To Mend the World: A New Vision for Youth Ministry

Praise for To Mend the World

To Mend the World is a wise and wide-awake book about youth ministry. Jason Lief and Kurt Rietema, experienced in their work with young people, recognize that the old ways of youth ministry no longer work. Their approach, in every way one can imagine, is both-and: both transcendent and immanent, both theoretical and practical, both active and reflective. They see youth ministry as essentially an interpretive task wherein hands-on lived experience and faith claims function in interactive illumination. Their aim is to equip young Christians for an effective, faithful life in the real world, and to help them be knowingly reflective about the menacing, seducing ideologies all around us and committed to creative, imaginative work toward a mended world.

—Walter Brueggemann, William Marcellus McPheeters Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary

Jason Lief and Kurt Rietema are two of the boldest and wisest people I know thinking about and doing youth ministry. To Mend the World puts this on display in technicolor. The book is deeply thoughtful and helpful. I’ve been worried that those drawing from innovation theory and social entrepreneurship have not had the patience, attention, and spirit to ask larger theological and philosophical questions to back these practices. However, Lief and Rietema have wonderfully questioned and reworked lessons from these fields of thought. There is much to learn, some things to disagree with, but much more that can bless the minister, young people, and the church in this fine book.

—Andrew Root, Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary and author of The Church after Innovation: Questioning Our Obsession with Work, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship

Youth Ministry is practical theology! Jason Lief and Kurt Rietema invite us to be facilitators of young people’s desires to tackle adult-sized problems and bring about change. To Mend the World calls us to a better way of doing ministry with youth.

—Dietrich Deech Kirk, executive director of the Center for Youth Ministry Training

With a mix of theological reflection, cultural analysis, and storytelling, Jason Lief and Kurt Rietema weave together a compelling account for why youth ministry needs to embrace social entrepreneurship. This is not some mere call for more effective or sustainable ministry. Rather, in social entrepreneurship, the authors see an invitation for youth ministry to rediscover the personal and social transformative encounter that is the beating heart of the gospel. This bold book will challenge assumptions and spark imagination.

—Mark Sampson, author of The Promise of Social Enterprise: A Theological Exploration of Faithful Economic Practice

To Mend the World is a collection of principles and experiences reminding us that the original purpose of youth ministry is not to invest in innovating superficial ways of doing church. Instead, it is to create spaces for transformational growth, where young people can develop as changemakers. Their visionary and daring wisdom can lead us out into a broken and uncertain reality, among real people making a lasting difference—something we as a church desperately need.

—Simón Menéndez, lead of Spiritual Changemakers Initiative for the Spanish-speaking world and director of Changemaker Education and Youth, at Ashoka Spain (Madrid)

To Mend the World sets forth a necessary vision not just for youth ministry but for the church! Rich in its theological framework and cultural relevance, Kurt Rietema and Jason Lief reorient our dreams for a younger generation by inviting us to cultivate a much-needed yet missing space: where young people dream, are culturally informed, and act on those dreams to make their communities a better place. In so doing, they demonstrate their faith in Christ’s restorative gospel by actively joining him in his ongoing redemptive work in the world.

—Michelle Ferrigno Warren, author of Join the Resistance: Step into the Good Work of Kingdom Justice

To Mend the World

To Mend the World

A New Vision for Youth Ministry

Jason Lief & Kurt Rietema

Fortress Press

Minneapolis

TO MEND THE WORLD

A New Vision for Youth Ministry

Copyright © 2023 Fortress Press, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email copyright@1517.media or write to Permissions, Fortress Press, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations marked (NRSVUE) are from the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition, copyright © 2021 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

All Scripture marked with the designation GW is taken from GOD’S WORD®. © 1995, 2003, 2013, 2014, 2019, 2020 by God’s Word to the Nations Mission Society. Used by permission.

Cover design and illustration: Soupiset Design

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-8122-7

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-8123-4

While the author and 1517 Media have confirmed that all references to website addresses (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing, URLs may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To the motley crew of Old Town—May you continue to seek human flourishing in all of your beautifully strange endeavors.

Jason Lief

To Elizabeth, Nancy, Rhiannon, and Zaira—You inspired it all and continue to make the world new in the most difficult places.

Kurt Rietema

Contents

One: Youth Ministry Must Die

Two: Disconnection

Three: Reconnection

Four: Seeking the Welfare of the City

Five: Going Off Script with God’s Mission

Six: Confronting Adult-Sized Problems

Seven: Creating toward God’s Future

Eight: Some (Im)practical Advice

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

One

Youth Ministry Must Die

Jason Lief

Early in my teaching career, I met a local pastor for coffee as a way to get connected to the broader community. He was young, with a growing ministry—a pastor on the boundary of hip and culturally engaged. Partway through the conversation, he asked, Why should I hire a youth pastor? He wasn’t inquiring; his tone suggested hiring a youth pastor is a waste of time. He talked about trends in youth ministry and stereotypes of youth pastors he believed to be problematic. What struck me about the exchange was his willingness to ask the question, Why youth ministry?

The question of the purpose of youth ministry has taken on more urgency as research shows young people are increasingly leaving the church. The response has been a number of books focusing on the nature and purpose of youth ministry, all with important insights to contribute to churches and youth pastors.¹ What gets lost, however, is a conversation about what it means to be the church at this particular cultural moment. This would include not just the issues young people face but the deeper cultural changes that affect the way we think about faith and culture within the framework of secularity. After all, the purpose of youth ministry, or any form of ministry, is connected with ecclesiology—what it means to be the Christian community at this particular cultural moment.

The dramatic social changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—including a shift from agriculture to an industrial, then a postindustrial way of life—created the social conditions in which youth ministry did its work. The Christian community had to deal with the adolescent—the teenager—and all the anxiety and alienation that came with it. Over the years, there have been enormous amounts of energy and resources devoted to youth ministry. There have been many successes, people who can trace their faith lives to youth events of some type. At the same time, the current cultural moment forces us to confront the question asked by the hip, young pastor: Why should I hire a youth pastor? Put differently, why should a church expect a twentieth-century ministry to address twenty-first-century issues?

It’s time for youth ministry to die. Now more than ever, the gospel needs to address the issues young people face. We still need adults who are equipped to live out the gospel with young people as witnesses to God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ. The problem is that youth ministry fails to speak to the lived experience of young people. While the packaging has changed, youth ministry remains stuck within a biblical and theological perspective that misses the point. As a result, youth ministry affirms the very cultural trappings it’s trying to help young people navigate. This is why youth ministry must die—so it can be transformed.

Death and resurrection are, after all, the heart of the gospel. Yet the gospel is too easily turned into moral and doctrinal programs to help believers go to heaven when they die. The result is a version of Christianity obsessed with believing the right things or living moral lives. Yes, Christian faith is about hope for a life to come, and it should bring about moral transformation. However, to make either of these the primary focus is to miss the point. The death and resurrection of Jesus are not about some abstract spiritualized heaven; the gospel is about transformation. The Holy Spirit doesn’t care about our contemporary obsession with growth or progress, as if Christian faith offers some form of a continuous improvement program. The transformation proclaimed in the gospel message about Jesus is a movement from life to death to new life. It’s about having an identity deconstructed so God, through the Holy Spirit, can knit us back together. Or to use more traditional theological concepts, it’s about justification and sanctification. If this is what the gospel calls us to, then why not allow youth ministry to go through the same process? It’s time for youth ministry to die, to be deconstructed, so something new can emerge.

Young people are anxious and increasingly fearful, and many of them are cynical about the future. The cause of this resignation and the problem with current forms of youth ministry stem from a superficial understanding of Christ’s death and resurrection that is transactional: Christ’s death and resurrection + faith = going to heaven when we die. What’s missing in this formula is the biblical understanding that true faith means participating in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Paul says as much in his letter to the Roman church: For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, so we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him (Rom 6:5–8 NRSVUE). For Paul, the resurrection was not the resuscitation of a dead body, as if God performed CPR on Jesus and brought him back to life; for Paul, resurrection is something mysteriously new. Resurrection is transformation, a breaking open of the current state of things so a new future is possible. It’s much more than the restoration of what was; it’s the gathering up of what was to make something new. This is the good news young people need to hear—that in Jesus Christ, God is at work taking the scattered pieces of our lives to make something new.

There’s a growing chasm between the biblical message and contemporary North American forms of Christianity. Within the current cultural and political environment, faith tends to be reduced to the affirmation of a way of life. This reduction has contributed to an overspiritualization that emphasizes the universal over the particular. Say a young woman is struggling with loneliness, feeling like she doesn’t belong. A pastor can approach this in two ways: (1) by focusing on how God’s love is demonstrated in how we love our neighbor, encouraging individuals to enter the lives of others in acceptance and love, or (2) by focusing on how God’s love is all we need and that we can be comforted knowing that God is always there for us. Technically, both are true, but one focuses on a particularity (how individuals are called to engage the lived experience of this young person to demonstrate God’s love), and the other focuses on the universal (God is always there for us). One is concrete, the other abstract. To overspiritualize is to focus on the universal in such a way that it never intersects with our lived experience. Telling a lonely young person God is always there for you does not change their lived experience; demonstrating God’s love for a young person by coming alongside them does.

Further, when Christians insist on emphasizing the universal nature of sin and the conversion of the individual sinner at the expense of concrete experiences, the result is unhelpful abstraction. Of course, sin and conversion are biblical and theological truths, but when they’re used in opposition to concrete issues, they provide a rationale for not getting involved. This results in the separation of Christian faith from embodied life and an otherworldly Christian spirituality, as faith and cultural life exist on different planes—the spiritual (abstraction) and the temporal (the concrete).

Charles Taylor argued that the difference between the time of the Reformation (the 1500s) and today, in the Western world, is that individuals are less likely to believe the material and the spiritual interact with each other.² Put simply, this world is cut off from transcendence. People no longer need to make sacrifices to the gods to ensure a good life; instead, the good life comes through science, technology, and the immanent cultural forces of politics or economics. As the 2020 presidential election showed, people in the West no longer care enough to argue about religion, but they are more than ready to shun family and friends—even resort to violence—over political beliefs. Put simply, the transcendent reality of the divine has been cut off from the daily lives of