Due to the limited space here, I’ll lay out my assumptions pertaining to this question. I’m going to focus on paid/professional youth workers because I think there are different expectations based on the nature of their roles versus volunteer youth workers who are equally qualified but have more limited resources. Second, I’m going to define community development as the process of helping the community develop to its full potential through empowering individuals and groups.
Youth workers must have a commitment to the whole person. Often, youth ministry forces false dichotomies, creating sacred and secular. This has often led youth ministry to emphasize the spiritual at the expense of the equally sacred aspects of the adolescent. While it is essential that youth workers mentor young people in spiritual disciplines and in the practices of their faith community, adolescents also need help learning, relating to their parents, negotiating peer influences, and dealing with pressures at home, neighborhood, school, and society. Youth talks, Bible studies, and lock-ins get lost in translation unless youth workers see a more complex and colorful adolescent.
This also means that the youth worker must see elements of community development as an essential part of the gospel, not as a means to an end. When we start “meeting the needs of adolescents” in order to “tell them the gospel,” we reinforce a sacred/secular dichotomy that bifurcates rather than integrates adolescents. Instead, we must bring “good news” and “gospel” back together.
What is interesting is that in Matthew 25, where Jesus pronounces judgment over the sheep and goats, we observe that Jesus highlights gospel in terms of what good news means to the poor, the hungry, the lonely, and the sick. I’d suggest, then, that instead of youth workers merely defining gospel in abstract concepts, they re-imagine gospel as good news as defined by young people in their communities. The question youth workers must ask each adolescent is, What is good news to you? Appreciating these answers may change youth ministry’s assumptions, budgets, programs, and approaches.
Youth workers must have a commitment to the whole community. Christian Smith’s work (also referenced in Andy Root’s work) claims that youth ministries often subscribe to “free-will individualism” and “anti-structuralism” that ignores systemic problems within society, placing the problem and the solution on the individual. An overemphasis on the individual misses the systemic problems that affect young people (poverty, racism, family systems, education, policy, etc.).
In my estimation, this assumption creates a misunderstood role of the youth worker in the broader community. Some youth workers operate as if they are the only true game in town, living in competition with other youth groups or assuming that it’s up to them alone to “save” this generation in their community. Lack of true partnership with other churches, schools, government, social services, counselors, etc., fosters an unrealistic perspective of how best to serve one’s community through youth ministry. The SEARCH Institute’s 40 Developmental Assets are a helpful step toward rethinking what your youth ministry’s role is within the whole community and how youth workers can lead, follow, and partner with others advocating for adolescents within their communities.
Youthworkers must have a commitment to their whole discipline. My first two points likely make my last point obvious: Youth ministry that is committed to community development calls for a different kind of youth worker. Gone are the days where youth workers’ job descriptions were merely about programming and hanging out with kids. Those committed to a whole gospel for the whole community must have the knowledge and skills to appreciate sociology, adolescent development, theology, and community partnership (with teachers, parents, civic leaders). This past week, our student ministry team spent time reflecting on the major strands of adolescent/emerging adulthood research and theology we believe must inform our ministry practices. Conversations like these are reframing our roles, reestablishing our priorities, and remaking us as youth workers.
Community development, therefore, needs youth worker development.
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This is an interesting question. The phrase community development became a part of our culture’s vernacular during the 2008 presidential campaign because of President Obama’s past role as a community organizer. The phrase community development has defined organized and ongoing efforts dedicated to improving community life, especially focused on caring for those who have been marginalized.
Recently the phrase community development is increasingly used more broadly to describe efforts to improve the quality of life and deal with challenging issues in our residential communities, especially within neglected urban centers. A growing number of Christians who believe that engagement in social justice is a part of God’s missional calling are using the phrase community development to define their activities of service and ministry within needy communities. I have used this language because I live among networks of Christians who use this nomenclature.
However, as I have considered an answer to this question, I suggest that we use the phrase community development frugally and specifically. There are people who have been called vocationally into community development. I think we belittle their work when we call sporadic service projects the same thing. When our youth ministries and churches engage in meaningful work that blesses our communities, we are behaving missionally and honoring God. It is important for God’s people to participate in God’s mission to help those in need, to extend mercy, and to work for justice.
Our activities of service should be intentional and ongoing. The church of Jesus Christ exists to engage in God’s mission. The church is to be about blessing the world, not itself. Our commitment to follow God in the way of Jesus sends us into the world to serve God, our communities, and our neighbors so that God’s will may be done on earth as it is in heaven. The church is called to embody the love of God in our communities, our cities, and throughout the world.
Serving communities in proximity to where we live for the love of God and love of neighbor is crucial if we desire to embody the great good news. It is the role of a youth worker to help our young people understand what it means to participate in God’s mission in the world. Too often we depend on the Mission Trip to shape our kids missionally. The mission trip may result in wonderful ministry, but it can create a distorted theology of mission.
In fact, I will go so far as to say that short-term mission trips should be suspended until you find a meaningful way to serve in proximity to where you live. If we (youth workers) do not build a missional ethos and behavior in our own communities first, we reinforce the tragic idea that serving God is something done “over there.” Missional thinking and living must be rooted in the here and now if it is to become a way of life. If your response to suspending short-term mission trips is concern for the people you serve “over there,” wherever “over there” is, then I suggest sending the foreign mission a portion of the money your youth group would spend to go “over there.” In the future, make faithful involvement in serving communities locally a prerequisite to going on a short-term mission trip.
I think we should reserve the phrase community development until we are deeply, regularly, and sustainably involved in serving and living within a particular community of need. Even if we are involved with works of mercy and actions of justice as we participate in God’s mission in a particular community over a long period of time, I still think we would be remiss to call our efforts community development. I believe one must actually live in the community of need one is serving to be able to consider the efforts community development.
I see an ever-increasing number of Christians relocating to communities that have been neglected by churches, government, and society in general. I admire those who move into certain neighborhoods for the purpose of living missionally. We should connect our youth groups with these bold missionaries and develop consistent and deep partnership to glorify God by embodying the gospel in communities that have been forgotten.
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I have to begin by saying that I’ve never really thought about this question as it’s being posed here. So that means, at least in my mind, that I can take back everything I say here if later I think it blows. Deal?
I think youth workers have absolutely no role in community development and yet everything to do with it. What I mean is that I think our purpose in ministry is to participate in the action of God; our concern is to seek out what God is doing in the world of young people. But God’s action comes from God’s future. God acts from the place of the resurrection, from the location of the new humanity and new creation, encountering all that is not the new, seeking to act to bring it into God’s redemptive life. The youth worker’s role is to participate in this action, to seek to place him or herself at the location of God’s action in world, to have eyes to see those places in the world where God is encountering death for the sake of life. It is the gospel that is the youth worker’s reason for being.
That said, to participate in God’s action in the world is to partake in the world; it is to delve deeply into the reality of the world. So the youth worker may very well participate in community development by providing outlets for the homeless or hungry or basketball programs for elementary-age kids. But these outlets exist not to develop social capital and lower crime rates (thought that’s not bad) but to witness to God’s action bringing forth the redemptive. The youth worker organizes these outlets as a concrete way of pointing to God’s future, a future where no one is without a home, a meal, or safety; the youth worker does these things as way of pointing to God’s action. The goal is not necessarily to be a community developer but to participate with God in the world, which can (and in some contexts will) lead to community development.
This means that success in ministry is viewed in a different way. If you see yourself as a community developer, than you have only succeeded when all homelessness and hunger are gone, when everyone is fed and sheltered. Anything short of this is short of success. The church does proclaim that society and structure must act to make human life human, using its structure to keep people from the dehumanization of homelessness and hunger. This is the church’s—the youth worker’s—prophetic calling. If you are the one who does this, then you are only successful when all problems are wiped away.
But from an eschatological perspective, from the perspective of God’s redemptive act, the youth worker’s actions of shelter and feeding come not with the naïve belief that they end homeless and poverty but with powerful proclamation that these acts, even small—feeding just this one child—witness to God’s future that is even now on its way into the world through the church’s action. Success in ministry is not solving every community problem but entering the problems and acting as a way of participating in God’s future.
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Comments
So, for me, both Andy's and Mikes comments remind me of the tension youthworkers must live in- proclaiming (in its broadest sense) the future hope of the gospel and recognizing that God is putting the world back together through our weak and limited expressions. Thanks, guys.