Youth Ministry Reconceived

If you checked in over the past couple of weeks, you've been seeing a lot of posts about various aspects of the Duke Youth Academy. DYA ended last weekend, and I've spent this week getting caught up on life-as-usual.

In addition to the blogging I did over the past few weeks, I also put my thoughts on the Youth Academy in my new column in the UM Reporter. This is the best 700-word overview of DYA that I can muster.

As a closing word on this year's DYA summer session, I would only encourage you to think about people you know who could take part in DYA next summer. Some possibilities include:

Students - Rising juniors and senior in high school are eligible to participate. There is an application procedure, which can be found on the DYA website. For any high schooler who is exploring their Christian vocation or simply wants to live the Christian life more deeply, there is no better way to do than DYA.

Ministry Fellows - Each year we invite a number of youth ministers to participate in the life of DYA. It is an opportunity for sabbatical, of sorts. You've got no responsibilities other than to take part in the full life of the community. The Ministry Fellow component is designed for youth ministers without a theological degree.

DYA Staff - The experience of working on staff at the Duke Youth Academy is tremendous. Each year we hire a number of college students to work as Resident Advisors (R.A.'s) and a number of other folks to serve as Mentors to our students. (The Mentors are often, but not always seminary students. We've also had teachers, pastors, volunteer youth workers, and doctoral students as Mentors over the past couple of years.) If you think you'd enjoy being a part of the staff, I would encourage you to apply!

[Note: Photo above taken by DYA student Nathan Milleson]

The DYA Daily Journal

If you've been reading my posts over the past few days, you know that I am writing about happenings at the 2009 Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation. If you'd like to know more about DYA, check out this post or this website.

One of the creative ways that DYA keeps parents, pastors, and friends back home 'in the loop' about what our students are doing each day is through the DYA Daily Journal.

This year the Journal is a bit different than in years past. Before, the Journal was narrative in form with a picture or two posted beside the text on each day (like in the 2008 edition, which you can see here).

But the 2009 edition is a little fancier - we've incorporated a slide show for each day that shows photographs of lectures, the arts, fellowship, and worship. And the text is still there too, which gives a rundown of the theme of the day together with highlights of the activities in which we're engaged. The slide show for any particular day will start automatically when you click on that day's Journal entry. So far we've got entries for our first two days, on Baptism and Creation.

Click here to check out the 2009 Journal.

And for any pastors and youth ministers reading this post, leave comments if you have any questions about anything I share related to DYA. I'm focusing on this because it is what I'm doing this summer, but it is also a program I believe in very much. There's just nothing better to help high school youth learn to live deeply the Christian life in a holistic way. I hope you'll think about directing some of your own kids to DYA next summer!

Gearing up for DYA

Tomorrow the Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation begins here on Duke's campus. This is my second year to work for DYA as one of the Ministry Coordinators (essentially an administrative position that helps to organize and resource one of DYA's program areas).

DYA's website describes it this way:

"The Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation is a two-week summer program for selected high school students to live in an intentional Christian community on the Duke University campus ... Days are patterned by worship through word and sacrament, reflection on scripture, study, service, play; practices ancient and modern that nourish the life of faith."

That's an accurate statement, but it doesn't do justice to the richness of the DYA experience. When the website overview goes on to say, "You will leave the academy challenged to consider your baptismal vocation, confident that God is shaping your future in radical and exciting ways," it's getting closer to the mark. To put it simply, I've never seen anything like what DYA offers to 16 and 17-year old youth.

As the outgrowth of Dr. Fred Edie's theological vision for youth ministry, DYA is centered around living an embodied Christian faith as part of a community of other young disciples of Jesus. That life is ordered around the symbols of book, bath, table, and time - with the book as Holy Scripture, the bath as Baptism, the table as Holy Communion, and time as the Patterning of Time in Christian Community. The high school students who come here each summer commit to living a semi-monastic life.

And get this: they love it.

I'm going to post a lot about DYA over the next couple of weeks. If you know of a youth who will be a rising junior or senior in high school at this time next year who might be interested in this experience, I'd encourage you to point him or her to what I post. In the meantime, here are some previous links you might find interesting:

A post from last year's Duke Youth Academy, which was my first as a member of the DYA staff. In the post I offer a little bit of an overview on the program based on my experience of it as a first-time staffer.

A book review of mine in the UM Reporter on Fred Edie's Book, Bath, Table, and Time: Christian Worship as Source and Resource for Youth Ministry. This is an excellent theology of youth ministry. A companion volume that will offer practical curriculum based off of Edie's vision is currently in the works.

A new look at Youth Ministry

A few days ago, I wrote a post on the Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation, which took place on the campus of Duke University in July. DYA draws kids from all over the country (and this year, Haiti as well) so that they can experience two weeks of intentional Christian community and theological study. Many of the kids who attend are already discerning a calling to some form of ministry. The focus of DYA is on the practices of the Christian life in the areas of Scripture, Baptism, Holy Communion, and the Prayerful Patterning of Time.

DYA faculty director Fred Edie takes those four essential elements of the Christian life and examines them in relation to youth ministry in his new book, Book, Bath, Table, and Time: Christian Worship as Source and Resource for Youth Ministry. I read this book in preparation for my own work as a Ministry Coordinator at DYA this year, and I've got to tell you, it's one of the best practical theology-oriented books that I've read in years. I just published a review of Dr. Edie's book, which you can find here if you'd like to read it.

Dr. Edie's work takes dead aim at a lot of the market-driven, highly individualistic, experience-heavy approaches to youth ministry that are so fashionable today. (I had never thought about how problematic youth ski trips could be; the first few pages of the book offer a devastating critique of them.) He suggests that teen fashion bibles like Revolve are exactly where the market approach to youth formation is going, and he wants the church to step in and say, "Wait!" Dr. Edie calls on the church to realize that it already has the resources it needs to form youth into mature Christians, and these resources are found exactly in those sacred gifts that the Holy Spirit is constantly offering the church: its book (Scripture), bath (Baptism), table (the Lord's Supper), and time (a form of life patterned by worship and prayer).

Don't be mistaken. This is not a book that's going to offer you the 10 Hottest New Ideas in Youth Ministry. But it's going to do something much better. It's going to engage you in thinking about how we form (or fail to form) our youth in truly theological ways. It's going to help you realize how new the oldest practices of the church can be, exactly because we haven't been using them with our very own children and youth. And it's going to suggest that it is really possible to integrate youth ministry into the full life of the church, instead of treating it like some odd appendage on the body of Christ that no one is sure what to do with.

This is a great book not just for youth ministers, but for pastors as well. Dr. Edie is an engaging, witty, and theologically insightful writer. Check it out.

Duke Youth Academy

The Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation here at the Divinity School began on Sunday. I am the Ministry Coordinator for Community Practices at DYA this year, so I have the privilege of spending this week and next with about 60 very talented high school students who are here to participate in two weeks of intentional Christian living.

The DYA website describes the community in this way: "Duke Youth Academy ... is an intensive encounter with Christian life. Days are patterned by worship through word and sacrament, reflection on scripture, study, service, play; practices ancient and modern that nourish the life of faith." But such descriptions don't do justice to the richness of what goes on here. This is the best formational program I have seen in terms of helping teenagers grapple with serious theological questions while also showing them an almost monastic way of going about the Christian life.

A typical day begins with a communal breakfast, followed by morning prayer. Students then hear a plenary lecture by a member of the Duke Divinity School faculty, and they follow that up with a workshop on worship planning. Following lunch, students have a mandatory rest period where they spend sabbath-time in their rooms. Afternoons consist of different activities: On some days, students will go out into the community for service and work projects. Other afternoons, they attend art workshops and prayer practice workshops where they get to engage in hands-on learning and practice around art-as-theology and different prayer traditions. Following supper, the whole community worships together and then students split up into "Mentor Groups" where they get to engage in conversation with a theologically-trained mentor.

We are only halfway through the first week, and I am amazed by this program. The faculty director is Dr. Fred Edie, who also teaches at Duke. His theological vision for youth ministry (which you can read about in his new book, Book, Bath, Table, and Time) drives the structure and program of DYA. The rest of the staff, led by Assistant Director (and current Duke student) Katherine Smith, is a talented and committed group of Christians who pour everything they have into forming young disciples of Jesus Christ.

DYA will certainly be keeping me busy for the next few days. And by the way, if you know a kid who will be a rising junior or senior in high school next year and would benefit from DYA, point them our way! All the necessary information is available on the DYA website, where you can also read reflections on daily life at the Academy from this year and past years as well.

[Note: I'm reviewing Dr. Edie's book for the United Methodist Reporter. When that appears online, I'll provide a link to it.]

Young People's Address at GC

The 2004 General Conference created the Division on Ministries with Young People, within the General Board of Discipleship. Now the 2008 General Conference has heard the first ever Young People's Address, before the whole gathered body. United Methodist News Service reports on today's address in this news story. It sounds like the 6 teenagers and young adults represented a diverse cross-section of the church.

The church yearns for young people, and young people yearn for a place to belong, according to one of those who gave the address. Amen to that. What they said up there is important. The fact that the church invited them to say it and celebrated their presence is even more so.

Let's talk about sex

Shannon Vowell has a remarkable article in the United Methodist Reporter this week where she calls the church to reappraise its teaching (or lack thereof) on sex and sexuality to its youth. She writes, "The bottom line on teenage sexual practice as far as our church is concerned is this: We've failed them by copping out on Scriptural teaching about sex, both institutionally and individually." She says that our desire to be relevant has led us to become relativistic, both in moral teaching and in fundamental doctrines such as the truth of salvation through Christ and the nature of God as Trinity.

She goes on to observe that "about sex, we stand silent - or simply echo a muted version of the ethos of culture: Anything goes, because we are too civilized and sophisticated to need God's boundaries."

Now, anyone who grew up in a United Methodist Church where the silence on sex was deafening can relate to what Shannon is saying. I grew up in a church like that, and while no one in the church - pastors included - would have thought they were doing anything wrong, neither did they consider that the church is the absolute best place for children and youth to learn about their sexuality.

In a seminar I'm currently taking on ethics in the early church, we spent a couple of weeks reading the church fathers on marriage and sex. Granted, the early church had some views on sexuality that we would rightly question. But what was significant to me is that these guys were preaching on sex and seeking to engage their congregations in the issue of how sex should be rightly understood. A colleague of mine in the class said that she had led a "good sex" retreat for her youth while a pastor in Arizona, which was oriented around helping adolescents understand sexuality in healthy and holy ways. But my colleague's courageous ministry aside, I think Shannon Vowell's view is the more common one in the church: Sexuality is considered so taboo that most churches won't engage their children on it at all.

Watching what this leads to in campus culture is as depressing as it is frightening. How many of us went to colleges or universities where, without any real formation around issues of sexuality in our faith communities, we were thrown into a culture where Bacchanalian revelry was the rule rather than the exception? And with no formation, what resources do such kids have to fall back on?

It is not as if there aren't brave individuals out there. Take Justin Noia, an undergraduate here at Duke who wrote this column last year on valuing sex and sexuality as a fundamental and inseparable component of love - something you would not want to trade in cheaply. Of course, Noia's column received angry letters to the editor (such as this one and this one) that insisted that his views were boring, Victorian, and misogynistic.

There is also a growing trend amongst Ivy League schools for abstinence organizations (or "chastity clubs"), such as the one described in this NY Times Magazine article on Janie Fredell and Harvard's True Love Revolution organization. It is a fascinating story, and one must appreciate the heroism of young adults who embrace chastity as a virtue in a culture that is often hostile to such a practice.

But we might ask, "How do we turn chastity from a virtue of the heroic minority to a viable or even preferred option for Christian college students?" I think the answer to that question has a lot to do with what Shannon is talking about in her article: it has to start at church.

Do you have any experiences of ministries on sex and sexuality in your own church context? Do you have any resources that you would recommend?