Co-Souled

A Blog about Christian Community from a Youth Ministry Enthusiast

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for Minnesota Without Poverty

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Trusting the Internet

As I was preparing a topic for this week’s blog post, I had originally thought that I would write about the importance of forgiveness and human dignity in the face of current events, specifically Osama bin Laden’s death and the resulting explosion of online response. 

A few nights ago, I was looking up online articles and theological commentary that might help me get started, and my wife read me this Martin Luther King Jr. quote from someone’s Facebook page:

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy."

  When I sat down to write this blog, however, I began by searching the web for the context of this terrific quote, and I was surprised to find that it was actually not from MLK Jr. at all.  If you don’t know about it already, read more here:

http://www.salon.com/technology/twitter/?story=/ent/tv/feature/2011/05/03/fake_mlj_quote_osama_death

Of course, there are plenty of people online who are, by now, aware of the widespread confusion caused by this mix up.  Hundreds of people, including my wife, quickly fell into the trap of believing a piece of information without verifying where it actually came from. 

In this blog about youth ministry and community, I need to acknowledge that youth gain a greater sense of connectedness to the outside world from the internet than perhaps any other form of media.  This poll (to be taken with a grain of salt) helps indicate where this generation gets some of the most important information:

http://mashable.com/2011/05/02/osama-bin-laden-death/

If so many people, including youth, are turning to the internet for information, ideas, perspectives on important issues, and if this recent MLK Jr. “quote” is an indicator of how difficult it can be to sort through true and false information, how can we better engage the internet as a way to keep youth connected to the wider world?

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"But I Suck at Praying"

Wednesday night confirmation at my congregation is anything but silent.  I’m not sure whether to credit this to the sheer number of kids (around 80 on any given night), the wide open space we meet in, the über-mellow disposition of the youth director, or simply the nature of adolescents, but whenever we gather as a large group, the side-chatter is absolutely incessant.  Truly, there is only one sentence that can bring this group of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders to a dead quiet: “Who wants to close us in prayer?”

I am confident that my confirmands are not totally unique in this way; that many congregations are noticing that their middle- and high-school students are, for a variety of different reasons, reluctant (even terrified) to participate in prayer. I propose that the idea of prayer—which is an integral part of the church’s mission—is not being presented to teens in the best possible way and that the church’s mission regarding prayer and youth ministry needs to be thoughtfully reconsidered.  

In a broad sense, we might say that the church’s twofold mission—which parallels the Greatest Commandment—is to intimately connect people to one another and to intimately connect people to God.  Prayer seems to hold a remarkably similar theological significance.  When we fully love God, we desire relationship with God through prayer.  When we fully love our neighbor, we desire to pray alongside them and on their behalf.  The practice of prayer, then—specifically communal prayer—is intrinsic to the mission of the global church.  

Despite how much we emphasize the importance of prayer to youth, it remains a socially and even spiritually intimidating thing for them to practice.  Prayer language is not the language of their hearts or everyday lives.  Too often, they feel too unholy to lead others and too uneducated to speak rightly (like Moses or Peter feel when they are called).   I've heard so many adolescents say, "I suck at prayer."  It’s no wonder we face the dead quiet and sea of averted eyes when we ask for adolescent prayer volunteers.  

Of course, we teach our youth that God doesn’t care how we pray as long as we pray from the heart.  Yet we cannot tell our youth that God unconditionally accepts all prayers while we simultaneously, continually convey the opposite idea with our own elevated prayer language.  Their experience with prayer cannot allow them to let go of the idea that there is a right and a wrong (or at least a better and a worse) way to pray; that we are just being untruthfully polite when we say otherwise. 

Although I see prayer language as perhaps the most major hurdle in helping teens feel comfortable with praying as a community, it would be fairly impractical to assume that we could (or should) uproot centuries of prayer tradition in order to make prayer language more non-threatening to young believers.  I can’t ask that we kill traditional prayer language altogether.  So, perhaps the first step to helping our youth see prayer as a comfort rather than a stressor is to provide them with less threatening opportunities to participate in prayer so that they might, on their own terms, find a comfortable balance between the language of the church and the language of their hearts.

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Anonymity, Authenticity, and Youth Ministry

Almost all of the middle- and high-school students in my congregation use Facebook and other social network sites on a daily basis.  When asked, the youth in my congregation will tell you that they use Facebook so that they might ultimately form deeper relationships with their friends and acquaintances using different tools provided by Facebook’s multifaceted interface.

There is another social networking site that we have not talked about in this class; one that seems to be rapidly gaining popularity among the middle school girls in my youth group.  The site is called Formspring.  Subscribers go to a fellow-user's profile page, type a question for a statement about the person, and this person posts a response.  All questions and responses are displayed publicly (unless the user deletes them) and the questioners are kept totally anonymous (unless they choose to reveal their identity, which seems uncommon).  

At the heart of this adolescent attraction to social networking sites, I think, is the deeper issue of forming identity.  Adolescents are in many ways individuals who have not yet fully developed a sense of their social and spiritual identities.  We become adults, essentially, when we can begin grasp who we are as individuals—what are the things I value most, what comprises my character, how do others see me, what makes me unique and valuable? During adolescence, these young people live in a constant state of self-discernment and re-evaluation, often based primarily on what kind of relationships they have with others.  Social networking sites like Facebook or Myspace can be a healthy source of support in identity formation.  

Much like the online Pro-Anna forums that Clay Shirky talks about in "Here Comes Everybody," Formspring is often used in a way that brings adolescents together and helps shape identity, but in ways that can quickly turn poisonous.  The inherent anonymity of the posts on Formspring, which makes it stand out from other social networking sites and adds to its appeal, makes it a relatively consequence-free environment for cyber harassment and bullying  (check out http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/03/30/27formspring.h30.html?tkn=PXXFQ5whEGj4i8FA7SrnWN8Ac3k6TqeldRdo&cmp=clp-edweek for more on this point).    

It would be easy to blame cyber bullying and and other adolescent problems relating to identity and self-worth on sites like Formspring and demand that they be shut down.  The observation I would rather make is that Formspring, despite the many ways it is often misused, offers its users a higher level of authenticity in relationships, which is obviously something its thousands of adolescent users desperately crave.  By creating and maintaining Formspring accounts, all adolescent users are taking an enormous social risk, thereby indirectly expressing the same desire for a much greater level of honesty and authenticity in their relationships.  The anonymity that characterizes Formspring allows users to step outside social expectations (like courtesy) in order to express their truest opinions about others.  Although we as ministry workers might find much more positive and supportive ways to do so, we might be able to glean something from the bold authenticity of Formspring and its users.  Rather than only taking on the role of a careful ministry worker that supports youth out of professional obligation, I hope that our ministry might be authentic--sometimes messy--enough that when we proclaim a message of love and acceptance (both God’s and our own), youth take that message seriously.  

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Whose Ministry Are We Talking About Here?

At my congregation's most recent annual meeting, I couldn’t help but notice the way that our ministries were categorized.  Since the primary focus of the meeting was reviewing the stewardship practices of our financial resources, every past and projected expense was grouped according to which staff member, committee, or council was responsible for it.  On some level, it made sense.  It was Excel spreadsheet about our budget, and it was maybe the most reader-friendly format.

  But on another level I was slightly bothered by this detail.  I was bothered in that these labels sneaked into our conversation: the outreach team requires this much for an upcoming event, our youth pastor can’t do her ministry without these resources, and so on. 

  Whose ministry are we talking about here? 

  To take on this question, I must begin by recognizing all ministry is first and foremost God’s ministry, and is the act of God making Godself from one human person to another.  At best, we as ministers are simply those given the opportunity to participate in the action of God.  But my second conviction, the one that seemed to float past my congregation as they were talking about budget, is that all believers are called into ministry. 

  It’s not the pastor’s ministry.  It’s not my ministry.  It’s ours.  Everyone’s.

  Henry Jenkins has an article,“Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,” that raises similar questions about co-creating environments. Although he is, in most ways, speaking within the framework of secular education and media, the criteria that Jenkins describes regarding what he calls a “participatory culture” might in some ways be applied to a ministry setting.  These are communities:

  1.With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement

2.With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others

3.With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices

4.Where members believe that their contributions matter

5.Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).

  Although this maybe isn’t an absolutely perfect model of what church ought to be, I wondered what it would look like if the average church-goer (perhaps especially the average youth group member) viewed their congregations in such a participatory way; if they demonstrated the confidence to claim the space and ministry as truly their own.  

  Better yet, what if we as leaders somehow equipped them to think this way?

  I realize that this is not a brand new idea, that all believers are called to take part in God’s ministry in their own unique way.  And I will admit that, despite my frustrations about the annual meeting, most of our members would agree that they all have an important role to play in participating in the action of God if we asked them point blank.  And in some ways, we can give this idea lip service.  We can say that we are already there. But are we as a church living into the freedom to participate that Jenkins describes?  Jenkins makes a strong case for the extremely high percentage of youth using the internets as a space to shape creative communities.  As far as I can tell, most churches don’t even come close to providing a space that makes youth and adults feel that comfortable, empowered, or free to think that far outside the box.

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The Tension Between Absence and Presence

When it comes to being in relationship with one another, every living person experiences a primal tension between presence and absence. This tension begins with the assumption that at the core of human nature is the deep-seated desire to be in connection with others.  In Genesis 2, a Biblical narrative that in many was points to the most intrinsic characteristics of our shared humanity, God realizes, “It is not good that man should be alone” (vv 18).

Where this tension really gets interesting, though, is when we come to realize the challenges of being present to those we love.  Even in our closest relationships, we cannot deny that the fact that we are individual beings, meaning that we can never fully encounter another’s thoughts, emotions, ideas, or memories.

On the one hand, this might be a comfort: the things that are most internal to me and most inaccessible to others are the things that allow me to form a unique sense of self, and therefore a sense of value. 

On the other hand, this idea can be extremely disheartening. Presence, in some sense, is an illusion, especially when it comes to the limitations of written or spoken language.   No matter how we might try, we could never completely and totally convey our thought to another person as they exist within our own selves. My ideas and emotions—my intangible signifiers of “self”—can never exist within the mind of another.    Achieving true, total presence, then, is impossible. 

And yet loving another person, at least by some definition, means desiring to be totally present to that person. Yet the more we seek to be present with another, the more we encounter the reality that that is impossible.  As we grow closer in love to the people around us, our sense of absence to them grows as substantially as our sense of presence.  

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http://vimeo.com/3503794

This is a video I found on the internet to help illustrate the devastating potential of the tension between absence and presence.  The mother in this clip has recently experienced the death of her son, and keeps his clothes around for comfort.  His clothes are a very real-life, very tragic symbol of the tension between absence and presence. 

Although the clothes are painful reminders to the mother of her son’s absence and might as such be put away, she sees them as her last remaining opportunity to be tangibly present to her son’s memory.  To cling to these clothes as a symbol of presence, she knows she must cling to them also as agonizing symbols of absence, and does so willingly out of her deep love for her son.  The tension that she lives through in her grief is an intense magnification of the tension we all face between being simultaneously present and absent to those we love.  

Just to warn you, this video a pretty emotional one.  Also, it is my sincere hope that by posting this video I am honoring the emotions of the family rather than objectifying them.  Ultimately, this is a blog about ministry, and we are called to do ministry for real families (like this one) who struggle with the absence of a loved one, whether that be through death, addiction, estrangement, divorce, or other painful circumstances. 

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Quantifying Ministry?

Most ministry workers that I talk with all confront similar struggles.  We all seem to face high expectations, but don't always receive much recognition.  We put so many hours in at church that we sometimes feel the need to literally re-introduce ourselves to our families.  We encounter situations so deeply heartbreaking that they almost outweigh our moments of shared joy and celebration. 

 I think it's safe to say that ministry is not for everyone.

Our common bond as ministers, regardless of our titles or contexts, is our enduring love for God and God's people.  God has so filled us with compassion, wonder, and gratitude that we must either share it with the world around or probably explode.  It is this passion that drives us to discern and enact the type of ministry that best reflects God's perfect love.  

But there's an obvious flaw in that way of thinking: God's love is perfect, and mine isn't.   

Scott Cormode's article "Multi-Layered Leadership," discusses three different types of leadership models for ministry, weighing pros and cons and arguing which might be the most effective.  In many ways, I think our constant efforts to quantify our ministries, to assess the work we are doing in terms of "successful" versus "most successful," and to ultimately maximize spiritual growth seems backward. Throughout Scripture, God seems to call upon only the most broken human beings: Abraham, Moses, David, Peter, Paul.  Time and again, God works through the ugliest, most impossible and tragic places.  In the chaos before creation.  On a mountain called "the wasteland." At the cross.

Yet it is this obsession with success that most churches and ministry workers, including myself, easily fall into.  In our shared passion for ministry, we refuse to let ourselves do it poorly.  But in doing so, are we denying our humanity?  Are we not leaving room for the Holy Spirit?  Is my ministry getting in the way of God's ministry?