Theological Youth Workers

Marketing Pain?

The other night I was invited to attend a Young Life banquet here in my local community.  I have never had much exposure to Young Life in my lifetime.  There was a chapter at my high school (I think) in Southern California and I knew some folks at Seminary who had been in or led Young Life groups.  My recent exposure has been more positive than negative on the whole, but I disagree with some of Young Life's philosophy and theology for reaching out to teens in the name of Jesus Christ.

At the banquet, Young Life had announced that they were going to be starting a new facet of their program that was going to try and reach out to single teen moms in our California community.  It seemed like a great idea to me due to the fact that there are a ton of teen moms in our city's area.  These moms are often on their own and are caught between being teens and adults.  Many of them are ashamed and feel left out of life and any outreach to them would probably be of some help.

My trouble came when the Young Life folks began to show a video about the teen moms who had most recently gone to the Young Life camp in Woodleaf, California.  I began to wonder as we watched the mothers on the video whether any of them had been asked to be apart of the video presentation.  I wondered whether they knew that they would be caught up in a fundraising effort for Young Life in some town in Cali.  Did they want to be displayed in front of an audience listening to sappy music?  What if somebody knew them?  Would that have been a source of shame?

At youth groups we often show videos about our latest trips to Mexico, the Indian Reservation, inner city L.A. or New York, or to the Gulf Coast.  We carefully choose music that fits the mood or the desired feel that we have determined will generate enough sign ups for the following year.  My question is: How and where do we draw boundaries with video and photos at our home churches?  Must we always ask for permission to show photos or videos of individuals that we have helped?  Should we ever show photos even if we have permission?  At what point have we begun to market the pain and suffering of others?  Do our efforts honor the dignity of a fellow child of God, or do we make people into objects when we engage in drumming up support for next year through multimedia presentations?--Matt Overton

Post Your Information

We'd like this blog to be useful for connecting us with each other. 

Please send your name, email, web address, and a short bio to moverton@standrewpcusa.org or jeremy@gracecolorado.com and we'll put your info on the typelist to the left.  Clicking on the names will direct readers to your website. 

Hell House!

Check out this article in the Denver Post.  http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_4333367

A local pastor around here wrote a script for one of those Halloween plays intended to scare people into repentance.  Supposedly, it's been copied by over 3000 churches.  Now it's going to New York as an off-Broadway play.  I'm very curious to see how that goes over in Manhattan. 

Having spent the past 7 1/2 years in Portland, Princeton, and now Denver, I've started to assume that this type of theology is fading away in our country.  Particularly among youth, my own experience is that they are less and less willing to even claim Christ as the exclusive Savior, because that smacks of intolerance.  And those who are willing to make such an exclusive claim realize the need to be tactful in their high schools, and keep a distance from the perceptions of Christianity given by popular culture. 

It seems clear that the religious far right continues to be very visible in the media, giving the impression of a growing movement, but are they attracting youth?  If so, where are they coming from?  They must be a very different breed than any students that I've ever come across.    

-Jeremy Watson

Many Hats

The other morning I was praying with some youth pastors from my new ministry community and one of the youth pastors began praying for "our senior pastors."  My ears perked up because he began to pray for all sorts of things related to the "senior pastor."  The curiosity was that everything he prayed about smacked of a great deal of hierarchy which is one thing that my denomination has tried to diminish in the relationship between the head of staff and the associate pastors.  To be sure, my head of staff has more experience than I do, but I do not see myself as a lower minister than the head of staff.  We do have some sense of hierarchy, but not to the extent that I was seeing in the room that day. The head of staff does not have a higher rank than I do.

It occured to me at that moment, and for a while after the prayer meeting, that I was the odd fellow in the room of youth ministers at that moment.  Most of them are youth pastors 24/7.  They are resposnible for their corner of ministry in the church and little else.  They have one set of responsibilities and one group to whom they are responsible too.  This is not my situation at all.

Each day that I come into the office, I have to make sure that I am ready to navigate multiple worlds.  I have funerals to think about, weddings, hospital visitations, adult education, and youth ministry.  I wear a collared shirt for the adults and sandals for the teenagers.  It is a crazy existence.  Lately, I have taken to keeping an extra pair of slacks in my office, and shorts too.  I am glad that I am a full fledged minister, but I have to admit that some days I wish I was just working with youth.  Sometimes, there are just not enough hours in the day to plan youth group for Sunday evening and the sermon for Sunday morning.  It's a lot of different hats to wear.  At times I even find myself adjusting my vocabulary between groups.  With teens, its teen lingo, with adults its any lingo that demonstrates that I am not just suited to work with teens.  Are you experiencing that realm of many hats?

---Matt Overton