Douglas Williams Blog, Home

WWTAWWTAG

Reading Rob Bell is like listening to pop music. It’s catchy, fun, and, when you turn it off, you walk around humming it just above a whisper. I’ve read a few of Bell’s books (Velvet Elvis, Sex God, Jesus Wants to Save Christians, Drops Like Stars), and I always get this feeling inside that I have to finish it as quickly as possible. Like it’s a race. I scan from one sentence to the next. You can’t linger over Bell. I don’t really know what this means; it’s just the way I read Bell.

I was surprised to read that Bell’s title was inspired from Haruki Murkami’s memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I have vivid memories of staying up late at church camp a couple of summers ago and reading that book by the light of my iPhone.

Bell has three talking points when he talks about God. He is With us, For us and Ahead of us.

I don’t really want to lay out those three points. Instead, when I talk about Bell, I want to talk about his use of the “profane”, the cultural vernacular. Bell is pop-theology, and that’s why he can draw such a large audience. He’s relative. He knows culture, high and low, but I’m not sure he distinguishes between the two. I think he sees all of life as this huge playground. He plays, skins his knees, deals with a bully, goes down the slide, climbs across the monkey bars, knowing God is with him, for him and somehow leading him as he plays. If he finds something interesting, he’ll tell you about it, but he doesn’t really care if you find it interesting or if it insults you. He’ll tell you how to define a word in Hebrew and then quote Ricky Bobby. He will make you listen.

I don’t read Bell because he offers great theological insight. I read Bell because Bell reminds me that all this writing and speaking and teaching involves real people in real lives who have other things on their minds and easily get bored and distracted when people talk about God. This isn’t just happening in my head for the sake of me becoming smarter, better, whatever. It’s happening because I want it to get in other people’s heads.

Bell was recently in Nashville speaking at Vanderbilt, and he did a Q&A session at the end of his talk. Someone asked for some advice, and one of the interesting things Bell suggested is that the guy should become a student of culture. I get the sense that this is what’s at the core of Bell’s speaking and writing, culture. I think he does his best to communicate – which, whatever you think about him, he’s pretty darn good at – and then he let’s God take it from there. Really, there’s not much else you can do.

Douglas Williams Blog, Home

Bonhoeffer’s Three Questions of Theology

In a previous post, I briefly described Andrew Root’s Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry and the tagline from the book of taking the relational aspects of youth ministry and turning it into a more robust theology.

Root draws heavily from Bonhoeffer throughout his book, and while the choice of Bonhoeffer may seem strange, Root points out that Bonhoeffer served as the secretary of youth in the ecumenical movement. So, it could, as Root argues, be true that though Bonhoeffer never explicitly wrote about youth ministry, his theology was probably written with teens in mind.

Here are Bonhoeffer’s three questions of theology with commentary and notes by Root.

Where is Jesus Christ? Christ is in the world and in the church. He is present in the relational aspects of this world and stands in between the transcendence of human relationships. As I can never know, completely and fully, my daughter as she grows and matures, we can never fully know each other. Humans are transcendent from one another. With this in mind, Root describes Christ as standing within this otherness, mediating the humanity of one person to another as the true human. With such a serious perspective of relationships, it becomes difficult to use the presence of Christ in such a utilitarian manner. “One does not love God in the neighbor, nor are neighbors loved to make them Christian-neighbors are loved for their own name sake, and in this love of the human companions one serves the will of God.”

What then shall we do?  Root uses ‘place sharing’ as a term to describe the formation of relationships. We “take the self of the other into my own self.” We do not lose ourselves in this process, but we make their suffering our own and as we stand with and for them, we come to know God. And this act is consistently done only through the presence of Jesus. We take on guilt in this process which is why, for Bonhoeffer, he made the decision to renounce his pacifism and become complicit in the assassination of Hitler. When we ignore the humanity of others, we violate our belief that Christ is place-sharer for all of humanity.

Root ends his work with some ideas about youth ministry, describing ways to create a youth ministry with a healthy focus on the relational. I valued, as a bit of an introvert, his insistence that the youth worker need not be “crazy, wild and maniacally outgoing.” Instead the youth worker should look for ways to foster organic relationships between teens and adults. It is around common, shared interest or task that relationships organically form. The youth worker’s job is to think about ways to have the humanity of those whose are other interact and, through that interaction, share in the presence of Christ.

Root has given me some theological chops to hold onto while I talk about the importance of a relational youth ministry. He has provided several good counters and corrections to the problems that can come from a relational ministry which fails to take seriously the relationship as the place where Christ is.

Douglas Williams Blog, Home

Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry

If there’s a buzz word in youth ministry it’s ‘relational.’ Every activity from game nights to day outings and youth group classes to mission trips are conducted with an eye towards building relationships. But what does this mean?

In my own ministry, I’ve used the term when talking about creating clubs at school, positing this time as an opportunity for students and teachers to get to know each other in a different way. Clubs would give students a chance to build relationships with teachers over a shared interest like fishing or obscure indie music. Many thought it was strange that such an initiative was coming from the Spiritual Formation team, but we were able to sell it because it was ‘relational.’

But what was I talking about when I suggested that teachers use this time to ‘build relationships with teens?’

If you had asked me this question six months ago, I would have talked about the importance of having a student feel comfortable enough with an adult so that when they began asking questions about faith and salvation, they would have someone they would listen to. My theology of relational youth ministry hinted at a principle of influence. We build relationships with teenagers and then we use those relationships to influence them to make good decisions and commitments of faith.

Andrew Root’s Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry challenges this idea of using relationships as a strategy to influence teens. Using Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology of community and relationship, Root questions and reforms youth ministry’s fascination with relational, urging ministers and teachers to embrace a deeper theology of incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection.

In the first section of Root’s work, he reminds us of the historical roots of relational ministry, tracing out the beginnings of adolescence as a distinct developmental stage. Through para-church organizations like Young Life, the church hired youth ministers who were trained in the practice of building community by using the influence of popular teens.  Youth leaders sought out those who were “cool,” made them believe that they too were cool, formed relationships with them and capitalized on that friendship to reach out to other students.

Root goes on to correct this method of ministry by examining Bonhoeffer’s three questions of theology: Who is Jesus Christ? Where is Jesus Christ? What then shall we do?  I’ll examine each of these in a future post.

I really valued Root’s analysis of relational ministry and the way he utilized Bonhoeffer’s theology to describe a theology of youth ministry. For too long I myself have felt uncomfortable with the view that youth ministry success is focused on the dynamics of the group’s leader. Instead, Root calls for youth workers to reexamine their theology of using relationship for the sole purpose of influence because it is within these relationships that Christ dwells.