Messy Work

By Alex Newman

Unkempt as John the Baptist – sans locusts and wild honey – the average youth minister can be a little “scary,” admits Tim Haughton, now an ordained Anglican priest at St Paul’s Bloor St. in Toronto.

“We don’t have that professional look to us. I wear jeans and a t-shirt, ride a motorbike, have a piercing and tattoo; this isn’t the kind of thing some congregations want replicated in their kids,” he quips.

Dan Oudshoorn – dreadlocks to his waist and sporting tattoos -- spoke at the Evolving Church Conference in March held by Epiphaneia (www.epiphaneia.ca), about the teens he reaches out to in his ministry on Vancouver’s seedy east side.

Cindy Westacott, a youth pastor in her 50s, married and with grown children, has observed that among her twenty-some volunteers at Bendale Community Church in Scarborough, the best might not “present” so well -- and are usually terrible at organization -- but they are “wonderfully relational and empathetic” with the kids.

Cradle Anglicans may remember the old days of AYPA – at least for those youth who stuck it out past confirmation. But times have changed, and secular forces are wreaking havoc on the spiritual outcomes of our youth.

Click to enlarge image. Photo: Sue CarelessA 2007 survey by Barna research found that not only do teens cherry-pick from a buffet of spiritual views, they usually don’t sustain their faith beyond high school. Barna’s research director David Kinnaman concludes that for the most part youth ministry needs an “overhaul” that will develop young people’s “intellect and vocational passions as well as cultivating their curiosity for the complexities of life.”

He also believes that teens need intentional youth workers to help them become engaged, thoughtful followers of Christ by relating to them on a deeper and intensely personal level.

The rewards of doing so are tangible. A 2003 study done jointly by the YMCA and Dartmouth Medical School called Hardwired to Connect reports that “religiosity does increase social connectedness...[and] reduces feelings of isolation and loneliness... [because] religious institutions offer a vision of the good life...and help develop long-term rather than short-term outlook.”

As studies demonstrate and as Haughton has observed first hand, teens are intensely spiritual. “There’s a yearning and desire in teens to change the world,” he says. “If we can shape that yearning with the gospel there’s no telling what they can do.”

That means both parents and parish have a small window of opportunity to seize upon the spiritual nature of teens and lay good groundwork for the future. Understanding their brains helps. In teenagers, the prefrontal cortex, which processes the reactions and impulses of the limbic system -- the mind’s primal emotion centre – is going through a wild growth spurt and doesn’t work too well, causing skewed judgment and narcissistic tendencies. As parents of any teen will tell you, patience is required to handle them with compassion and love.

Click to enlarge image. Photo: Sue CarelessCorralling their energy, passion and zeal is key, but it takes time, patience and committed youth leaders with whom they can connect. When Haughton was youth pastor at St Paul’s from 2002-2008, his aim was to nurture young disciples who could eventually run their own program. He implemented an informal chapel, complete with youth band, to run parallel to Sunday service. A talk given either by himself or one of the five or so youth leaders he was mentoring at the time was followed by small group discussion.

Getting the kids to take ownership was a “messy” process, though. “If I did it all myself it would have been less time, less headache – teens often have time management issues and their recall is sometimes bad – but it was amazing to watch them step outside in faith in a safe environment. And that did wonders for their future abilities.”

It’s not something that can be done in an hour on Sundays, he adds, and developing an effective youth ministry was “hugely slow. Relationships with leaders were integral. My suggestion is to get a couple of very good, gifted, godly leaders and pour a lot of time into them and keep them over the long haul.”

Westacott agrees. She and her husband, Dean, have shared Bendale’s full ministry for more than 15 years – Dean in charge of adults and she the youth – and done it on what amounts to a single salary.

“Dean and I have run into money problems ourselves,” Cindy says, “but he is so insistent that we not let the youth programs go down, that he went back to teach part-time and still run the church.”

Their financial sacrifices have yielded results – in the past ten years about 1500 kids have come through their Friday night drop-ins. March break and summer sports camps each draw about 100 children a week, and their after-school programs are a vital sought-after service in a city plagued by budget cutbacks. And about 85 percent of the kids come from the community -- many with deep emotional and spiritual issues.

The program is sustained by volunteers ranging in age from 20 to 53, a large enough roster to ensure kids will “click” with someone, Westacott points out. “But it’s critical to hold on to at least one main pastor,” she adds. “It’s so hard on kids when a youth pastor leaves – even though it’s usually because they need to take a full-time job. That’s why we find the team ministry works – you cover the bases on a smaller budget.”

In outlying areas where money is even tighter and volunteers in shorter supply, it’s a challenge to even start up a youth group. Kevin Stockall is the parish priest in charge of several small churches in the Sackville, Nova Scotia area, and he and his wife hold a youth program every two weeks.

They try to cover equal parts Christian education, recreation and service, but Stockall has found it’s hard to get “traction” with high school kids: “Those who’ve been attending since they were little and had strong friendships tend to stay; but those who join later, it’s harder for them to stick with it.”

It’s the same for teens who’ve attended one church all their lives, then move elsewhere with family -- it becomes harder to integrate at that age, he says. As well, there’s a “significant transition” to high school, and kids are dealing with peer pressure plus freedom of choice, “including the one to not go to worship service at all.”

Stockall’s prescription –at least for regular churchgoers – is that “there is no substitute for a family that models the love of Jesus Christ, and does so without pressure so that they see faith in Jesus is integral to your life.”

The second key is friendship, he adds, especially when relationships with others who are well rounded and spiritually mature are nurtured. But it must go beyond fun and friends – and relate to their own spiritual development and encourage them to “chew on” faith issues.

This resonates with Dr John Patrick, who co-founded Augustine College out of concern for the large numbers of evangelical youth who were losing their faith at university. Rather than strive to keep teenagers off the streets on a Friday night by amusing them, Patrick suggests that good youth ministry must help kids develop “Christian virtue and character.”

That means tackling some very serious issues. “They need to be able to defend legitimate tolerance and the sanctity of life (and say why abortion and euthanasia are wrong),” Patrick explains. “They need to deconstruct moral relativism; they need to be able to talk about sexuality – and homosexuality. Otherwise, they will go nowhere. The university will eat them up.”

He’s found that teens are “fine with serious discussion...though they can’t respond to something they don’t understand.”

That’s why the emphasis at Augustine College is history of all subjects -- math, literature, philosophy, music, art and science. “It’s been stunningly successful in character formation,” Patrick says.

Oudshoorn agrees: “The defining characteristic of this generation -- from the most conservative proper church kid to the ghetto punk – is that search for a meaningful spirituality. They thirst for the living water and they are searching for God. But the encounter must be real, tangible, and the God-story needs to come alive. Rather than a random collection of stories with a moral, it has to connect in a very real way to their own life story, and be a big-picture story they can move into and live with.”

Youth may tend to hold back on faith, intimidated by the overwhelming commitment of that once-for-all conversion idea and one task of a youth minister, Oudshoorn says, is to help youth see “that everyone’s life is a series of Damascus Road experiences, a constantly becoming.”

Nor can youth ministry shirk hard issues. Teenagers are at a crucial point, he’s discovered, where they are “very honestly engaging problems and challenges with peers, and they’re going to have to confront faith, because once they go away to university, they will meet sustained challenges, from profs and peers.”

That requires fearlessly confronting the really tough questions, admitting you may not know the answers, and being honest with them if they ask you what you think.

The irony is that of the youth he meets in Vancouver it’s often the non-churched ones most receptive to the message. They’re the ones who’ve tried it all -- material possessions, drugs, sex, cutting – and found it lacking. Because teens are on a quest for meaning, churches must avoid pat answers to deeply existential questions, he says.

Oudshoorn knows of what he speaks. Raised in a Christian home, he went through a serious teenaged rebellion – rough enough to get him kicked out of the house. Thanks to some “people who got involved, I survived though. And I have more compassion for kids because of what I’ve gone through.”

That’s why his job as a street youth worker with Streams of Justice, a Christian social justice movement, takes him where the kids are: in the park where they get high, in the shelter where they are homeless and alone; and in the church.

It’s also why he invites them into his home – with his wife and young baby. “This ministry cannot be a 9 to 5 job – it’s a way of life.”