Somehow, through the years of church development, discipleship was diluted. It became a system of education that rested its impact on one idea that has proven false. That thought is simply: Right thinking leads to right behavior. If knowing the right things to do and the reasons behind those behaviors were enough, then wouldn’t ministry be so much easier? Discipleship isn’t only about education. It has to go beyond giving the facts of the faith and get involved in the person. The hard questions that linger behind our everyday thoughts are where discipleship lives.

Legalism is another trap for discipleship. As much as understanding can’t be the end, neither can behavior. If that were true, the world would be a much better place, but legalism isn’t the fix the church thought it was. Instead of making moral people, it made judgmental people. It gave them a false sense of what the gospel means. Instead of holding a ruler over everyone’s head, discipleship wants to see hearts moved toward God. Like Merton’s prayer, it believes that the desire to please God does, in fact, please him. So instead of exacting a system of right doing, discipleship focuses on right being.

Unlike contemporary discipleship, Jesus didn’t use books (education), didn’t rest on behavioralism (legalism), and didn’t force the world’s way of life on his disciples. Instead, he helped them know themselves and pointed to what God was doing around them.

In Matthew 16, Jesus has an exchange with Simon that is well known. In that encounter, Jesus asks his disciples who people say he is and who they think he is. Simon, ever eager, jumps in and calls Jesus the Messiah. Jesus not only recognizes Simon for this, but he calls out the change by renaming him Peter. Jesus points to something deep within Peter and marks that unique characteristic in him. Discipleship should do this as well. It needs to see specific bits of people’s personalities and call them out. In my experience, this most often happens when relationships are developed enough for disciples to feel safe. When they do, they reveal more about themselves and their response to God.

Often the most painful moments of brokenness are where God shows who we are. It isn’t wasted on me that, right after Peter receives a new name, he is called Satan by Jesus. Peter must have felt schizophrenic. But this exchange points to a key element of Peter’s faith. He is impetuous. When that ready, fire, aim mentality trusts God, he sees for himself how close to Jesus he is. On the other hand, when he doesn’t trust and actually tries to force his own way, it proves how apart from God he is.

Another example I look to for discipleship is Jesus’s response to the religious leaders in John 5. After being attacked for healing on the Sabbath, Jesus explains something about the way he lives life. He lives life watching for God’s work and then joins in. Discipleship can learn a lot from this explanation. If instead of educating and measuring, it could point to God’s work; then it would be much closer to the way Jesus leads his disciples.

Jesus has an amazing track record with his way of discipleship. By investing himself in twelve men, he changed the church for thousands of years. Where would his death and resurrection have led, apart from his disciples carrying that message afterward? When we as youth workers trust other methods—education, behavior modification, distraction, entertainment, etc.—what we really show is our lack of faith in Jesus’s way. My hope for the future and the hopeful revolution of youth ministry (and the church) is that spiritual leaders will see Jesus’s example and follow it more closely. If that happens, the future is assured.

Experience is also a necessary part of discipleship. Jesus taught his disciples as they were, out in the villages, putting them right in the middle of God happenings. Often he held off teaching them until after an experience–a miracle or sending them out to do ministry. Sometimes he just allowed these experiences to be the teacher. Discipleship seems to be an ongoing experience; an encounter with and surrendering to the living God.

However, community seems to be the glue that holds discipleship and formation together. If, in the simplest sense, discipleship is the lifelong process of becoming like Jesus, then the business of the church is to create environments to foster that–to be a community of discipleship.

It seems that modern church culture has stripped away much of the relational dynamic of discipleship and formation. Discipleship in many churches is relegated to a class you attend to learn and adhere to beliefs and doctrine. In many churches, discipleship becomes a curriculum where growth is marked by knowledge. After all the blanks in the discipleship workbook are filled in, the expectation is that this knowledge will be integrated into the thoughts and actions of each participant.

What this approach lacks is the idea that discipleship is a journey and not a destination. It is a continual process of becoming and being made new. It is about much more than the acquisition of knowledge; it is about transformation. Some of what made Jesus’s discipleship so potent is that it was not just expressed in a sterile classroom. It went well beyond philosophical colloquy and systematized steps for living. Jesus’s discipling was an impartation of himself, lived out in three dimensions. It was a daily relational-living experience of being with his disciples. The disciples saw Jesus, filled with compassion, reaching out to a hurting and confused world. Jesus processed life and real needs with them, awakening them toward a kingdom understanding.

When discipleship becomes just about knowing doctrine and Scripture, it becomes disconnected from its relational essence. It becomes disembodied, disrupting the fabric of who we are as Christ’s body, called to help form one another in his likeness. As the Spirit of God gives us life, we are to impart that life to one another. Christian communities hold the potential to become beautiful, robust pictures of the revelation of Christ–far more than just one individual can reflect. It is God’s remarkable intention to express Godself through community.

The very nature of Christianity is one of community. A branch connected to the vine; a body with many parts; our growth and health are inextricably connected to one another. We cannot become disciples of Christ without the continual nurture, challenge, and care of a community. It is difficult for us to sense that we are deeply known by God if we are not deeply known by others. Part of becoming a disciple is to be seen and heard by others. A discipling community helps uphold and redirect us when we lose our way.

Part of the Jewish faith tradition is to embrace a communal understanding of formation. For centuries, Jews have wrestled with their faith together. Dialogue about the Scriptures and how they should be lived out continues to be a central part of being shaped spiritually as a Jew. In the Hebrew culture, diversity of thought is vital to growth and enlightenment. There is a palpable anticipation that God is always doing something new and that the reflections found in the thoughts and lives of our community reveal God to us in profound ways.

To be formed requires pliability, an openness and vulnerability with God and others. As we open ourselves up in community of faith, it releases the possibility for God to form and remake us together.

There was a good post about formation and community on this very blog in 2010: Slant33.com/FormationCommunity

In this spirit, discipleship is about strategically investing a lot of resources into those who truly want to grow. As unpopular as this statement may be, it is reflective of the ministry of Jesus as he sought to found a movement through the rabbinic style of the day, where disciples were willing to follow him. We pray that God will be with each person as they move forward in life in becoming apprentices. Let them have a teachable spirit and the courage to make the necessary changes in their lives to move forward in their purpose. May each person who takes this message to heart be transformed by God and take the necessary steps in order to be mentors to those who will follow in their footsteps.

To the dismay of many, ministries often do not outline their outcomes very clearly. Mainly, what is expected of individuals largely falls into what can be considered a voluntary fire department. That is to say, there is a heavy emphasis on attending church services or training events, yet to go out and fight fires or become active, there is a lot of wiggle room. The bar is extremely low, while follow up on what is done as a result of the investment put into each individual is severely lacking.

Accountability in a relationship is at the heart of an apprenticeship, which leads to spiritual formation. Many institutions are more than willing to make rules and expect others to simply fall in line. Then what can result next is the equivalent of telling a child to look up the answer in a dictionary or an encyclopedia, where no tangible help or mentoring is provided when they are in need of guidance and direction. Therefore, the culture of any organization that does not make it a priority to help develop the capacity of people in their community is severely missing the point of what was at the heart of Jesus’s ministry. Without the structure that allows for deep relationships to develop, rites of passage such as baptisms become surface-level commitments because new disciples are not truly embraced in to the community of support.

In the well-quoted passage often referred to as the Great Commission in Matthew 28, the verses preceding it are often either skipped or read quickly through. Matthew 28:16-20:

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

In this passage it is clear that even though the disciples have walked with Jesus for three years and intimately know him, in addition to seeing him raised from the dead right before them, some still doubt. It is important to realize that there are people in our community of disciples who are in need of a safe place where they can work through their doubts.

Through it all, discipleship is a two-way street. Leaders need to be consistent and model what it takes to be successful. Disciples need to have a teachable spirit and take what they are learning and put it into practice. In my experience, there can be no denying that what people put into this type of intensive learning relationship is what they will eventually get out of it. Apprenticeship programs are relevant models for ministry and a necessary tool to address standards. Values are the heart of the issue. With that said, discipleship in Authentic LA primarily takes place during the regular times of discussion that are provided along with mentors regularly available to help disciples move forward in their walk with God.

One year during the winter season, we hosted Christmas Karaoke. It was a themed party where those in our ministry came together to celebrate the incarnation and partake in some traditional Mexican drinks & desserts. As the evening progressed, an XBox 360 transformed the living room into a virtual Karaoke club. After the order by which everyone would sing was set, it was fun to see students choosing to sing contemporary songs, while others chose to bring back some old school jams. This brought up some great interaction between everyone, and a true bonding experience took place in just a few short an hours.

In the end, events such as this serve to provide informal opportunities for people to connect and learn from each other. Seemingly random conversations are sparked as the night passes by. Relationships are then strengthened over time. It is not unusual to see a student take the initiative to add a retiree as a friend on Facebook that night. In the coming weeks friendships will begin to take shape as we continue to provide opportunities to spend time together in community.

Building off my previous Slant 33 post, I view myself as a facilitator, whether that is through the formal mentoring program we run, the small groups we offer, or the community building events we host. I am trying to be someone who is known for connecting those people who need to know each other.

I think a small step in the direction of intergenerational ministry has been the movement toward integrated teaching and curriculum. Many churches are moving toward presenting the same teaching content across all of their segmented ministries. Churches introduce a teaching series or curriculum that presents the same topic or Bible text to be studied across all ages in Sunday school, small groups, and taught in worship gatherings. While I do think this is a beneficial approach in creating shared vision and experience, I wonder if it really helps foster much conversation or connection across multiple ages.

On the more extreme end of intergenerational ministry are family-centered or family-integrated churches with a focus on the role of parents discipling their children. This growing movement denounces any age-segmented gatherings or classes and spurred a documentary called Divided the Movie, which attempts to build a case about how age-separated ministries, especially youth ministries, are unbiblical. Though thought provoking, the negativity of this film seemed unhelpful and divisive. I think peer groups for learning and community still (and may always) have a valid place in the church. Moreover, most churches will not be able to see a bridge between their current structures and a completely family-centered intergenerational approach.

Intergenerational ministry must flow out of the fabric of the values of a congregation. It must be a culture. It cannot just be a program to help retain and indoctrinate younger attenders.

In my congregation, intergenerational ministry’s strongest showing is through the unstructured support provided by adults–especially non-parents–toward the children and youth. When I attend a play or a recital for one of the youth from my church, I always see other adults who are there to show support. These are not youth leaders or teachers–they are friends and mentors who want to show their support and care. Intergenerational life is natural to us. Time after time I have heard graduating seniors remark that they feel overwhelmingly supported and accepted by their church family.

This unstructured support and relationships flows into structured involvement. New teenagers are given the opportunity to choose a mentor from the congregation. Structure is provided for the ongoing relationship, but it almost always flows out of a connection with an adult that has been growing for years prior. Many of the leadership groups of the church, including our recent pastoral search committee, have teenagers as equal members serving on them. Every Sunday, children and youth are involved in the service lighting candles, reading Scripture, sharing joys and concerns, and ushering. It is a blessing to see a congregation that has worked to develop an environment where people of every age feel they are an equal part of something bigger than themselves.

For many of us in North America, these ideas seem strange or idealistic. If you are like me, many of your experiences with intergenerational church ministry has felt awkward or forced. Youth’s involvement in church services and ministry often comes across as a token showcase of talents, accomplishments, or piety to sooth parental angst. The importance of intergenerational ministry is more than just reaching youth or creating another category of programs. It is vital to helping people grow and thrive in their faith for the long haul.

We haven’t found that silver bullet. While small groups, mentoring, justice work, leadership, and a host of other youth ministry programs are important, the reality is that kids, ministry programs, and spiritual development are far more complicated than just one silver bullet.

But here’s one thing that stands out in our sticky faith research as critically important to students’ faith development: intergenerational relationships. As we have empirically studied students as well as networked with churches across the country, we think the future of youth ministry is intergenerational.

We need to make an important distinction. There is a difference between multigenerational ministry and intergenerational ministry. Multigenerational is when folks of different ages are in the same meeting space. But just being in the same space doesn’t mean relationships are being built. Intergenerational ministry happens when folks start sharing verbally with each other and ultimately share life together.

Some churches are taking baby steps toward intergenerational ministry, like pairing high school seniors with senior adults in senior-to-senior mentoring programs, or creating annual intergenerational traditions.

Other churches are taking medium steps, like planning intergenerational mission trips, empowering parents to help their kids connect with other adults, or changing their job titles to reflect a renewed commitment to connecting teenagers with the overall church (i.e., replacing the term high school pastor with the term minister of student integration).

Still other churches are taking large leaps and cancelling youth Sunday school (especially if they also have a youth midweek meeting) and integrating teenagers into the overall life of the church. They are championing what my good friend and colleague Dr. Chap Clark calls 5:1 ministry. In 5:1 ministry, every teenager is surrounded by five adults who pray for them, support them in tangible ways, and communicate that they are on that teenager’s team.

As meaningful as these steps are for the teenagers involved, what’s been as encouraging is to hear how churches are transformed as adults rub shoulders with children and teenagers. As one youth leader told me, “We knew moving toward intergenerational ministry would be good for our students. What’s surprised us is how valuable it’s been for our church.”

¹The College Transition Project is a culmination of six years of study of 500 youth group kids as they transition to college, including two three-year longitudinal studies and two interview studies. The goals of this research are to offer help to parents, leaders and churches in building a faith that lasts, or sticky faith. See StickyFaith.org for more details.

For many Gen-Xers like me, no punches are pulled when pointing out what is cheesy and hypocritical in the church. We’ve authored zillions of tweets, posts, articles, and books over the last decade about how the church is irrelevant, suggesting that Christianity has become a cliché in and of itself. Much of this critique is warranted and possibly part of a greater redemptive good. But those who are committed to being part of a Christian community feel a sense of fatigue from this barrage of critique.

There is a certain attitude I slide into, one in which I exhibit a stance of having it figured out. This contributes to divisiveness as it delineates us and them—the sophisticated from the simpletons, the educated from the uneducated, the forward thinking from the stuck in the muds (is that another cliché? Someone stop me).

With these realities in view, I felt conflicted about pointing out youth ministry clichés. I am tired of being the squeaky wheel (cliché?). I don’t want to labeled as the contrarian, the dismissive idealist who tears everything apart rather than helping construct. I want to provide solutions rather than pointing out the problems. You feel me? (Darn, another cliché.)

So how do we offer critique that is redemptive? How can identifying clichés that need to go away move beyond targeting pet peeves? When I critique a cliché, is it just me being tired of its overuse in my circles, or is it a phrase that is truly losing its helpfulness? The danger with clichés is that they are here today and gone tomorrow (got me again). How do we walk the fine line of critique without sliding into arrogance? Is it possible to create better categories of language? I hope so.

The language we use is important because it shapes the way we think. Language is a way that we make meaning and identify ourselves. We must thoughtfully evaluate and refine how we speak, especially about God and the church.
So maybe it is good for us to identify clichés that hold us back from clearer and more substantive descriptions of our realities. Perhaps it is helpful for us to shed words and phrases that have lost their meaning by being overused or spewed carelessly and without context.

Now, I just have to think of a ministry cliché that really gets under my skin… That would really take this post to the next level!

Youth ministry becomes segregated from the church body. It becomes us (students) versus them (adults). Chap Clark calls this the Mickey Mouse Syndrome. Essentially, youth ministry becomes an extension and not a part of the church body. When only focusing on ministering to students, it becomes easy to drift away from the church. The problem is that there is no intersection between other adults and students in the church context.

Youth pastors cannot effectively disciple the masses. One adult can really only have a deep spiritual relationships with five to eight students, max. There is no way a youth pastor can do discipleship well for more than five to eight students at a time. Eventually the youth pastor will need more help from the community and church. This is why the youth pastor must get parents and adults to partner together in order to raise the next generation.

So if youth pastors are not supposed to only hang out with students, then what do they do? Why should a church pay for a professional youth worker? I think there are two primary tasks that define the role of the youth pastor.

The first task of the youth pastor is to mobilize God’s people to do the work of the ministry to young people. The youth pastor has to figure out how to get the church and the family to work as partners in raising students. God’s people are called and compelled to serve. Therefore, youth workers have to persuade adults they need to serve the next generation.

If the youth pastor is not empowering and equipping more adults to care for students, then no one ever will. Youth workers must approach everyone with the opportunity to work with this incredible next generation. Every youth pastor has to be thinking, How can I get more adults to care for students?

The second task is assimilating students into the church body. The goal of youth ministry is to assimilate authentic disciples into full participation in the life of the community of faith and the church. As Jim Burns of Homeword and Mark DeVries of Family-Based Youth Ministry have said, "The degree to which students will stay in the church, get involved, and make significant life decisions for Christ is directly dependent on their sense of belonging to the church community.”

The aim of any youth ministry must be that students see and experience themselves as participants in God's family of faith. One of the best and most practical ways for students to play an active role in the life of the church is by creating avenues for them to serve inside the church. Bottom line: The youth ministry programmatic strategy needs to move students from youth group participants to church body participants.

I must admit that during my first year in youth ministry, I thought youth ministry was awesome because I didn’t have to deal with adults. In fact, church adults annoyed me. I thought my job was to be the cool friend to all the youth. After my first year, I realized there had to be a more robust framework. After some seminary education, contemplation, praying, and reading I was convicted that youth workers are theologically responsible to train all generations to care, love, and serve the next generation. The more committed adults the church has to care for students, the more sustainable the students’ faith will be.

It is really tough to change the mentality I only work with students to I mobilize God’s people to care for students. But trust me; getting more committed adults in the lives of students is such a healthier and sustainable way to do youth ministry. So let us shatter this cliché.

I think it only continues to promote the idea that the youth pastor is merely a stepping-stone job to some senior role or is for overzealous twenty-somethings who want to hang out and have an excuse to revisit their high school years. I suppose—on a good day—it could be a caution that the job might be harder than one thinks. But beyond that, I’m not sure it has much merit.

I also think those of us who have accepted a call into youth ministry need to take a hard look at what we signed up to do. I know several youth pastors who have been at three or four churches for three years or fewer each time. I also know plenty who have been in the same spot for more than ten years. But when you move on for a third time after a short stay, I stop believing the church is at fault and start to believe it’s the youth pastor. The truth is plain and simple: Mentoring teens into young adults is no short-term process, and if we are just one more revolving door in their lives, then we should have little reason to believe our impact will be much different from the example we’ve set. If their faith comes and goes, well, so did we.

In addition, if you only stay three years and then leave, depending on the age of students you’re working with, you likely won’t even have any understanding of what it is your ministry is producing. About the time you get a chance to see any real fruit, you’ll be headed for the door, never once serving alongside a student who came fully through your ministry and is back to serve with you. It’s a tragic loss to the kingdom of God and even your own personal story. Let’s stack hands and destroy this cliché once and for all.

Your youth ministry is full of cliques. Really, please tell me, what group of people in the world is actually clique free? It seems that every sports team is one or has many. I’m guessing every small group ever formed is one. Workplaces have them. Schools have them. Churches have them. We could build a solid argument that Jesus and his disciples were an exclusive clique. Maybe Peter, James, and John were yet another.

I’ve been told more times than I’d like to admit in the last eighteen years of youth ministry that someone’s child won’t come to my high school ministry because it’s too clique-ish. Nine times out of ten it’s just an excuse from a student who sits in the back, is uninterested, won’t talk to anyone, and is looking for someone to blame.

The truth is that we do have cliques, and we do all kinds of things to try to both build and destroy them. We build them all the time by trying to help students form small groups, serve in community, and build deeper relationships with a select few. Once your youth ministry has more than ten students in it, they’re going to form friendship circles, and not everyone is going to hang out with everyone else. The student claiming our youth ministry is full of cliques is almost never the one trying hard to make new friends or risking saying hi to someone they don’t know. They are actually not really even upset that we have cliques; they’re just upset that they’re not in one yet.

We also work against cliques in our main gathering especially, working hard to pay attention to those who are new and introducing them into existing friendship and small group circles where they would be a good fit. Instead of falsely fighting cliques, we strive to keep them open and use the bonds of friendship and connection to help students gain ownership of their faith and our ministry.

Perhaps some cliques need to go, but so do the clichés that people use as excuses for lack of risk and investment.