How Youth Ministry Can Change Theological Education -- If We Let It by Dean Kenda Creasy;Hearlson Christy Lang;

Author:Dean, Kenda Creasy;Hearlson, Christy Lang;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2016-03-29T13:18:30+00:00

Both Rooted and Odd: Learning from Disequilibrium

High School Theology Programs can typically name their central commitments. These central commitments are often relatively consistent with the denomination(s) or constituencies to which they are affiliated. But these programs are also able to risk more than typical congregational youth ministry programs. By practicing ec-­centricity, they can pose difficult questions to both the dominant culture, and sometimes to the church itself. For example, Youth Theological Initiative (YTI) at Candler School of Theology, affiliated with United Methodism, creates space for youth to ask questions about sexual orientation and the value of other religions. The Compass program at Gordon-­Conwell, an evangelical seminary, challenges youth to ask critical questions about the role technology plays in our lives, while Huron College’s Ask & Imagine program encourages participants to ask provocative questions about tradition and exclusion in Holy Communion.

!Explore, a program of the Mennonite church, also espouses commitments central to Anabaptists: (1) making Jesus the center of our faith, (2) making community the center of our lives, and (3) making reconciliation the center of our work.11 Yet these commitments are incommensurate with individualism, consumption, and entitlement, all dominant Western cultural values that even many Mennonites embrace. With foci that at times differ from and challenge their cultural context, and sometimes that differ from and challenge their denominations or constituencies, HSTPs may help re-­enliven the denominational vision among young people who attend them.

This has a big payoff. Leadership development programs abound in North America. Developing leaders for tomorrow is among the aims of schools, businesses, and extracurricular activities — not to mention churches, seminaries, and denominations. While High School Theology Programs must surely be counted among the groups nurturing leadership, what is unique about these programs is that they are intentional about developing Christian leaders: leaders who are vocationally compelled by the good news of Christ and who acknowledge a calling to use their gifts for ends other than economic gain or social prestige. Theological reflection on the disruptive event of truth, and pedagogical reflection on disorientation and disequilibrium, demonstrate the importance of forming Christians who are not just disoriented from the dominant values of the wider culture, but who are also reoriented toward the emerging Kingdom of God, in which all of creation has been reconciled with the Creator.

Leaders whose faith is shaped by Jesus, whose identity is shaped by a community of believers, and whose vocation is aligned with the Kingdom of reconciliation, have the capacity — by facilitating encounters with truth that decenter and recenter young people — to create communities that not only anticipate the Kingdom, but that proleptically embody that future for all of humanity. The High School Theology Programs model ways in which churches, denominations, seminaries, camps and conferences, and others committed to the formation of Christian leaders can create holy disequilibrium through geographical, moral, and cultural dislocation. The ultimate goal, however, is reorientation in a renewed commitment to the good news, revealed in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ.

The call in this

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