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Youth Ministry and Narrative Intelligence
- By Chris Folmsbee
- Published 03/1/2009
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Chris Folmsbee
Chris Folmsbee is president of Sonlife, a youth ministry training organization. He is the author of A New Kind of Youth Ministry and an upcoming book for students called Clear: Bringing God’s Truths into Focus. He’s also an advisory board member for The Journal of Student Ministries.
Youth Ministry and Narrative Intelligence
I am hearing a wonderful amount of chatter around ’story’ and the art of storytelling in youth ministry. What I am thinking more about these days, however, isn’t our ability to craft good stories and tell them well. What I have been absorbed by lately is what is commonly referred to by some as narrative intelligence, which is the ability and capacity to think in story.
Thinking in story is critical for a meaningful connection between a person’s story, the story of a particular community and God’s story. So the question lingering in my mind and heart is, how do we help our students raise their narrative intelligence? In other words, how do we help the students in our faith communities engage more deeply in the enduring, unfolding narrative of God?
Tantamount to the mission of God, is the narrative of God, for it is out of God’s narrative that mission is first and most deeply understood and acted out. It is out of mission that we might interact with our worlds — not just with logic, reason and information but also with meaning. The ability to think in story furnishes our students’ lives with the ability to generate context and meaning from the stories of Scripture, their experience, reason, culture, etc. How do we help our students generate context and meaning from the mission of God to help them live more closely aligned to the intended ways of God?
The more I think about it, the only way we can truly renovate our commitment to being missional in and to our communities is to go back to the source, God’s narrative, to find our purpose for youth ministry. That purpose (derived from our mission which is derived from God’s narrative) of youth ministry is to participate in God’s restoration of the world toward its intended wholeness.
Youth ministry has to get unstuck and work its way toward extending the missio Dei through a creed of: evangelism (where the message of the mission is proclaimed and performed), contextualization (where the message of the mission is made more accessible culturally sensitive) liberation (where the message of the mission sets students free from the hesitations and hindrances that keep them from their belief in a loving God) and impartation (where the message of the mission is about the converting of culture from hearers of the story to storytellers).
I’m certain that youth ministry (through mission yielded people like you and me and a globe full of others) can make its way toward a place as described above, but how? In what ways might we more deeply commit to a narrative-missional approach to youth ministry? What is it going to take to realize this commitment? What is keeping youth ministry from this commitment? Why is it so much easier to be committed to attractional, social or externally focused approaches?
Thinking in story is critical for a meaningful connection between a person’s story, the story of a particular community and God’s story. So the question lingering in my mind and heart is, how do we help our students raise their narrative intelligence? In other words, how do we help the students in our faith communities engage more deeply in the enduring, unfolding narrative of God?
Tantamount to the mission of God, is the narrative of God, for it is out of God’s narrative that mission is first and most deeply understood and acted out. It is out of mission that we might interact with our worlds — not just with logic, reason and information but also with meaning. The ability to think in story furnishes our students’ lives with the ability to generate context and meaning from the stories of Scripture, their experience, reason, culture, etc. How do we help our students generate context and meaning from the mission of God to help them live more closely aligned to the intended ways of God?
The more I think about it, the only way we can truly renovate our commitment to being missional in and to our communities is to go back to the source, God’s narrative, to find our purpose for youth ministry. That purpose (derived from our mission which is derived from God’s narrative) of youth ministry is to participate in God’s restoration of the world toward its intended wholeness.
Youth ministry has to get unstuck and work its way toward extending the missio Dei through a creed of: evangelism (where the message of the mission is proclaimed and performed), contextualization (where the message of the mission is made more accessible culturally sensitive) liberation (where the message of the mission sets students free from the hesitations and hindrances that keep them from their belief in a loving God) and impartation (where the message of the mission is about the converting of culture from hearers of the story to storytellers).
I’m certain that youth ministry (through mission yielded people like you and me and a globe full of others) can make its way toward a place as described above, but how? In what ways might we more deeply commit to a narrative-missional approach to youth ministry? What is it going to take to realize this commitment? What is keeping youth ministry from this commitment? Why is it so much easier to be committed to attractional, social or externally focused approaches?
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Comments
Comment #1 (Posted by RJS)
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You said: Largely, I think this comes from a lack of context and meaning for who Jesus is. I wonder if it isn't the limited view of the gospel that students are taught that keep them from embracing a much more robust gospel -- a full narrative gospel that allows them to be a disciple that participates in God's mission to restore the world to its intended wholeness.
I think that you are dead on here - a limited, somewhat superficial (sometimes) view of the gospel plus a social club doesn't effectively build disciples. Part of my point was that youth ministry is important, it isn't something that "just happens" and it isn't something that "anyone" can do without mentoring and planning. To be done well it has to be done with intent - and the first step is defining the purpose, because every aspect should then work together to forward that goal so much as possible.
Comment #2 (Posted by Sue Van Stelle)
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I've been reading this and the former post w/ great interest, and only now have gotten the chance to respond. I'd like to throw something in the mix which considers this from a different angle:
How do we raise "narrative intelligence"? I come at this question from the perspective of a former English teacher who is sometimes frustrated by how little the youth in my youth group are able to engage with ANY story. My experience has been that the skills youth need to hear/read a story and process it in such a way that it connects to their own story, not to mention that they then act out of the story, are skills that don't get high teaching priority in their classrooms. Can anyone name a standardized test which measures narrative intelligence? Do scholarships get offered for that? Sometimes I wonder if it is time to go back to doing what Sunday school was originally invented to do: teach children to read.
But I wonder why we are asking about raising youth's narrative intelligence without also asking about raising the adults' narrative intelligence. On an average Sunday, is the sermon formatted according to narrative intelligence? Are small group studies? Bible classes? Where does it happen at all? (Perhaps my church is the only one represented where this does not happen; if so then I must repent of jealousy.)
What keeps youth ministry from committing to this? Perhaps no one else is doing it either! You expect the youth pastor/director/leader to pull this off alone?
Two sentences haunt me from Christian Smith's study back in 2005 (or 2006) called Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of America's Teenagers.
The first is: "They will become what you are." This pertains most strongly to parents, but also to congregations. The more highly committed to faith the parents are, the more likely it is that their teens will be as well. For kids that don't have committed parents, the next best bet is connecting them with at least five adults who are walking out a mature faith. (The five adults statistic comes from something from Fuller Youth Institute, but I don't have it with me right now.)
The second haunting sentence is: "You get back what you invest, and normally not a lot more." This applies to congregations. Again, my experience may be an anomaly, but where do the youth fall in the congregation's priority list? What percentage of the congregation's financial, time, people, and strategy resources go to youth ministry? In my experience, the youth program is often the first thing to get cut. Another observation is that once a congregation hires youth staff, it acts as though its responsibility to youth is completely fulfilled.
If we are going to have narrative intelligence, we need to have time with kids to teach them in depth, and we need support from parents and a congregation who EXPECT the youth to have narrative intelligence. We are also going to need an entire congregation with narrative intelligence, acting it out in a tangible way and able to articulate why it acts in such a manner.
I'd be willing to bet my mini-van that if you immerse a child in a community like that, your investment will go out and change the world.
