Let me begin by admitting that I am inspired by youth workers I know who are committed to proclaiming the gospel to students, pursuing them with their investments of time, relationship, sacrifice, and love. Their actions embody the perpetual hope that consistently announces good news that God is near, that God loves eternally, and that God is calling each person toward her or his created identity. I continually hope youth workers know that their thinking, planning, joys, heartaches, and sleepless nights proclaim our future hope in the here and now.
As with any discipline, there is always room for improvement as youth ministry relentlessly pursues clarity and authenticity in its proclamation. In this spirit, I urge youth workers to reflect on the following…
Proclamation is revealed through a compelling narrative, not bumper stickers. Proclamation sound bites, sadly, still cloud youth ministry’s proclamation with disjointed, undeveloped, dogmatic phrases that only perpetuate confusion and misunderstanding. For example, saying, “Jesus died for your sins” to an American teenager (or parent) will likely mean little unless one understands the significance of creation, fall, blood sacrifice, or resurrection.
Youth ministry must erase bumper-sticker proclamation from its discourse and methods, recognizing that announcing the mystery of the gospel requires a broader understanding of the biblical narrative that unfolds through teaching, dialogue, and faithful journeying in relationship. This narrative must be faithfully proclaimed within the whole community of faith as it is told and retold through the beautiful rhythms of the church calendar and intentional liturgy.
Proclamation devoid of the narrative, apart from a community that lives into the narrative, remains a sound bite. Let’s clarify proclamation with narrative, within community.
Proclamation needs congruency in words and actions…and in youth workers. Let’s sidestep the debate over whether word or action comes first in proclamation. Both are needed and, more importantly, both need to be congruent. Further, students’ experiences of love, grace, forgiveness, reconciliation, discipleship, prayer, etc., need an interpreting faith community that encourages them to make meaning of what they are understanding and experiencing.
Interpretation through a faith community is expressed through various forms—explanation, teaching, worship, modeling, ritual, and symbol all embody proclamation. When this happens, the proclaimed message of Jesus rings with congruency, resisting bodiless platitudes, random acts, and hypocritical expectations (which adolescents can smell a mile away).
For this readership, let’s keep in mind that a congruent proclamation within a congruent community requires congruent youth pastors, youth workers, and youth ministries. Reflect on your personal and ministry congruency and commit to keeping words and theory and actions and experiences within close proximity so that students catch the connection.
Proclamation invites liberation, not suppression. One of the challenges I often see with youth workers is that they get stuck believing that there is only one way to proclaim the gospel and only one way to respond to it. I believe this perspective (even though often driven by good intentions) suppresses adolescents’ faith formation. When one’s own cultural and personal experiences are uncritically fused with a narrow theology, it leaves little room for one to accept the responses and journeys of others that may be different from one’s own. The result often ends with those in positions of power (adult youth workers) prescribing both message and response.
This truncated proclamation celebrates “faithfulness” by rewarding behaviorism and conformity while suppressing critical thinking. Adolescents, then, are taught that their thinking, questioning, creative expression, and varied responses to good news beyond the narrow bandwidth prescribed by authority figures are off limits. Some research shows that adolescents are smart enough to play the game, making adults/authority figures happy by offering the right answers while working out their real issues on their own, in other places, with other peers, in other ways. Proclamation invites adolescents into safe space, liberating them to hear and respond to the good news of Jesus. It doesn’t drive them away to work things out on their own.
This challenges youth workers to embrace the beauty and mystery of what they’re proclaiming and stretches them to welcome to multiple responses and journeys (based on culture, development, etc.). It may challenge even youth workers’ own understanding of good news.
Better proclamation isn’t louder. It’s bigger, closer, and wider. Let this define youth ministry’s ongoing proclamation.
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The word kerygma is a transliteration of a Greek word that describes preaching and/or the content of preaching or proclaiming. In the first century, kerygma meant the proclamation by a herald who had an important announcement. The emerging church described in the book of Acts embraced this cultural tool.
In the New Testament framework, the kerygma is an announcement of divine action by God. It was in the context of the reality of Jesus’ resurrection that the kerygma received its mandate. The disciples discovered an empty tomb and later interacted with the resurrected Jesus Christ. They could not help but proclaim far and wide that Jesus Christ, who was born miraculously, lived sinlessly, proclaimed the kingdom of heaven was at hand, died sacrificially, arose from the dead victorious, and ascended into the heavens, is Lord.
In the simplest terms, our proclamation is “Jesus Christ is Lord.” In the fullest sense of proclaiming the good news, we declare that God is at work to redeem and restore the whole creation. There are many evangelicals who have unfortunately drawn the battle lines with a definition of proclamation that narrowly focuses on a particular view of atonement.
Youth ministry must move away from a proclamation ensnared by formulaic and one-dimensional soteriology. A kerygma that focuses solely on You’re a sinner who is going to hell but Jesus died for you so you can go to heaven if you ask Jesus into your heart is deficient in heralding the scope of truth contained in the great good news.
Our efforts to preach and proclaim the great good news seem warped when we start out with the emphasis that people are sinful and need to get saved so they can go to heaven when they die. Let’s herald the good news that starts with the reality that all human beings were created imago Dei (in the image of God). Let’s connect the imago Dei in our fellow human beings with the overarching story of God at work in the world. We should not start the story in Genesis 3 with the fall of humanity. We’ll get there soon enough. I meet few human beings who deny that they are broken.
For youth ministry to properly proclaim the great good news, we must embrace a high Christology. We must look to the Lord Jesus Christ, who is God’s proclamation of good news. Also, I think it is critical that we embrace the whole of the Christ event—not just birth, crucifixion, and resurrection but also the words and teachings of Jesus.
I believe it is the responsibility of the church and of God’s people to always be on the lookout for demonstrations of God’s in-breaking kingdom, even when these acts come from outside the church and from non-Christians. When we see people and institutions cooperating with God, our proclamation should be to point it out and declare, “There it is!”
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As a professor who routinely grades sermons of current and future youth pastors and a consultant who hears a lot of youth pastors speak, this is an issue I’ve had a lot of time to consider. Therefore, I offer the following two suggestions for improvement:
1) Preach the whole narrative of Scripture. Why is it that most people only seem to preach from the New Testament? In one of my classes, I ask students to think about the last 10 youth sermons they’ve heard and to identify whether the sermons came from the Old or New Testament. On average, they indicate that 80% of the sermons were from the New Testament.
We sometimes seem to forget that we are the people of the book…the whole book. How can one make sense of Jesus the Messiah, who chooses peace over violence, without first understanding the suffering servant of Isaiah? How can we help our teenagers grasp the importance of the Passover meal without first comprehending the Passover account as found in Exodus? In short, the Old Testament is as much a part of our history as the New is. And in a culture where adolescents seem to learn best by narrative, the Old Testament is replete with narratives, both small and large, that are part of our identity as the people of God.
Given that most young people have trouble connecting the dots between the biblical stories, perhaps the best thing we can do is to take our students through Scripture from beginning to end to give them a sense of the whole story. What if you were to devote a year to preaching through the Bible? For instance, one could show God’s salvation history by choosing 52 representative stories or themes from Genesis through Revelation that illustrate God’s mercy extended to his people. This would not only help students see how the stories connect but give them the big picture of God’s work throughout Scripture.
2) Learn to properly exegete your audience. As a seminary professor, I often hear sermons that are biblically and theologically solid yet never connect with their intended audience largely because the speakers never thought to consider whom they were speaking to and what the congregations’ needs were.
Look closely at the story of your youth group. What kid of worlds do they live in? Do you know their needs, fears, and desires? Do you understand them developmentally, culturally, and spiritually? This is sociological analysis, and it is vitally important if we want students to be able to apply what we are saying.
Homiletics professor David Buttrick says that one of the most important things that should occur in any sermon is an understanding of the blocks (cultural, social, denominational, religious, etc.) a congregation might have that keep it from hearing what you are saying. Ask yourself, What thought patterns or prejudices exist in the minds of these students that could prevent them from receiving this message? Then work to address those concerns in the sermon.
As a side note, one of the problems with preaching someone else’s sermons is that the person who originally wrote the sermon doesn’t know your youth group. He or she may understand adolescents and youth culture, but they don’t know your particular group of students. They don’t know about the young girl who confessed to you last week that she was pregnant or the boy whose parents are getting a divorce. They don’t understand the unique context (geographically, culturally, denominationally, etc.) that is part of your group’s identity. Therefore, it is impossible for that sermon to truly connect with your group since you haven’t done the hard work of exegeting your group and addressing their congregational blocks.
3) Allow the sermon to shape you before you expect it to shape others. Authenticity is a buzzword these days when it comes to preaching, and with good reason. Our students need to know not only that can we explain the text but that we are living the text in our own lives before we ask them to do so. Are you willing to spend equal amounts of time both in sermon preparation and in what Tim Keel calls heart meditation—that deep, intimate conversation with God where our very souls are shaped by the text?
Jesus himself did more than just teach and tell others what to do. Instead, he caused them to hunger for the righteousness they needed by demonstrating in his own life a vital relationship with the Father. He modeled an attitude and devotion that spurred others to imitation. As preachers, we must take care that the character and examples of our lives are consistent with the messages we speak.
Preaching to adolescents may be one of the hardest things we do. Yet if we are willing to do the hard work of biblical and cultural exegesis, thereby opening ourselves to God’s transformation, preaching to youth can become a vitally important aspect of discipleship.
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