Thoughts

“Let no one disregard you because you are young, but be an example to all the believers in the way you speak and behave, and in your love, your faith and your purity.” (1 Timothy 4:12)

1. Why a ‘Youth Ministry’?

“If we are violent, where [do] we learn it?”[1]

“‘How can we motivate our young people to embrace Orthodoxy and carry it into their adult lives?’ The question is a valid one, but I fear that those who pose it are often not being honest with themselves. Children rarely go off in odd directions without taking some clues from those around them, especially their parents. Children follow and learn from our example, whether that example happens to be good or bad. We form them into what they become by how we live our lives. Sometimes they rebel against what they have learned, but even that rebellion is shaped by the very attitudes against which they choose to rebel.”[2]

In order to understand ‘youth ministry’ theologically, we must understand why there is a need for such a thing as ‘youth ministry’, a concept which seems to have no precedent either in Scripture or in Tradition. The very concept of ‘adolescence’ really only arose a little over a century ago[3], followed by the evolution of the structure of society to a more age-based system, the emergence of an adolescent sub-culture in the 1950s, youth ministries beginning in the latter part of the last century, and finally we have arrived at a point where the youth sub-culture has become in many ways the defining culture of modern western society, even to the extent that in this society, many seem to go to great lengths to avoid adulthood, responsibility and commitment.[4]

If we need a ‘youth ministry’ then, is it perhaps a result of our own failure as adults? Is the very concept of ‘youth ministry’ an attempt, completely in tune with the zeitgeist, to create a system to do something we have failed to do relationally? Is it another attempt to pass off on to others something we as parents have the responsibility to do ourselves? If ‘we form them into what they become by how we live our lives’, then who is most in need of ‘ministry’ – youth or adults? I believe that all these tough questions need to be considered before it is possible to have any understanding of ‘youth ministry’ which has a chance of being thoroughly Christian, and many approaches to ‘youth ministry’ seem to owe far too much to the secular model.[5]

A major key to the scriptural and traditional model of ministering to youth seems to be the concept of mentorship, conjoined with a deep and sincere love of the one being mentored. Many scripture passages speak of the relationship between young and old, either within the family or within the community:

“Listen, my children, to a father’s instruction; pay attention, and learn what understanding is. What I am offering you is sound doctrine: do not forsake my teaching. I too was once a child with a father, in my mother’s eyes a tender child, unique. This was what he used to teach me, ‘Let your heart treasure what I have to say, keep my principles and you will live…’” (Proverbs 4:1-4)

“In the same way, younger people, be subject to the elders.” (1 Peter 5:5)

It is important also to note that traditionally and in the scriptures, the job of spiritual mentoring of the youth is primarily the responsibility of the parents:

“And fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4)

So what are we to do in a culture where so many children and youth are growing up without their fathers?[6] Clearly there is a tremendous need for alternative male guidance within the Church, but also to build up men and families in such a way as to turn back this tide. Fatherhood and mentorship may be the most significant forms of ‘youth ministry’.

If ‘youth ministry’ participates in the societal model of segregating by age, where it may unwittingly play a part in entrenching the so-called ‘generation gap’ and the ‘youth sub-culture’, then it may in fact be harmful. If, on the other hand, the purpose of ‘youth ministry’ is to bind together the community across generations, to encourage interaction between the generations, and to strengthen the family and the ‘home church’ within the family, then it will be able to serve as a positive force in the Church. After all, as C.S. Lewis says, faith is a sort of infection – something imparted by more than just words:

“Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them… They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry.”[7]

So in order to catch the infection, we need to be heavily involved with people who already have it. One youth minister, no matter how faithful, in a crowd of youth who live most of their lives entombed in a deeply secular culture (to say nothing of the ‘sub-culture’) will not be able to achieve this alone. As Fr Cownie writes:

“‘Youth Ministers’ will not be able to communicate much about Orthodox spirituality unless the kids are actually seeing this happen in the home or at least in the homes of other church members. Somebody actually has to start living Tradition in order for it to be conveyed.”[8]

2. Faith and culture

“Pure, unspoilt religion, in the eyes of God our Father, is this: coming to the help of orphans and widows in their hardships, and keeping oneself uncontaminated by the world.” (James 1:27)

A significant problem from the very earliest days of the Church was how far to interact with a surrounding non-Christian culture. If we are undertaking a mission to a youth sub-culture, how are we to go about it? Many of the most successful missionary adventures in history were undertaken by those who went to great lengths to understand and learn from the culture they were working in. St Cyril and St Methodius, Greek missionaries to the Slavs, spent much time learning the local languages, and even devising an alphabet for them so that the new Christians could worship in their own language. Later, the Russian missionaries St Nicholas of Japan and St Herman and St Innocent of Alaska all spent a considerable amount of time listening to the people they had come to serve, learning from them so that they could assess what in their respective traditions had come from God already, what would need to be transformed or ‘baptized’ into Christian use, and what would have to be rejected as incompatible with the faith.

So for those of us called to be witnesses in our own society’s youth culture, we must spend a good deal of time listening to those we wish to witness to before we are ready to begin teaching them (St Nicholas spent eight years familiarizing himself with Japanese language, culture and traditions before he felt ready to preach).

In modern western youth sub-culture, however, the problem is exacerbated, as even the sub-culture is full of sub-cultures. Some of these sub-cultures are deeply rebellious responses to what is seen as wrong with the dominant culture, and while the rebellion is understandable, the responses can be at least as bad as the culture they are critiquing – after “the optimism surrounding modernism… at the opening of the twentieth century”, the century closed with “extreme cynicism and nihilism.”[9]

For those who have followed through this “history of nihilism… we sit in ashes: an abandoned child in a wasteland of apostasy, lonely survivors of centuries of holocaust with no one to point in the direction of home, for all has been destroyed.”[10] For those who feel the meaningless of the world, who feel the hopelessness of modern culture, need to know that there is another way out but nihilism. For those that have already seen through the world, they may be close to understanding the words of Christ:

“If the world hate you, know that it hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you, but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, the world hates you.” (John 15:18-19)

3. Ascesis and theosis

“I have written to you, young people, because you are strong, and God’s word remains in you, and you have overcome the evil one. Do not love the world or what is in the world. If anyone does love the world, the love of the Father finds no place in him, because everything there is in the world – disordered bodily desires, disordered desires of the eyes, pride in possession – is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world, with all its disordered desires, is passing away. But whoever does the will of God remains for ever.” (1 John 2:14b-17)

It is important that in our attempt to seek a way in to engagement with youth and the culture or sub-culture, we do not take our lead from the world. It is too easy to seek out some more clever marketing, come up with some good slogans, try to show how God provides a service to us – why else should we choose him, when we have so many other choices? Instead we need to offer the Way[11] – the “narrow gate and… hard road” (Matthew 7:14) – a hard road that we take together, requiring commitment both to the task at hand and to the relationship – with Christ and with one another. There is no other way of winning the race but to train hard for it (cf. 1 Corinthians 9:24-27) through continuous struggle – not struggling alone but alongside Christ and with the grace of the Holy Spirit like the wind behind us: “work out your salvation in fear and trembling. It is God who… gives you the intention and the powers to act.” (Philippians 2:12-13). The goal of all this training is nothing less than “to come near to God and dwell in union with him”[12] – in other words,

“You must realize from the outset that the goal towards which [God] is beginning to guide you is absolute perfection; and no power in the whole universe, except you yourself, can prevent him from taking you to that goal… If we let him – for we can prevent him, if we choose – he will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine.”[13]

4. Spiritual fathers

“Not to rely on oneself is so necessary in our struggle, my beloved brother, that without this, be assured, not only will you fail to gain the desired victory, but you will be unable to resist the smallest attack of the enemy. Engrave this deeply in your mind and heart.”[14]

It has been held since the earliest days of Christianity that it is impossible to be a Christian on one’s own, but this is only possible within the Church. Theophan the Recluse explains clearly in Chapter 2 of Unseen Warfare why this is so, and what dangers lie in attempting to ‘go it alone’. The importance of mentoring has already been noted above, and it has also been noted that one youth minister in a group is inadequate to share the fullness of the faith and Christian life with those to whom he is ministering. They need more, and he needs accountability and responsibility. This is why in Orthodox tradition, one has a ‘spiritual father’, and this relationship will be extremely helpful to those attempting to grow in the faith, and those who take seriously their spiritual struggle. It also allows personal time for reflection on one’s own story and where God is leading through it as well as the advice of someone wiser and more mature in the faith, a key aspect of the fathering and mentoring aspect of youth ministry.

5. Lives of the Saints

“Eudokia was born in Samaria of Palestine in the 1^st century. In her youth she was very beautiful, and because of her loveliness, she lived a life of deep immorality. She was concerned only for the pleasures of this life, and loved the impurity of a loose sex life.”[15]

“In the fourth century there lived a man called Moses. Moses was of African blood, an Ethiopian to be precise, large in stature and a giant in wisdom. As a youth, Moses was one of the most feared gangsters in northern Africa. He was the leader of a gang of outlaws, and was known to have cut people’s throats.”[16]

The importance of dealing with one’s own story has already been mentioned, and is widely recognised as being an essential part of ministry. All we have done and all we have been in the past is part of what constitutes the person each of us has become. Nothing is forgotten, and though some things can be left behind, they will have taught us something for the present and the future. Even Christ’s wounds from the nails did not disappear, but were glorified in the resurrection. Telling each other our own stories can help us learn from one another, and we do this not only with those still on earth, but with all members of the communion of saints. We tell many people’s stories from the story of Joseph from the Old Testament (Genesis 37-50) to all the lives of the saints. In all of these we can see how God works in so many miraculous and varied ways in the lives of those who put their trust in him, and we can find those whose stories particularly move us, or to which we especially relate, and we can become close to those saints of the Church. We can see how we ourselves can move out of sin to repentance, and how God can work great wonders even with our very small steps of repentance, as he did for Eudokia and Moses:

“After living only a few years in the monastery, Eudokia reached such a height of purity that she became a model for all the desert-dwelling monks and nuns. When the abbess and superior of the monastery died, all the nuns unanimously chose Eudokia to take her place as spiritual leader of the sisters.”[17]

“… In the desert, Moses began the spiritual battle of the heart that leads to Christ… As Moses progressed in the spiritual life, many youths wishing to dedicate their lives to God gathered around him. Many of his former gang members and other outlaws renounced their ways and followed Moses, saying, ‘If he who was the baddest of all the bad has feared God, shouldn’t we?’”[18]

6. Darkness to light

“Cries of frustrated human beings often point to the divine ideal and intent.”[19]

It has often been remarked upon that those who seem furthest from God can sometimes be more easily touched by him than those who seem less troubled. There are many reasons for this – that they have come to know best their need of him, that they have despaired of this world and have therefore drawn close to the next. In modern western culture, this should give great opportunities for Christians to come alongside troubled youth and lead them towards the light.

The importance of mentorship in this process has already been stressed, and yet:

“Most fail because they are not willing to relocate among the poor and the oppressed… because they do not have the opportunity to make themselves culturally vulnerable (as Jesus did with the woman at the well or with tax collectors)”[20]

In order to effectively mentor, the mentor needs to commit to being involved in the life of the person he is mentoring. Obviously this does not mean participating in sin, but it does mean walking through the valley of the shadow of death, if this is where the mentee is walking. At the same time, the mentor needs to be spiritually strong enough not to be sucked in: one cannot help a man drowning in a whirlpool by jumping in with him, but only by standing at the side, reaching in and giving him a hand to hold on to that is connected to somebody firmly grounded outside the whirlpool. Both mentor and mentee need to be practising together holding on to Christ’s proffered hand to pull them out of the world’s ways.

“Blessed is anyone who perseveres when trials come. Such a person is of proven worth and will win the prize of life, the crown that the Lord has promised to those who love him.” (James 1:12)

The aim of the mentor is to navigate himself and his mentee through that valley, persevering through the darkness and going on through death into the light of life.

7. Resurrection

“Just when the world thought that God is dead and is bleeding to death under our knife… He resurrects from the dead. The teaching of the crucifixion always goes hand in hand with the resurrection. Just as all paths lead to a destination, so the cross is the way to resurrection, humanity’s ultimate destination.”[21]

Modern western culture is ultimately devoid of hope. It is plentiful in (ultimately unsatisfying) pleasure, in material goods, in image and idol, but it cannot even conceive of the idea of eternal hope in anything other than the most sentimental and unreal ways. Those of us who have been brought up in that culture are tainted by it, and the closer we are to it, the more we are immersed in it, the more true this is. It tends to be those who lose out in this culture who are the most dangerous to it – both for bad and, possibly, for good. Those who have fallen furthest can make the greatest saints in this life, if they can look up in the humiliation of their fall and accept God’s hand as it is offered. As for the prodigal son, taking the smallest step in the direction of his father causes his father to leap up and run towards him, gathering him up to himself. In all our relations with the youth of our culture, we must, while hearing their stories, radiate the hope of the resurrection and the love of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, into whose life we are all invited to dwell for ever.