Reading: Chapter 2: The Challenge

Chapter 2

THE CHALLENGE

More young people are killed in Chicago than any other U.S. city. Since 2008, more than 530 youth have been killed in Chicago with nearly 80 percent of the homicides occurring in 22 African- American or Latino community areas on the city’s South, Southwest and West sides.¹

Through local newspapers and evening newscasts, the disturbing realities of youth violence reach suburban soccer moms, academy professors, rural farm families, and many others far removed from its direct influence. Branded into the American psyche is the media imagery of city streets swarming with ominous-looking youth wearing white muscle tees, sagging jeans and hoodies.

It’s hard to walk past anyone fitting that profile without feeling a foreboding sense of danger.

Even for those of us who were born, raised and live in the city, when we see a young person who fits the media stereotype, our response is akin to that of the climber who may love the mountains yet treads carefully in somber awareness of their dangers. For anyone who has grown up urban, threat-assessment is like a sixth sense, a way of life.

We call them at-risk youth. “At-risk” describes young people whose environment makes them most vulnerable to violence, abuse and delinquency. Considering the influence of modern media on social norms and values, even young people growing up in secure and healthy communities can be deemed, to some degree, “at-risk.” But the setting most associated with the phrase is the inner city: those depressed urban sectors within major metropolitan areas where the population consists of the less educated and more impoverished, has a predominant minority presence (mostly Afri- can-American, Latino and Asian-American), and is characterized by a higher crime rate than other areas of the city.

These at-risk features of city life have a significant impact on youth ministry. “I don’t know how to help him,” a veteran youth leader cried. “He loves our basketball program. He’s a good kid. But then he goes home, where gangsters and drug dealers surround him, always pressuring him to hang with them. He asks what God is doing, why He’s allowing this. I honestly don’t know how to respond.”

Truth is, most youth leaders don’t know how to respond. Never has the chasm between adults and youth been more pronounced. Experientially we cannot fathom the challenges of growing up urban today. Yes, we know statistics; we understand the dynamics of family and community brokenness. Yet such knowledge rarely translates into genuinely effective intervention and change. Too often those who speak directly to youth sound eerily like Job’s counselors, spouting pious platitudes that sound right but have little to do with what’s really going on.

Maybe, like the young man rioting in Baltimore, we are in need of an emphatic reminder (a “slap to the head”) that we can do better.

Clouded by Assumptions

Years ago, I brought a group of kids back from a weekend mountain retreat in time to attend morning worship at a church in our neighborhood. The girls did not want to go in, because they had been taught that it was wrong to wear jeans in church.

I assured them that people would understand and would even be excited about their presence. I was wrong—terribly wrong—and was sorely chastised for my “transgression.”

You may laugh; dress codes have indeed relaxed over the years. But the disconnect is still there; it just shows up in different ways. Many a youth leader has said, “I want to take the ministry in this new direction; I know it is the right thing to do. But the leadership won’t allow for it. It doesn’t fit with their expectations; there’s too much pressure to keep things the same.”

A significant reason why self-examination is not something people who work with urban youth do well is context. Most youth programs are part of something bigger: a church or parachurch organization. A governing body’s expectations wield a great deal of control; their presence can bring any innovation or new ideas to a grinding halt.

Behind a controlling body’s expectations lies a deeper problem: prevailing assumptions. “Give them healthy activities, lots of love and the gospel; God will take care of the rest,” I have often heard adults assert. “The cream [i.e., youth destined for success] always rises to the top.” “I survived my adolescent years; so will they.” There is a measure of truth to this kind of thinking. But, as the messages coming out of the hip-hop and rap music genre reveal, today’s young people are experiencing an anguish of soul and a confusion about life that are tearing them apart. Sitting back and letting things happen has become an untenable response. Youth are struggling, and that struggle is affecting families and communities. It is tearing at the very fabric of society.

Enter the youth leader. They are special—a unique breed. Possessing great passion for Christ, their earnest desire is that young people come to know Christ and grow in Him. While there are some who treat youth ministry as a ladder toward something greater, most pursue their mission with abundant zeal and at times a reckless abandon. Often I have heard youth leaders cry out: “Satan never rests and neither should we!” (Which inevitably evokes my response: “Satan was never meant to be your role model. God is your role model, and He rested on the seventh day!”)

The fact of the matter is, misplaced zeal can be damaging. Most youth workers burn out after two or three years. This is hardly a surprise; inner-city ministry is demanding work! But faulty assumptions—the underlying beliefs upon which actions are based— can speed the process of wearing leaders down, especially when those beliefs do not fit reality.

In their masterful work Divided by Faith, Christian Smith and Michael Emerson identified some commonly held assumptions within the evangelical worldview that have produced behaviors inconsistent with belief. (In the case they were studying, the primary disconnect between belief and practice involved affirming reconciliation while practicing racial isolation.) In a similar way, most approaches to serving at-risk youth are rooted in commonly held assumptions. Here are a few of them:

• Evangelism is the primary task of the church, and therefore the primary focus of youth ministry.
• Christian maturity is measured by one’s knowledge of Scripture.
• Leaders, like cream, rise to the top. Therefore the youth leader’s task is to lead youth to Christ and disciple them, giving special attention to the best and brightest.
• Adolescents lack the maturity to lead. Especially those within the at-risk youth population—handicapped by such social deficits as poverty, single parenting, poor education, gang presence and the like, they need people who first and foremost love and encourage them. Leadership development is nice but not necessary.
• Developing leadership capacity in youth is a transactional process. Leadership growth happens when youth are proficient in carrying out assigned tasks with a positive attitude.

Most assumptions are based in truth but have just enough error mixed in to steer us in wrong directions. This makes them faulty, and acting on faulty assumptions leads to great frustrations.

Understanding Community, Mission and Adolescents

It will take conclusions more aligned with truth and reality to make a difference in the areas of community, mission and adolescents

Urban ministry and community development pioneer John Per- kins says, “Two things in society are broken: the family and the community.” The reality is that youth are byproducts of that brokenness. Youth are individuals, to be sure, with the power to effect outcomes by their own choices. But they have been influenced, shaped, and to greater and lesser degrees, controlled by their socioeconomic environment. They have been touched by brokenness; they must navigate and interpret life through the grid of family and/or community dysfunction.

Reaching these youth requires more than an understanding of the city and empathy for its young residents. It requires the ability to translate the gospel message into their context—to become a conduit through which Jesus addresses their deepest needs.

I remember experiencing a feeling of helplessness as kids dropped out of school, engaged in acts of violence, and experienced the stresses brought on by poverty and family instability— all the while telling them, “Jesus loves you.” The Jesus I spoke of early in my ministry had little to say about young people’s social needs. It took a rereading of the Gospels and meeting John Perkins to realize that preaching the gospel includes a profound social engagement.

The Scriptures describe Jesus as“a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief ” (Isaiah 53:3, KJV). Yet I’ve observed presentations in which youth never pick up on the idea that Jesus is acquainted with their grief.

Contextualization is more than an academic exercise. It’s a physical one as well. It’s not just about what is spoken. It’s about where and how we live.

When I began working with inner-city youth, I lived in the suburbs of Denver, near the seminary I attended. After two years, I moved into the city—into the same community where the young people I had been working with lived. The first week I was there, my house was broken into—twice.

I remember trembling and staring in fear at the broken window in my living room. Then some of the neighborhood kids came over. You know what their response was? They looked, nodded their heads and said, “Now you understand. You’re one of us now.” My life and message had gained a context. I could now say that Jesus was acquainted with their grief, and do so with credibility.

This does not require experiencing all the same traumas they do (although it was helpful that the problem of theft in the community became my problem, and that motivated me to join other neighbors in working to solve it). But context matters. Positioning matters.

The Bible tells us, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). The axiom rings as true for the city minister as it does for the foreign missionary: To the best of your ability, you live among the people you serve.

Most youth leaders see their primary mission as leading kids into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. This mission, vital as it is, becomes compromised and even polluted when it is pursued outside the Kingdom context of loving God and people.

I will never forget when I first heard inner-city mission leader Bob Lupton talk about a “theology of neighbor.” Immediately a  red flag went up: I’m a Christian, and I’ve never heard of a “theology of neighbor.” My first reaction was suspicion. Then I thought, Wait a minute. God’s greatest command is to love Him and love my neighbor. Having a theology of neighbor makes sense. What followed was horror: Why don’t I have a theology of neighbor? Why would a theology concerning God’s greatest command make me suspicious? What’s wrong with me?

I have dear friends—wonderful Christian leaders—who struggle with treating the Great Command as the greatest command. The best they can do is put loving God and neighbor on par with preaching the gospel. There are strong socioeconomic drivers behind this that we will examine later.

Allowing the Great Commission (which most view as evangelism apart from disciple making) to override the Great Command (loving God and neighbor) creates a perspective that reduces people to “souls” in need of saving, and turns compassion into an evangelistic technique. What does treating the Great Command as the greatest command look like? Loving neighbor becomes the context in which good news is shared. Think of it this way: Before the meal can be served (preaching), guests must be properly greeted (loved) and the table set. The youth leader’s first order of business becomes loving kids and creating a ministry setting that is conducive to discovery and growth.

Then there is the young person himself or herself. Who are these strange creatures? Everyone must journey through adolescence to reach adulthood. Adults know this, although we do not like to think about it very much. Generally we’re thankful to have survived the journey, and we tend to view youth ministry as helping youth make it through this life stage with a minimal amount of pain and damage.

For youth growing up urban, a dynamic interplay of developmental forces is at work. Inwardly, there are the physiological and psychological changes inherent within normal adolescent development. Adolescence is generally understood as that prolonged developmental bridge between childhood and adulthood, generally including the teenage years and early twenties. It is a uniquely turbulent phase of life, often filled with what G. Stanley Hall, the father of modern adolescent psychology, called “sturm und drang“ (storm and stress) as emerging adults wrestle with matters of self-identity, capacity, belief and direction.

All youth take this developmental journey, but those at risk do so through a particular sociocultural grid: the inner city, where formative adolescent development strains against such negative forces as poverty, family brokenness, and a culture of violence.

Realities such as these—compounded by media images that paint urban youth as out of control and dangerous—can mesmerize and overwhelm those trying to make a difference in a child’s life. But they also can mislead. It is like watching a magician skilled in the art of deception: Our attention becomes riveted in one direction, when the answers we seek lie somewhere else. We can become so fixed on the pain and agony of the city that we miss the implications of basic adolescent development. Consider this. If adolescence is a normal stage in human development, and therefore by God’s design, it should raise questions: Where is God in all this? What is the church’s responsibility to young people during the formative years of their lives? If adolescence is a God-thing, in what ways should the reality of that experience shape and influence youth ministry engagement? Such questions should be asked not only by youth leaders but also by all who are concerned about transformative urban youth development.

Not a Time to Hinder

In Mark 10, Jesus responds to an episode involving children with an important lesson on discipleship. This brief story deserves careful scrutiny:

People were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them (vv. 13-16).

In Jesus’ day, it was a common practice for parents to bring their children to great leaders to be blessed by them. Why the disciples rebuked the parents is unclear; perhaps they discerned that Jesus was weary, or felt that He should be spared the bother of children. The teaching that emerged from the encounter was clear: To enter the Kingdom, one must receive “like a little child”—that is, as a child receives, with receptivity and dependence. These qualities are necessary for discipleship.

But is that the sole takeaway from this passage? Are we merely to learn that adults need to be receptive, like children? Or was there more to what Jesus was saying?

Mark’s Gospel reveals a heightened sensitivity to Jesus’ humanity. His is the only account that describes Jesus’ emotions so vividly. Jesus, Mark recounts, was indignant over the disciples’ choice to turn away children. Being indignant is “feeling or showing anger because of something unjust or unworthy.”² This is significant. To Jesus, the disciples were not committing a simple error. They were attempting to do something unjust. Their actions evoked righteous anger!

What made Him so angry? It’s hard to imagine that Jesus was angry because an object lesson was being thwarted. A much more reasonable interpretation is that there was something terribly wrong with impeding children’s access to Him.

Jesus’ righteous anger led Him to issue two commands—or rather, one command reinforced by its negative counterpart. The first was: “Permit!” To permit is to let in or allow access. Adults must allow children access to Jesus. He then reinforced this positive instruction with a negative: “Do not hinder!” Under no circumstances should children be hindered, impeded or obstructed from coming to Jesus.

To treat this as an admonition for parents to bring children to be blessed by Jesus, as if it were simply a call for baby dedications, misses the bigger picture. Absent Jesus’ intervention, the disciples could have easily diverted the children away from Him. The parents could have kept them away in the first place. Children may be receptive, but adults control access. When the disciples hindered the access of children to Jesus, it became an abuse of power. Jesus sized it up immediately and cried, “Unjust!”

Fast forward to today. Now, as then, adults set the agenda for youth ministry. We hold the power. Adults—pastors, youth leaders, ministry directors, parents—exercise a great amount of control over if, when and how children have access to Jesus.

What would Jesus say about how we use this power?

• Would Jesus view the assumptions that guide most youth ministries as honest, well-intended mistakes? Or would they make Him angry?
• What would unhindered access to Jesus look like? Would it consist of more than a “Bless you!” and a hug? Would there be opportunity for, as Francis Schaeffer described it, honest answers to honest questions? Would attention be given to guidance? Would access involve a process of discovering who God really is, and who young people are in relation to Him? And what about leaders? Would there be greater transparency in leadership? Greater openness? Would leaders be committed to living lives worth imitating (see 1 Corinthians 11:1)?
• Finally, how important is this? Could the absence of a transformative ministry presence be a contributing factor in the growing youth violence in our cities? Is this hindering of young people’s access to all Jesus has to offer them important enough to evoke anger? Is youth ministry a justice issue? I believe it is.

Youth are our future. Yet we do not seem to know what to do with them.

It was Einstein who said, “You cannot solve problems with the same level of thinking you used when you created them.”

No single youth leader (or church or denomination or para-church ministry) can be blamed for the growing unrest among urban youth today. A quick review of the state of societies around the globe provides plenty of directions in which blame can be cast.

But when it comes to responsibility—being able, compelled and obligated to respond—Jesus says that’s on us, the people of God. The time has come to weave what I call transformational discipleship into the fabric of urban youth ministry.

Time to Reconnect

Winston Churchill once said, “Criticism is easy. Achievement is more difficult.”

Moving urban ministry past lament and excuses to genuine achievement requires stepping away from the complexities of ministry in the urban jungle, just for a moment, to take a fresh look at the fundamental youth ministry task.

1. First, we must do something that may seem elementary but is extremely important: We must rethink the purpose of youth ministry. With humility, we must look again at the basic questions: Who are these enigmatic young people? What are their felt needs? What is the church’s responsibility to children and youth during these formative years of life?
2. Then we must revisit our theology. What is the mission of the church? What does it mean to be created in the image of God? How do these and other theological truths, such as those embedded in the Great Command and Great Commission, impact youth ministry? What did Jesus mean when He said, “Permit the children to come to me”? What does it mean to “be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2)?
3. Finally, we must engage in the hard but necessary work of pressing purpose and theology into clear plans of action. Form must follow function. Youth leaders are leaders, and the first task of leadership is to define reality. This means designing a ministry structure and process that reflect (with integrity and cohesion) core beliefs and objectives.
   

Time for New Ideas

I believe youth ministries are called and (thanks to the presence of local churches) strategically positioned to make an impact on youth development in the city centers of our world. I believe such influence is critical to stemming the growing tide of dysfunction and unrest within the modern-day youth population. But this will require significant changes in the way youth ministry is currently perceived, as well as substantive adjustments to how youth ministry is carried out. It is time for an infusion of new ideas. Some such ideas are captured in the phrase “transformational discipleship.”

• Transformational discipleship is the outgrowth of a theological construct. I have spent my ministry life pursuing the question, How can the church animate (bring to life) leadership capacity among youth native to high-risk communities? To answer this question, I have found myself examining truths related to mission, growing up urban, the image of God, and leadership. Then I connected the dots (“If A, B, C, and D, then what?”) and pressed them into a philosophy and strategic approach.
• Transformational discipleship speaks to the essence of youth ministry, not youth ministry as a whole. There are many wonderfully creative ministries serving the needs of urban youth. Transformational discipleship does not diminish the need for specialized programs, such as sports, music, art, literacy, drama, advocacy, dance, and others. Specialized ministries of all kinds are important and sorely needed.
• The purpose of transformational discipleship is not to replace such ministries, but to enrich them by placing transforming young minds and growing through leading at the center of urban ministry activity.

The primary objective of this book is to unpack this ministry concept. The first section presents the need for such an approach, the history behind its development, and a working definition. The second section establishes a foundational paradigm that is theological (the biblical premises behind the concept) and ethnographical (the social, cultural and economic context in which youth ministry is carried out). The final section addresses how to build a transformational discipleship ministry culture and infuse the concept into new and existing youth ministry programs.

Notes

1. 1. Kari Lydersen and Carlos Javier Ortiz, “Chicago Reporter: More young people are killed in Chicago than any other American City” (Chicago, IL: The Black Star Project, January 31, 2012).
2. 2. “Indignant” at www.merriam-webster.com, accessed July 2015.

Questions for Thought

1. In what ways are youth at risk in your neighborhood (or another community God has given you a heart for)? In what ways does the environment make them vulnerable to abuse, neglect and delinquency?
2. What are some of the assumptions upon which you have built, or plan to build, your youth ministry? How solid are those assumptions?
3. Which characterizes your ministry more, evangelism or loving God and neighbor? How might making loving neighbor the context in which the good news of the gospel is shared change your ministry?
4.  In what ways does your ministry permit youth to come to Jesus? Are there ways in which your ministry may be hin- dering youth from coming to Jesus?