I want to piggyback on something Rosanna wrote this weekend, expanding it into a larger discussion on youth and children's ministries. Her piece was simple, describing the theologically teaching moments in carving pumpkins. In one event and one essay she perfectly captured our strategy working with the younger folks of our congregation.
Since I started in youth ministry a couple decades ago I've been a proponent of conducting young people's ministries organically. There's a time and place for sitting kids down and telling them all about God using chalkboards and worksheets and traditional teaching methods. In our church this happens in confirmation and a little bit in Sunday School. But if that's the only way you teach them about God, if that's the only experience they have of "God stuff", then you have the unintentional consequence of divorcing God from anything they do in the rest of their life. You end up with young people who can recite correct technical doctrine in the classroom but who don't perceive God outside of it. Entire generations have been raised to think there's "God stuff" and then there's "real life" and the two don't mix. That, my friends, is an incorrect--OK, I'll say it--downright bad witness.
Organic ministry focuses more on finding God in the things the kids already do, how God is working in the lives they already have instead of how he's absent until they learn the chalkboard stuff. We teach them about a God who is with them everywhere and always and not just during the hour they're learning at church. The traditional message runs, "These things are holy, the things you do are not." We try to teach them how to do the things they normally do in a holy fashion, not giving them holy moments but helping them see how to live holy lives.
From the outside this looks like doing a bunch of odd stuff in church: carving pumpkins, playing games, sitting around and drinking pop and talking. Some will say, "How is that different than what they normally do?" It's not too much...and that's the point! Little by little these kids are learning how to play games and be friends with each other in a holy way, how to see and invite God into their cultural rituals like pumpkin carving, how to share God in conversation and refreshments. We're not happy with the kid who perfectly parrots our answers about the Trinity (which we do teach them) in class and then goes out into the world not caring about his neighbor. We'll go a little light on the doctrine and show them what the doctrine means first: sharing, caring, being together, getting over little bumps in our relationships and forgiving each other, celebrating this life God has given us, creating love and goodness in the world. That way when they hear the doctrine they are able to embrace it because they've really been living it all along.
Organic ministry doesn't produce as many of the tangible moments by which we've traditionally gauged our results. There aren't as many instances when we can say, "I taught the kids about this theological concept today!" In fact in a given moment one might say, "All I really did was carve a pumpkin or play a game. What really happened there?" But over the long haul giving up those single moments when we can be proud of ourselves as teachers in favor of multiple moments when we were integrating our lives and God's with the real, everyday lives of the kids really pays off.
In just a few years of doing ministry this way here I can point out case after case of young folks who have moved on coming back and touching base when they needed help, being concerned for the lives of their friends as much as their own, and bringing incredibly good things into the world. And that's not going to end. They probably didn't understand the significance of pumpkins and board games when they were 8 or 13, but when they're 35 or 40 they're going to look back and realize everything they got taught about God and life through this time together. They're going to smile as they realize it didn't seem like teaching at all, that it was so deeply ingrained that it slid right into their hearts and stuck, and that God has blossomed like a flower in their lives as naturally as breathing. We didn't give them a fish, we taught them how to fish, and that's going to affect everything they choose to do: jobs, marriages, faith relationships, and hopefully raising the next generation of children.
Thank you to Rosanna and the rest of the Sunday School and youth ministry folks for putting it so perfectly and getting it so right.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
