Youth Ministry Civil War?

In my previous post I discussed what motivates me to do progressive youth ministry and asked others to share their motivations. Yesterday I saw a Facebook notification about a comment from a friend and onetime youth ministry colleague: “I’ll be very curious to see how everyone’s motivations bring them to select which ‘team’ they end up on.” My heart sank a little because this comment touches on a potential criticism of the progressive youth ministry movement: do we really need to subdivide the youth ministry world into competing tribes?

It turns out that he was actually commenting on a different post I made about the new Captain America: Civil War trailer. But the question persists.

For better or worse, it’s inevitable that proposing a different way of doing youth ministry—or any kind of ministry for that matter—is going to create divisions. This is part of our spiritual DNA, what Paul Tillich called the Protestant principle. To be sure, these differentiations do not need to devolve into warring camps, but it’s hard to not at least imply that a new way is intended to be different from (if not better than) previous ways.

I’ll confess that I’m torn between PYMer Maggie Nancarrow’s suggestion that we ought to describe our progressive faith without saying “but I’m not…” and the more intentionally contrastive rhetoric of the late Marcus Borg. Maggie is right that we need to focus on positive articulations and not perpetuate the notion that certain forms of conservative or fundamentalist Christianity are normative. Borg was also right that these popular forms of Christianity are often dangerous and that there is too much at stake in the world to let them go unchecked. The urgency of both approaches is only heightened when the context is youth ministry with emerging generations.

I’m willing to live with that tension for now, because I’m convinced that PYM is part of a much bigger progressive awakening that is changing the shape of Christianity in North America.