The church of TODAY: rethinking youth ministry
This article appears in Vocations magazine (pictured at right), Spring 2022. Read this article in the magazine online or download the PDF. To subscribe, click here.
Eser Kim is a doctoral student in religious education at Knox College and a youth worker with Vaughn Community Church (Thornhill, Ont.). Her research focuses on the role that youth and adolescents have in our church and society – particularly that they should be considered full participants in our faith communities now, not just once they become adults. Vocations interviewed Eser to learn more.
“So how should we as Christians understand this pandemic?” I opened a conversation with our youth. It was March 2020, and the virus was just beginning to significantly affect our lives. I had wanted the youth to rethink the narrative that God was allowing this pandemic. But I was about to, yet again, be surprised and impressed by an adolescent’s perspective.
“Humans tend to blame God for what they’ve done – like this pandemic,” answered one of the Grade 8 girls. “But the pandemic is an opportunity for us to stop and really pay attention to the injustice around us, like what we know about now through the Black Lives Matter movement. The pandemic is a real bummer. But maybe God is not allowing this pain as much as allowing us to see the pain that was already prevalent around us – and we were too busy with our own lives to acknowledge it before.”
What spurred you to research this topic?
My interest in youth started with my own adolescent experience. My parents were both theologians, and we could have real debates about hard theological questions. I remember asking my parents, “Does God exist? If so, why the Christian God?” Having access to those conversations really helped me through my own adolescence. But we didn’t get answers to those hard questions in church. So I wondered, What about all the other people who don’t have these parents? Where do they flesh out those questions?
When I began my graduate studies, initially I was interested in adolescent suffering and flourishing; I then shifted to social justice issues and how faith formation happens when adolescents are participating in meaningful ministries. But the foundation for all of those studies is acknowledging youth as agents. So I decided to begin with who youth are, how we’ve been misunderstanding youth, and how we should understand them.
I focused specifically on Korean-Canadian adolescents because they’re in a particularly liminal, hybrid space – between cultures and between ages, with some independence but also partially marginalized. I’ve only lived in Canada for four years, but the “between-ness” of this group really connected with me. I was born in Germany to Korean parents and moved around a lot – to Korea, the United States, back to Germany, and so on. I believe that theology is autobiographical, starts with your own experience. And cultural hybridity runs deep for me.
How would you encourage us to understand youth and youth ministry, and why?
We often talk about youth as being the church for the next generation, the church of tomorrow. We as adults design church programs for youth – fun games, adult-directed Bible studies. We think of youth as “consumers” of religion rather than as people who are capable of being full actors, able to lead and create. Youth ministry needs to be more than just games and pizza. The youth are important not only for the future, but also in our current church and world. They’re not just the next generation, they’re living in the present.
The youth are also theologians. For example, at our Friday night youth Bible studies, we decided to tackle some really hard theological questions: Does God hate women? If God is good, what about sin and suffering? Each week I prepared information about the various sides of those questions to share, but after the Bible study I always realized that I had learned so much from the youth as well.
I’ve been educated and trained as a theologian, but their perspective is very different. So many times I’ve come away thinking, I never thought of it that way! They apply these questions and their thoughts to their lives, school life, and friendships. That’s a constant reminder for me that they are living real lives now, having real struggles, and thinking about their faith pretty seriously. We can all benefit from their unique perspectives.
Sometimes it’s hard to stay objective during a student leadership meeting. I want to “help” or tell youth that something won’t work because I’ve already tried it, etc. At times having more life experience comes in handy, but that also can hold the youth group back from innovating. What they need is someone who walks with them in their faith journey no matter how messy it gets – not someone who helps them or tells them what to do. “Efficiency” isn’t necessarily a value that goes with Christianity.
Taking youth seriously, and allowing them the same freedom to experiment that adults have, serves the church far better long-term.
Youth can also help churches to take action. Their generation is interested in social justice movements. But a lot of churches are hiding behind the idea of a “personal Jesus” instead of going out and making changes; we’re too comfortable within the church building instead of reaching out. Adolescents, however, aren’t afraid of going out beyond those church walls, and they’re not afraid to make changes. That helps the whole congregation to move forward.
How can we shift our approach to youth?
To begin, we can make changes in our own churches and reframe our understanding of youth ministry. Let’s think about how this can really be the youth’s ministry. In my church, we’ve stopped calling our youth the next generation, and we’ve started to emphasize the members of the church of today, including our high school Christians.
We’ve given a lot of freedom and power to our youth instead of having the pastor/teacher run the program. Our youth leadership mostly plans everything, and they’ll come to us youth leaders with their plans and ideas. We’ll talk about pros and cons and move forward together.
Youth ministry that is inviting youth as agents and as theologians is very different than the youth ministry that is prevalent in churches, which is ministry for them and to them. I’m aiming for ministry along with and done by youth.
Beyond reclaiming their own agency, empowering adolescents also makes us all more aware of the power dynamics that exist in ministry and the ways we’ve been conducting ministry. Changes like this can begin within the youth ministry specifically, but the whole congregation has to be involved to make structural, systemic change that cultivates youth empowerment. Church is usually adult-centric, with the adults as the decision-making body in power. My goal would be to have a more mixed and integrated approach with the youth having a say in decision-making.
Rethinking ministry can challenge the congregation, but it reminds us of mutuality and interdependency, which benefit the whole congregation. When adults and youth minister with each other, learning happens both ways. We are all part of God’s kingdom, now and here, not just once we reach a certain age.
This article appears in Vocations magazine, Spring 2022. Read this article in the magazine online or download the PDF. To subscribe, click here.