Faith shaping in the lives of an adolescent is, among other essentials, fundamentally about two key factors: Helping a young person along the path of discovering her identity, and helping her realize her calling in life.

It can be difficult, a challenge at the very least, to reprioritize our approach to youth ministry away from attractional to missional.

At the risk of oversimplification, attractional youth ministries are largely focused on getting students in the door, and missional youth ministries are largely focused on sending students out the door. While some attractional mantras might echo, “If we could just get them in the door, we could convince them of who Jesus is and their need for Jesus in their lives.” But a missional mantra might be heard stated more like, “If we could just get them out the door with the passion for being and doing God’s work and accomplishing God’s mission, we could help them convince others of their need for Jesus.”

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.

I see four primary threads of thinking regarding youth ministry these days, and I believe understanding these threads of thinking can help us better understand one another as the youth ministry conversation begins to flatten.

[For more about the “flattening” of youth ministry, see the January/February 2008 “Re-Culturing Youth Ministry” column.]

The world of youth ministry is flattening.

By flattening I mean that youth ministry is leveling out.  I’m not speaking about ways that for-profit and non-profit organizations may be changing, whether they’re old or new.

People need us—the church—to be a people formed by God’s story and mission to provide a path of escape, an exit from pain, a respite from wandering, and a shield from what assails.

There’s nothing quite like spending an hour or two meandering along the sidewalk of a city street or over a mountainside trail. Wandering has a way of lowering the anxiety level and raising our spirits.