Presence-Centered Youth Ministry – Pt. 1

This is part one of a look at Presence-Centered Youth Ministry by Mike King. A team of folks at LifeBridge is taking a look at this book in the context of discussing the future of student ministry in our community.

Mike King is the president of Youth Front in Kansas City and has 30+ years of youth ministry experience. Below, I’m doing a (very) rough summary of chapters 1 and 2 just to get the conversation rolling:

Presence-Centered Youth Ministry

Chapter One – Three Decades of Youth Ministry
Mike narrates his journey from growing up in a mainline church to teenage rebellion to involvement in a fundamentalist youth ministry. This led him from a holistic liturgical worship experience to interacting with faith as primarily if not totally propositional and cognitive in nature. This new type of faith presented a sacred versus secular dichotomy, relegating anything of the ‘secular’ category to be synonymous with ‘demonic’.

As an increasingly celebrated youth minister, Mike writes about learning psychological methodology to increase the effectiveness of ‘altar calls’ – in his words: how to remove ‘sales resistance’ to the Holy Spirit.

This change from a liturgical, narrative-centered worldview to a truncated one, from creation-fall-redemption-restoration to a fall-redemption only led to methods that quickly defined non-believers as fallen sinners in need of a quick fix raise-your-hand-and-get-saved kind of approach.

Mike tells a poignant story about an experience in a cathedral during this season of his life. Overwhelmed with the beauty and mystery of the sacred space of the cathedral, he describes the moment as ‘awesome’ and ‘transcendent’ and it led him to pray. What followed was a friend’s reminder that Catholicism is idolatrous (and should remind the rest of us how much bigotry Protestants express toward Catholics).

Mike slowly moved from identifying himself as a ‘Fundamentalist’ to identifying as an ‘Evangelical’. Eventually Mike experienced a renewal of the holistic faith of his youth and realized, “I was tired of seeing young people damaged by a brand of Christianity that was increasingly arrogant and mean-spirited. We in the church have spent a lot of effort to define worldliness as smoking, drinking, popular culture and so on, but if we took the message of Jesus seriously, shouldn’t we have included sins like greed, debt, materialism and gluttony? I had been promoting a Christianity that accepts overworking, overeating and apathy toward social justice. I had been a part of retrofitting Christianity for the American dream.”

Chapter Two – Dysfunctional Evangelical Youth Ministry
“Presence-centered youth ministry is about deconstructing the big business of North-American evangelicalism and returning to the missional nature of ministry in the way of Jesus.” – pg. 26

There’s a helpful brief history of evangelicalism on pgs. 26-27

Then comes one of the strongest parts of the book: “Problems Within Evangelical Youth Ministry” – Pg 30

• Succession – the church has an underdeveloped theology and practice that aids the passing on of the faith from one generation to the next
• Lack of Tradition – there is an unhealthy hostility toward, resistance to, and lack of appreciation of tradition.
• Age Segregation – there is an propensity toward cutting youth off from adults and thereby damaging the important role of intergenerational interaction in faith formation
• Decisionism – there is an overemphasis on instantaneous conversion. (I’m reminded here that Peter Berger once said that ‘to have a religious experience in America means essentially nothing’.)

Next, King ventures into Dallas Willard land (land that I love) by asking what has happened to Christian formation among youth ministry. There was a time when birth, baptism, catechism, and confirmation provided a pathway for formation. These (because they are associated with Catholicism?) have been discarded in favor of hyped-up event-centered youth activities.

There’s a great chart on pg 40 King borrows from Robert Webber’s The Younger Evangelicals (another great book!).