wesley’s language, along with parallel language coming from other quarters, and later (and a few concurrent) philosophical developments and fashions.

This claim is bolstered by the fact that much of his energies are spent holding inward and outward religion together, employing the distinction to undercut the distance between the two. For Wesley, inward religion necessarily breeds outward religions, and outward religion fosters and deepens inward religion. The two are of a piece, and can’t be separated without doing violence to both.

Furthermore, for Wesley the ‘heart’ isn’t too separate a thing either. The Oxford Fellow just means to point out that our human desires are exactly where God wants to go to work on us. God wants to transform and reform us where we love. Moreover, Wesley is also no adherent of Deb from Napoleon Dynamite‘s “follow your heart” philosophy (yeah, I just went there).

I noticed these ‘hurdles’ (and other similar concerns) over the summer as well, but the more I read Wesley the more I am convinced that Wesley is merely a victim of a changing conversation, and that he is not guilty of these modern philosophical and theological crimes.

You beneath life’s crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps so slow;

Look now, for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing;
Oh, rest beside the weary road
And hear the angels, and hear them sing:

“Peace on the earth, goodwill to men
From heaven’s all gracious King!”
The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels, to hear them sing.

Life is not all sunshine and rainbows. It’s sorrow, striving, struggling, suffering (and, undoubtedly, other words that start in ‘S’). In Romans 8 the apostle Paul seems to think that the world itself is taken up into this struggle: he says that creation is groaning – like from childbirth! – in anticipation of what one day will be but has not yet come to be.

And, in spite of whatever alternative messages we may conjure, this is where we live as well. This groaning awareness of what is not, of what God has left unfinished. This is the first part of what Advent is about, waiting in (sometimes painful) anticipation of what is not yet.

But – and this is a big ‘but’ – Advent is never celebrated without knowing that Christmas is right around the corner. Though we still live in an unfinished world, we live in a world that is being finished, a world that God has inhabited in a human person. And in a sense he’s done so simply to say, “Peace on the earth, goodwill to men / From heaven’s all gracious King!”

The world that is still being finished is here in the humility – or humiliation? – of a baby reduced to being born in a filthy barn, really, finally, fully finished. May the scandal of this good news haunt our waiting in the coming weeks; indeed may it haunt our every thought until Christ is born anew in our lives and in our world. And may the materialistic pretensions of this season be undercut by the material reality of what we’re celebrating – the Savior of the world being born surrounded by dead grass and animal feces.

Animal feces? I’m pretty sure there’s an apt metaphor for much of what we do around Christmastime somewhere in there…

In my reading from the Church Dogmatics this morning, ol’ Karl was talking the Old Testament, and some of the things he was saying reminded me of a quote that I thought I had read earlier in §14. But I was wrong. Here’s the quote, from von Balthasar:

All ancient peoples have their gods. The God of Israel, however, is distinguished from all other gods by the fact that he brings into being a people to worship him by his own free sovereign act of choosing – whether we look at the first manifestation of this choice of a people – when God called Abraham – or at his choosing his people when he led them out of Egypt at the hand of Moses (who himself had first to be called of God), thus making something like a nation out of a miserable collection of uncultured and demoralized slaves; before all this, in each case there is a free act of the divine initiative that can neither be foreseen, demanded, nor deduced. (Engagement With God, pp. 13)

I quite enjoyed the point that von Balthasar makes here. Israel is not a people who have a god named YHWH. Rather, YHWH is the God who has a people, Israel.

Leonardo says, "I'm not a student, but I am a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle."

I recently asked a friend and colleague if she knew where the term “student ministry” came from, and why so many people use it. She wasn’t really sure, but she did point me to this blog post guest authored by Christian Smith that served to confirm my apprehension about that way of speaking of our ministry with teens.

I was still in high school the first time I ever heard someone use the term “student ministry,” and even then it caught me off guard. It seemed really weird to me that a church would label me as a student, because I did not think of myself in those terms. These days I am actually working in youth ministry, and I’ve only grown more convinced that it’s a weird way of talking about ministry to teens. Here are a few of the reasons why I never say I work in ‘student ministry’:

First of all, the church should be careful when it defines people in terms of their occupation. What we ‘do’ is an important part of who we are, but privileging any one role tends to be reductionistic, especially when that privileged role is chosen poorly. This is particularly true with young people, who are so often engaged in a number of activities outside the classroom that they count more central to their identities. I’m not sure that I know a single teen that would self identify first as a student. As far as they’re concerned they are softball players, guitarists, gamers, band members, and (I hope!) Christians before they are students. If they don’t identify themselves primarily as students, why do so many churches?

Second, it’s a bad idea for teens to be thought of as students in the church, because the term ‘student’ reinforces some unfortunate but common misconceptions about discipleship. The term ‘student’ lends itself to an excessively cognitive understanding of what teens are, and therefore to an excessively mental, intellectual view of discipleship. Teens are thought of primarily as neutral idea-receptacles that need to be filled with the right kind of information. This is problematic insofar as Jesus doesn’t call us just to think the gospel, he calls us to live it. Christianity is less about what you know, and more about who and how and why and where you love. Worship is a very different genre from what goes on in the classrooms our teens frequent. And thank God for that.

Third, the term ‘student’ overestimates the difference between teenagers and the rest of the church. On the one hand, ‘student’ risks suggesting that the rest of us have nothing else to learn, nowhere else to grow. And on the other hand, the term overestimates the tentative nature of teen faith. We need to invite teens to be the church today along with us, and they can’t do that as just ‘students’. And if the rest of us are going to be the church together with them, then we too need to get in touch with the fact that we are still students, or better, disciples of the master too.

Fourth, the term is exclusive. The church has a responsibility to minister the gospel to all teens, regardless of whether they are students, home-schooled, dropouts or early graduates. This one seems like a no-brainer to me.

I don’t mean to suggest that the term ‘youth’ ministry is perfect and unproblematic. Only that it is far less problematic, makes much more sense, and doesn’t carry so many risky misconceptions. Separating a group by its age can be problematic, especially since I think we should be striving to be one church, worshipping God together, across generational lines. If for Paul it was important to point out that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, man nor woman, slave nor free, in our age we might just as well add that in Christ the differences between young and old are reconfigured as well. So ‘youth’ ministry might overestimate the difference between youth and the rest of the church as well. But if such a ministry is put together to make sure young people have a place in our community (‘in’ being the operative word, not apart, alongside or near), then maybe the difficulties of the term can be minimized. Regardless, I still think this is a smaller barrier to overcome than those with ‘student’ listed above, so I’ll stick with ‘youth’ unless someone can persuade me otherwise.

On that note, I’d be really curious to hear if anyone knows why the term ‘student ministry’ is so popular? What are its benefits? Or what’s the critique of ‘youth ministry’; why is that term so bad?