- Home
- Article Topics
- Theological Themes
- The Fluidity of Faithfulness
The Fluidity of Faithfulness
- By Pete Ward
- Published 11/16/2007
- Theological Themes
- Unrated
How Doing What We Do Has Reinvented the Church
There’s a Christian urban myth that goes something like this: The people were really going for it in a prayer and worship time. It was one of those inspired meetings where they were spontaneously starting songs, praying prayers, and reading from the Bible.
In a particularly meaningful time of quiet someone starts to sing, “He’ll be coming ’round the mountain when he comes.” Straightaway the song is taken up by the group—they knew the tune, and it seemed to fit the moment. All appears to be well, and so they continue with the next verse, ”He’ll be riding six white horses when he comes.”
But then it all comes unstuck. Before they realize it they hit, “He’ll be wearing pink pajamas when he comes,” and suddenly they have to put the breaks on. Well...it was sort of a good idea.
There’s that talk illustration that went a bit wrong, the film clip that seemed to miss the point, and the icebreaker that got the meeting off to a bad start. The truth is, we’re kind of prone to this sort of thing in youth ministry. The reason is, we want to communicate the faith to young people, and to do that we have to do two other things: We have to make a connection, and we have to express the faith.
We’re probably not afflicted by this level of religious lunacy, but can we really say we haven’t been there at one time or another?
When it’s your job to innovate like that week in and week out, mistakes are going to happen. But on the other side of the mistakes are many more moments of real impact in the lives of teenagers. It’s important that we know exactly why and how youth ministry has helped change and shape the church—and our faith.
How It Works: Joining One Thing to Another Thing
I suspect that at one time or another most of have encouraged young people to pray as Jesus is their best friend. We might even Jesus is their best friend. It’s there worship songs we sing, such as Martin Smith’s “Jesus, Jesus, Friend Forever.” The works because it links an aspect of experience—friendship—to a theological joins one thing to another thing.
Take another example: Sport. It’s clearly part of young people’s lives, and we can kinds of useful connections by linking the culture of sport. It doesn’t take much to see that sport can help us connect faith to common experiences such as challenge, effort, health, teamwork, and participation. So it seems a natural thing for youth ministers to make the link between discipleship and sport. There are even a few handy Bible verses about running the race and so on. Sports ministry is kind of a natural move—and if you pardon the pun, a good many of us have picked up the ball and are running with it. We’re joining one thing with another thing.
Now when you join one thing to another, you end up with something new. It’s an innovation. An ancient truth expressed in a new way. So linking Jesus to friendship or discipleship to sport is a re-expression of faith. And it adds new ways of looking at old truth. Who Jesus is gets connected to how young people feel about their best friends.
This isn’t as straightforward as it may seem, however; because something that might seem timeless (e.g., friendship) actually changes as society, culture, and individuals change. What it means to be a best friend is shaped by the shifting nature of youth culture, so what it meant to be a “best friend” in the 1950s is slightly different what it meant in the 1970s, or what it means today.
To use worship songs once again, when Joseph Scriven wrote his famous hymn, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” in the mid-19th century, he may have used the same imagery to speak of Christ as Martin Smith did more than a century later, but what each means by “friend” is slightly different. For Scriven, Jesus is a gracious person, someone to whom you can bring your troubles and in whom you can confide. In Martin Smith’s lyric, friendship feels more personal and connects Jesus with ideas of intimacy, relationship, and family.
How we see friendship has subtly changed over time and those aspects of friendship we pick up on to speak about our relationship to Jesus have also changed. I suspect that Martin Smith’s song would have been viewed as highly inappropriate in Scriven’s day.
Doing New Stuff: How the Church Reinvents Itself
In recent years, youth ministry has been one of the main catalysts for change in the church—the conduit through which it reinvents itself—because youth workers are always doing new stuff. Back in the 1940s and ’50s, Youth for Christ thought of itself as “Anchored to the Rock and Geared to the Times.” Being geared to the times committed the organization to finding new ways to connect to young people.
They set about this through huge, spectacular rallies held not in church but in large, prestigious, secular venues such as Soldier Field in Chicago. To promote the event, a whole range of media and advertising was utilized. At the meetings huge choirs would perform, athletes would take part in world-record attempts, and of course, there was the star attraction—the young evangelist Billy Graham. Graham was not only youthful in his preaching, connecting the gospel to the events of the day, but also he was media savvy and very much in tune with the events of the day.
Youth for Christ and Billy Graham didn’t invent what they did from scratch; they developed it from a variety of sources. However, what they eventually created was new. Within a few years what started in youth ministry was picked up by a large number of churches and church leaders. Graham and YFC influenced a generation of preachers and launched a million evangelistic ventures.
And youth ministry hasn’t simply influenced styles of evangelism. It’s shaped the music we use in church, showed the church new ways to work for social justice, and pioneered relational styles of ministry. The influence of youth ministry is even present in styles of small group work, ways of doing creative Bible study, and even in Bible translation. What starts in youth ministry ends up shaping the rest of the church. This pattern continues today.
Take the mega-church movement. Its roots are in youth ministry and the Jesus movement of the ’60s and ’70s. Chuck Smith and Bill Hybels started off working with young people. Their distinctive ministry expressions carried through to the formation of their churches. Today the style of music in church springs from the shift toward more worship in youth ministry a while back. Even the Emerging Church thing has its feet firmly planted in the way that youth ministers have worked with young people.
Little Moves Create the Flow
But this isn’t a tale of big-name Christian leaders influencing the church; it’s a tale that keeps getting written—by you. Individual youth leaders in local churches trying to connect with young people and express the faith. So, every time we’re creative and use an illustration in a talk, every time we look for a new way to work interactively to get young people to discuss an issue, every time we come up with a great idea for outreach or develop a new style of relational ministry, we’re slowly but surely changing the face of the church.
A really good example of this has been the explosion in the use of film clips, moving images in worship, and visual aids to prayer. Back in the time of Billy Graham, the visual culture of evangelicalism was practically nonexistent. Now we’re all learning how to interpret movies for illustrative purposes. It’s a quantum leap culturally toward a visual theology. Sure, there are experts in the field, but basically we’re working out how a visual theology should and should not work by our own daily practices.
Developing a visual sensitivity and theology is entirely new ground, but we are charting this territory by millions of small innovations. Youth ministers are very much in the vanguard of this new area. There are products out there to resource what we are doing, and groups like Youth Specialties help to spread the new ways of working—but at its heart are individual practitioners making daily decisions about what will connect and what will express. Each one of us is part of the fl ow of innovation. Our little decisions are slowly but surely changing what it means to be Christian and to be the church.
The implications of this are significant. Basically what it means is that faith—as it is lived and expressed—is a shifting, moving, living thing. As we do new stuff and innovate, we’re part of the ongoing life of God. The Holy Spirit moves like the wind
Being Faithful Is a Moving Target
Connecting has its limits, however, and it’s quite possible to get things wrong. It’s not just that we’re always in danger of selling out to culture or watering down the faith; the problem for youth ministry is that faithfulness is not a static concept. If we’re connecting with a shifting youth culture, then staying faithful is a more fluid idea than YFC’s old adage “staying anchored to the rock” might imply. Faithfulness is a tricky business because we are constantly charting new ground.
The way that we make new stuff by joining one thing to another has its perils, too.
Let’s go back to the example of sport. When we re-express faith by linking it with the culture of sport, we can import into church life some of the more problematic aspects of the sporting mindset (e.g., competition, hero worship of athletes, and the overwhelming influence of financial and commercial interests). These aspects of sport can produce tensions and areas of contradiction if ours are sports-oriented ministries. Athletic achievement is kind of like Christian discipleship, but it is also kind of not like it. Being a disciple may not be about success or being the best or
getting the prize. Faith needs to find a place for the grace of God, the way of the cross, and a spirituality based on humility.
While sport may lead us to value strength, faith may want us also to embrace weakness. When sport may applaud the winner, Christian faithfulness might mean that we are almost certainly seen by some as losers. Still, there’s no reason why a Christian expression of youth ministry through sport cannot stay faithful and on course to express theological truths.
And as with the metaphors of friendship or sport, our own innovations also have complicated downsides. Because culture is a moving target—get connected and you end up moving with it. Therefore being faithful is a moving target as well. So when we start off singing, “He’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain” and the Spirit is moving us, always keep in mind that a pink pajama verse is ready to jump in.
In a particularly meaningful time of quiet someone starts to sing, “He’ll be coming ’round the mountain when he comes.” Straightaway the song is taken up by the group—they knew the tune, and it seemed to fit the moment. All appears to be well, and so they continue with the next verse, ”He’ll be riding six white horses when he comes.”
But then it all comes unstuck. Before they realize it they hit, “He’ll be wearing pink pajamas when he comes,” and suddenly they have to put the breaks on. Well...it was sort of a good idea.
There’s that talk illustration that went a bit wrong, the film clip that seemed to miss the point, and the icebreaker that got the meeting off to a bad start. The truth is, we’re kind of prone to this sort of thing in youth ministry. The reason is, we want to communicate the faith to young people, and to do that we have to do two other things: We have to make a connection, and we have to express the faith.
We’re probably not afflicted by this level of religious lunacy, but can we really say we haven’t been there at one time or another?
When it’s your job to innovate like that week in and week out, mistakes are going to happen. But on the other side of the mistakes are many more moments of real impact in the lives of teenagers. It’s important that we know exactly why and how youth ministry has helped change and shape the church—and our faith.
How It Works: Joining One Thing to Another Thing
I suspect that at one time or another most of have encouraged young people to pray as Jesus is their best friend. We might even Jesus is their best friend. It’s there worship songs we sing, such as Martin Smith’s “Jesus, Jesus, Friend Forever.” The works because it links an aspect of experience—friendship—to a theological joins one thing to another thing.
Take another example: Sport. It’s clearly part of young people’s lives, and we can kinds of useful connections by linking the culture of sport. It doesn’t take much to see that sport can help us connect faith to common experiences such as challenge, effort, health, teamwork, and participation. So it seems a natural thing for youth ministers to make the link between discipleship and sport. There are even a few handy Bible verses about running the race and so on. Sports ministry is kind of a natural move—and if you pardon the pun, a good many of us have picked up the ball and are running with it. We’re joining one thing with another thing.
Now when you join one thing to another, you end up with something new. It’s an innovation. An ancient truth expressed in a new way. So linking Jesus to friendship or discipleship to sport is a re-expression of faith. And it adds new ways of looking at old truth. Who Jesus is gets connected to how young people feel about their best friends.
This isn’t as straightforward as it may seem, however; because something that might seem timeless (e.g., friendship) actually changes as society, culture, and individuals change. What it means to be a best friend is shaped by the shifting nature of youth culture, so what it meant to be a “best friend” in the 1950s is slightly different what it meant in the 1970s, or what it means today.
To use worship songs once again, when Joseph Scriven wrote his famous hymn, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” in the mid-19th century, he may have used the same imagery to speak of Christ as Martin Smith did more than a century later, but what each means by “friend” is slightly different. For Scriven, Jesus is a gracious person, someone to whom you can bring your troubles and in whom you can confide. In Martin Smith’s lyric, friendship feels more personal and connects Jesus with ideas of intimacy, relationship, and family.
How we see friendship has subtly changed over time and those aspects of friendship we pick up on to speak about our relationship to Jesus have also changed. I suspect that Martin Smith’s song would have been viewed as highly inappropriate in Scriven’s day.
Doing New Stuff: How the Church Reinvents Itself
In recent years, youth ministry has been one of the main catalysts for change in the church—the conduit through which it reinvents itself—because youth workers are always doing new stuff. Back in the 1940s and ’50s, Youth for Christ thought of itself as “Anchored to the Rock and Geared to the Times.” Being geared to the times committed the organization to finding new ways to connect to young people.
They set about this through huge, spectacular rallies held not in church but in large, prestigious, secular venues such as Soldier Field in Chicago. To promote the event, a whole range of media and advertising was utilized. At the meetings huge choirs would perform, athletes would take part in world-record attempts, and of course, there was the star attraction—the young evangelist Billy Graham. Graham was not only youthful in his preaching, connecting the gospel to the events of the day, but also he was media savvy and very much in tune with the events of the day.
Youth for Christ and Billy Graham didn’t invent what they did from scratch; they developed it from a variety of sources. However, what they eventually created was new. Within a few years what started in youth ministry was picked up by a large number of churches and church leaders. Graham and YFC influenced a generation of preachers and launched a million evangelistic ventures.
And youth ministry hasn’t simply influenced styles of evangelism. It’s shaped the music we use in church, showed the church new ways to work for social justice, and pioneered relational styles of ministry. The influence of youth ministry is even present in styles of small group work, ways of doing creative Bible study, and even in Bible translation. What starts in youth ministry ends up shaping the rest of the church. This pattern continues today.
Take the mega-church movement. Its roots are in youth ministry and the Jesus movement of the ’60s and ’70s. Chuck Smith and Bill Hybels started off working with young people. Their distinctive ministry expressions carried through to the formation of their churches. Today the style of music in church springs from the shift toward more worship in youth ministry a while back. Even the Emerging Church thing has its feet firmly planted in the way that youth ministers have worked with young people.
Little Moves Create the Flow
But this isn’t a tale of big-name Christian leaders influencing the church; it’s a tale that keeps getting written—by you. Individual youth leaders in local churches trying to connect with young people and express the faith. So, every time we’re creative and use an illustration in a talk, every time we look for a new way to work interactively to get young people to discuss an issue, every time we come up with a great idea for outreach or develop a new style of relational ministry, we’re slowly but surely changing the face of the church.
A really good example of this has been the explosion in the use of film clips, moving images in worship, and visual aids to prayer. Back in the time of Billy Graham, the visual culture of evangelicalism was practically nonexistent. Now we’re all learning how to interpret movies for illustrative purposes. It’s a quantum leap culturally toward a visual theology. Sure, there are experts in the field, but basically we’re working out how a visual theology should and should not work by our own daily practices.
Developing a visual sensitivity and theology is entirely new ground, but we are charting this territory by millions of small innovations. Youth ministers are very much in the vanguard of this new area. There are products out there to resource what we are doing, and groups like Youth Specialties help to spread the new ways of working—but at its heart are individual practitioners making daily decisions about what will connect and what will express. Each one of us is part of the fl ow of innovation. Our little decisions are slowly but surely changing what it means to be Christian and to be the church.
The implications of this are significant. Basically what it means is that faith—as it is lived and expressed—is a shifting, moving, living thing. As we do new stuff and innovate, we’re part of the ongoing life of God. The Holy Spirit moves like the wind
Being Faithful Is a Moving Target
Connecting has its limits, however, and it’s quite possible to get things wrong. It’s not just that we’re always in danger of selling out to culture or watering down the faith; the problem for youth ministry is that faithfulness is not a static concept. If we’re connecting with a shifting youth culture, then staying faithful is a more fluid idea than YFC’s old adage “staying anchored to the rock” might imply. Faithfulness is a tricky business because we are constantly charting new ground.
The way that we make new stuff by joining one thing to another has its perils, too.
Let’s go back to the example of sport. When we re-express faith by linking it with the culture of sport, we can import into church life some of the more problematic aspects of the sporting mindset (e.g., competition, hero worship of athletes, and the overwhelming influence of financial and commercial interests). These aspects of sport can produce tensions and areas of contradiction if ours are sports-oriented ministries. Athletic achievement is kind of like Christian discipleship, but it is also kind of not like it. Being a disciple may not be about success or being the best or
getting the prize. Faith needs to find a place for the grace of God, the way of the cross, and a spirituality based on humility.
While sport may lead us to value strength, faith may want us also to embrace weakness. When sport may applaud the winner, Christian faithfulness might mean that we are almost certainly seen by some as losers. Still, there’s no reason why a Christian expression of youth ministry through sport cannot stay faithful and on course to express theological truths.
And as with the metaphors of friendship or sport, our own innovations also have complicated downsides. Because culture is a moving target—get connected and you end up moving with it. Therefore being faithful is a moving target as well. So when we start off singing, “He’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain” and the Spirit is moving us, always keep in mind that a pink pajama verse is ready to jump in.
