#andy root

About Those Flying Drummers...

The job of the youth worker, according to Bonhoeffer, is not to re-create an institutional church for youth but to help and advocate for the young to be found at the center of the church-communities life - for it is here that young people encounter the presence of Christ.

The youth minister is to be captivated not by the spirit of youth and his or her culture but by the church-community. For the church community is the place where the divine and human meet in personhood.

Youth cannot save the church, for the church is not simply an institution in need of new members (even enthusiastic ones); the church is the very body of Jesus Christ in the world. Youth ministry, Bonhoeffer argues, does not start with the love of the spirit of young people.

Youth ministry is first and foremost a theological task, Bonhoeffer asserts. It is not a sociological, cultural, or church-growth strategy; it is, rather, a ministry that seeks the encounter of the divine with the human.

Bonhoeffer asserts that it appears that the spirit of youth has overtaken the Holy Spirit, that the church’s future is not dependent on being indwelled by the Spirit of Christ (the Holy Spirit) but by attracting the spirit of the young. Bonhoeffer starts… by calling out this idolatry. The future of the church is not dependent on youth, but only on Jesus Christ himself. The church must avoid the culture of youth - especially in our day, when we feel the decline of religious institutions. Bonhoeffer believes we can only minister to youth if we see our ministries as not for getting the spirit of young people into the church but encountering the Holy Spirit with young people in the church-community.

To be incarnational in youth ministry is to enter into the suffering of adolescents; it is to understand yourself as their place-sharer. Relational ministry is not about having the answers or being "cool"; it's rather about gently and sensitively joining adolescents in their suffering. It's not about fixing their suffering, but about being brave enough to see it and live with it.