This is Wednesday night youth group. We don’t do Bibles here. We’re here to have fun.”
That’s what a high school senior told me during my first week as a youth minister nearly two decades ago. At that church, I was only threatened with termination once, after several parents came to the senior pastor with the same criticism: Their children weren’t having as much fun as they did during the previous youth minister’s tenure. Clearly, in their minds, youth ministry was for fun.
The memory of that uncomfortable conversation resurfaced in my mind as I read Andrew Root’s new book The End of Youth Ministry?: Why Parents Don’t Really Care about Youth Groups and What Youth Workers Should Do about It. In the opening pages, one youth minister laments that every complaint and every expectation about her ministry “kept coming back to fun. . . . As if fun were freedom instead of a chain around my whole body.”
As someone who spent years fettered by the soul-draining weight of that chain, I was encouraged by the alternative that Root recommends: “Youth ministry is for joy.”
Changing Values
Root, professor of youth and family ministry at Luther Seminary, sets the stage for this claim by analyzing the history of American adolescence. His focus is “not on how to do youth ministry but rather on why to do it at all.” It’s here that Root is at his best. Working from the moral philosophy of Charles Taylor, best known for books like Sources of the Self and A Secular Age, Root illustrates complex social changes in easily understandable ways. In the process, he mounts a cogent argument for the obsolescence of the type of youth ministry that dominated the 1980s and ’90s.
Parents no longer prioritize youth ministry, according to Root’s retelling, because youth groups no longer provide the goods that they desire. In the heyday of youth ministry, peer groups were perceived as the proper context for children’s identity formation, and permissive parenting was viewed positively. Teenagers in particular developed their identities by spending unstructured time with groups of peers and experimenting together with the world of adulthood. From Fast Times at Ridgemont High to Stand by Me, E.T., and The Goonies, films of the 1980s idealized coming-of-age quests in which identities were forged by taking risks within a self-selected circle of friends.
There were dangers, however, particularly when the risks turned romantic. This is one reason why youth groups became so popular. Church-based peer groups decelerated the rush toward adulthood by providing teenagers with a safer circle of friends within which personal identities could take shape. Weekly youth group gatherings were packed with fun activities that provided all the benefits of risky coming-of-age quests without any authentic peril. Emotionally charged worship at camps and retreats fed feelings of love and longing while (at least in theory) turning these desires toward Jesus.
But times have changed, and peer groups that provide safe risks are not what parents value most. Among youth, the quest for recognition through social media has eclipsed the peer-group experimentation that characterized earlier generations. Among parents, permissive parenting has given way to what Root calls “constant, hovering parental presence.” As a result, coming-of-age quests have morphed into parent-managed pilgrimages aimed at discovering which activity or hobby will become each child’s “thing.” Parents provide their children with a smorgasbord of different activities because, as Root observes, they hope “one or two will stick. . . . The garage full of discarded tennis rackets, musical instruments, one-time-worn gymnastics outfits, and unused golf clubs witnesses to this reality.” The assumption is that a pain-free discovery of each child’s “thing” will secure her or his present happiness and future success.
These parents don’t deliberately devalue youth ministry or church. For the most part, their feelings are grounded in worldviews of which they’re likely unaware. By and large, youth groups simply don’t strike them as very important. At most, they might help students find their identities and provide a safe refuge during difficult moments. And that’s why youth ministries that focus on high-energy activities and emotionally charged events have become obsolete.
But what if—as Root suggests early on—the goal of youth ministry is joy? This would take the focus off of producing activities that compete with parent-managed quests to find a child’s “thing.” Joy-oriented youth ministry “seeks to give young people visions and practices in which the point of life is to encounter and to participate in the Good.”
Activities and events build our identities only if they are embedded in stories, and the only stories that satisfy our deepest longings are shaped by the story of the cross and the empty tomb. Helping youth to reconceive the pain and promise of their stories in light of the gospel doesn’t decelerate movement toward adulthood. Instead, it makes space for recognition and identity formation without competition and resentment. Youth ministry then becomes a place where students and adults “share stories and are open to something bigger that ushers us into joy.”
Blind Spots
Root’s writing is elegant and precise. Extended quotations are quarantined in footnotes, which frees Root to craft a readable narrative while still providing scholars with necessary points of reference. His depiction of the rise and decline of youth ministry is well researched and compelling.
However, Root’s prescriptions for the future seem somewhat less compelling. Throughout the book, he weaves a touching but apparently fictional story of a ministry that was transformed after a teenage girl’s brush with death. The narrator’s month-by-month journey of interviewing parents and youth workers mixes “factual occurrences and made-up characters to articulate larger points.” Yet, because Root writes in the first person singular and intertwines this fictional narrative with his own reminiscences, it’s difficult to tell where fiction ends and fact begins.
As a literary device, this fuzziness is of little consequence. But these narratives form the foundations for Root’s advice to workers and volunteers in youth ministry, which left me wondering whether his prescriptions might be based on little more than his ruminations and a handful of unstructured conversations.
The End of Youth Ministry? also operates with some significant blind spots regarding lower-income families. To be fair, Root does declare in the opening pages that, “because congregation-based youth ministry remains mainly a middle-class phenomenon, I’ll locate my story there.” I’ve invested most of my ministry years into low-income and inner-city contexts, and I would suggest that his middle-class lens is deeply mistaken.
Youth groups began in middle-class contexts in the mid-20th century, but they didn’t stay there. By the 1980s, many rural churches were doing everything in their power to hire part-time youth ministers, and congregations in economically challenged areas had weekly youth group gatherings overseen by volunteers. Even if Root is correct in claiming that youth ministry remains a middle-class phenomenon, the upshot is a package of prescriptions aimed at a demographic that’s largely white, privileged, and rapidly shrinking. Perhaps, within this demographic, it makes sense to equate parenthood with shuttling children to ballet, piano, hockey, debate, SAT tutoring, and a stream of other activities. Root’s fixation on this demographic seems blind to life outside the middle class.
My own church’s youth ministry includes several teenagers who remember vividly the summer four years ago when six people were shot to death within sight of the church’s bell tower. The freedom to discover their “thing” by participating in traveling baseball teams and SAT tutoring requires an infrastructure largely beyond their reach. This isn’t simply an issue of cost. It calls for a family structure secure enough to allow risk and possible failure. It requires households where parents have jobs that are salaried and flexible. Neither the diagnoses nor the recommendations in The End of Youth Ministry? takes these students’ experiences into account.
A few weeks ago, conversing with a single mother who works an hourly wage job, I asked, “What does your son need?” Her response was more a lament than an answer: “All he needs is somewhere to be other than here in the house. I save up and buy him a new video game every month; I know it’s not good for him to be just playing those games all the time, but it’s either a game inside or a gang outside.”
A book that sets a vision for the future of youth ministry ought to include something for families like hers. I’m not suggesting this woman’s son needs the activity-driven youth groups of the 1980s and ’90s. Maybe what he needs most is a youth ministry built for joy. And yet, The End of Youth Ministry? seems to operate with little awareness of the challenges standing between transcendent joy and the experiences of families like this one.
Promising Avenues
Twenty years ago, when I was informed that youth group was more a matter of fun than of Bibles, I replied—once I regained my voice—that “things are different now.”
In that moment, I was speaking more truth than I knew. The demise of the youth-ministry models of the 1980s and ’90s was well underway. In The End of Youth Ministry?, Root provides a helpful diagnosis and a hopeful response. The book is not without its oversights, but I’m encouraged by its emphasis on cultivating joy. Root has opened promising avenues for further research into a model of youth ministry aimed toward transcendent goodness and structured around the narrative of the cross.
Timothy Paul Jones is the C. Edwin Gheens Professor of Christian Family Ministry and chair of the Department of Apologetics, Ethics, and Philosophy at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the editor of Perspectives on Family Ministry: Three Views (B&H Academic) and serves as a teaching pastor at Sojourn Church Midtown in Louisville, Kentucky.
