Why Progressive Youth Ministry?

My commitment to progressive youth ministry has always been very personal—a reality I suspect is shared by many people in this movement.

I loved my high school youth group. My best friends were there. I valued the mentorship of trusted adults. But growing up in a conservative evangelical denomination, I was basically a fundamentalist by the time I left high school.

To say that I was unprepared for life outside of my small-town evangelical bubble would be an understatement. I wasn’t ready to have serious conversations with people of other faiths, most of whom turned out to not resemble the caricatures and stereotypes I had been warned about at church. I wasn’t ready to bring Christianity and science into a constructive dialogue. I wasn’t ready to study the Bible and Christian history from the perspective of historical criticism. I wasn’t ready to consider religion through the lens of sociology and psychology. I wasn’t ready to figure out how to live as an adult without a puritanical system of behavior modification. I wasn’t ready to understand gender equality, gender nonconformity, or the spectrum of human sexuality.

All of this nearly cost me my faith, which quickly unravelled once it came into contact with the real world. Somehow, I was able to reassemble my deconstructed faith into something more inclusive and progressive. But many of my friends from similar backgrounds couldn’t do the same. Quite a few of them gave up and walked away from faith altogether. They were becoming “nones” long before I had any notion of what that meant.

Several years later, when I found myself engaged in youth ministry—despite my best intentions to do anything but youth ministry—I made it a priority to help the young people I was working with to be better prepared for the challenges of postmodern adulthood than I was. I wanted them to experience life after high school as a time of faith expansion instead of religious crisis. We obviously can’t prevent all crises, but we can certainly nurture a more open and resilient faith foundation than I what I had when I left home.

What about you? What motivates your commitment to progressive youth ministry?