Some of the connections between salvation and community that youth ministry workers might consider reflecting upon are:
What Does Connecting Me to We Mean? (Communal identity)
It is no surprise that adolescents are naturally self-focused due to psychological, developmental, and socio-cultural forces. It’s also no surprise that young people typically mirror their cultures. From a western perspective, autonomy and individuality are strived for and celebrated. While having benefits, these cultural values can warp one’s need for interdependence—a necessity in development and the prayer of Jesus (John 17). Somehow, individuals must rediscover faith communities as essential, not optional.
Robert Webber (Ancient-Future Faith) reminds us of scriptural metaphors that define faith communities: the body of Christ as interdependent, tangibly expressing the very heart and healing of God together in our world. Salvation is found in our dependence upon God and each other, living out the very nature and purposes of God in ways that bless the whole world.
The people of God as the ones who, though different, find a unifying center in God revealed through Jesus Christ. Salvation is God giving us a new identity.
The fellowship of faith, where faith is practiced and grown as a verb, dynamically changing and growing as the community journeys together.
The new creation, where we celebrate renewal and resurrection in our lives. We gather as messed-up people, speaking hope and renewal to each other because of resurrection. Salvation is our message to each other that there is hope for you and me.
Kenda Creasy Dean (Practicing Passion) reminds us that adolescents have a tremendous amount of passion and seek to situate it in something equally as amazing. Salvation for adolescents, then, is showing them that the embodied, unifying, dynamic, hopeful faith community called the church is a place that is big enough for all their passion. This is good news for adolescents—salvation clarified and inspired by a community acting within the wonderfully complex, mysterious, multi-layered aspects of God’s saving grace. This is space big enough for adolescents to call home.
How Do We Connect the Narrative to Us? (Communal Discourse)
The community acts as an interpreting community for young people, where questions can be asked and more questions can be offered. It is the place where faith language, symbol, and practice happen in the rhythms of life. Self-interpretation has its limitations, especially for young people who are seeking to discover and define their identities. Older people need space and skill to tell good stories from their own journeys (cf. Stanley Hauerwas, Growing Old in Christ), and young people need space to hear these stories, reflecting on their own.
Salvation, then, means inviting all into the narrative; finding connection in the midst of our diverse backgrounds and stories. It is what makes the church beautiful. It means not only young people understanding the narrative passed onto them but previous generations encouraging (and learning from) the next generation who continue the story with new language, ritual, and symbol. This may challenge some of our church/youth ministry assumptions about what participation with the whole community means and how we carry God’s narrative of redemption forward.
How Do We Embrace Suffering as Ours? (Communal Burden Bearing)
Last month we had a worship service that created space for people to come and be prayed for. I listened to a wide range of stories that included both joy and tragedy. These are the stories that any faith community inherits. Faith communities that welcome young people open themselves up to their lives, embodying the good news.
More strongly, churches that commit to youth ministries must recognize that this move is not a step toward outsourcing youth issues. It is a portal to let all youth beauty, pain, drama, joy, expression, and messiness in. This is good news for everyone and one more picture of God putting the world back together.
Given limited space, these are some of my connecting points. What would you add?
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I just got back from a two-week pilgrimage with students, following the path of the Celtic missionaries who brought the gospel to Scotland and Northern England. Since we—the participants on the trip—all came from different places, we began to grow into community as we traveled together in a small van over winding roads (including some stops for vomiting along the way!). We lived together, sharing space and bathrooms very different from ours at home. We tasted new food and learned to cook new food and learned about different styles of leadership and communication. Then we repented when we really screwed it up.
Visiting places of incredible beauty, like the Isles of Iona and Lindisfarne, is a powerful way to encounter God. But laughing hysterically over jokes, burping, and finger puppets during evening prayer are also powerful and productive ways to engage God’s Spirit. By the end of the two weeks, we each had engaged God on our own, through what we learned from the saints of old and through each other along the way.
The Celtic missionaries—monks, abbots, and abbesses—were all about community.
Their process was to move into the neighborhood and get to know the locals, learning the language of the people. While the monks on the continent were about separating from society, the Celtic monks believed in making themselves part of the local community and moving into its center. They didn’t throw out the art, music, and customs of the locals but helped them learn to see God and engage God through these things. The Celtic monasteries were places of hospitality, welcoming all who came to call. You were invited to eat with, learn with, and work alongside the Christian community.
In the Celtic monastery, one had a “soul friend,” who came alongside the seeker to help her learn to engage God and listen to her story. Today, more than ever, we need to be people of hospitality who are moving into the neighborhoods, learning the languages of our cultures, and helping others to see Jesus as we live and work and serve outside the church walls. We need to be and to help our students become people who listen to the hearts of others and go places where Jesus would go—among the outcasts and the poor and those outside the confines of the church walls.
Also, it’s important for us to find a community where we can safely share our stories and our hearts. We need other safe people to process the events and happenings in our lives. Each night along the pilgrimage we shared our experiences of the presence of God that day. And we also shared our frustrations when we didn’t feel connected to God at all. We had to learn to listen to each other and deal with stuff that came up in order to function on the road as a whole. People in a loving, kingdom community really do help us to connect our story to God’s story. As we listen to how others are experiencing life with Jesus, we learn and grow ourselves. We are never too old or too experienced to need this kind of community in our lives.
So to answer the question directly, the Celtic monks of old showed that how we live together reflects God’s love to those in the community and those who might be interested in joining us on the journey. In our two weeks, we had the opportunity to learn to love, share, serve, encourage, and say we are sorry. The people we hang out with really do impact how we live and act. That’s why we need to be a part of loving communities (which may or may not be churches. We all know many churches that aren’t loving or safe!) to help us live our faith.
Learning to live out our lives in the way of Jesus and following Jesus in a 24/7 way takes practice and encouragement. Salvation is caught, not just taught. Jesus didn’t have his followers memorize a bunch of rules or laws. The Jewish disciples already had enough of these. Instead, Jesus poured his life into the Twelve. They learned by doing; by practicing healing, casting out demons, praying and teaching and serving others. They went out in groups and in pairs and came back and processed together what they’d learned and experienced, the good and the bad. They practiced living out the kingdom of God, not just hearing about it. This was salvation; to do the kingdom as total beginners among friends. Jesus was comfortable with these untrained beginners doing the kingdom. And their friends didn’t have to be seminary professors to tag along.
In 2010, like in the 600s, people need to see the kingdom of God in action. They need to experience the people of God moving into their lives, loving and serving. As God’s people love and serve and share and listen and go the extra mile (doing their best in living out that “Sermon on the Mount” thing), then others will want to be part of the community and discover the gift of salvation.
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Roman Catholics are taught that outside the church, there is no salvation. In Latin: extra ecclesiam nulla salus. Even if the official teaching of the Catholic church has nuanced this of late, the expression rankles even the most sympathetic of Protestants and evangelicals. For many, this line gives too much credit to the church. We’d rather it say, “Outside Christ there is no salvation.”
I would agree. We need the emphasis to be on Christ, but… Have you ever given much attention to the interconnectedness, the intimate union, of the Father and the Son in the New Testament? Or that this same union is extended to the church so we can say that Christ and the church are one?
Notice these words of Jesus: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). It gets deeper for Jesus: “Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (14:11). This unpacks, even if we can’t comprehend it, the earlier statement of Jesus: “The Father and I are one” (10:30). We get it: Jesus and the Father are a sacred unity.
But Jesus extends this in the most amazing of ways when he extends the union of Christ and the Father to his church—both amongst church people and the church people with Christ! He prays “that [his people] may be one, as we are one” (17:11, 22). He defines this in the next verse: “I in them and you in me, that they may be completely one” (verse 23).
Two facts then: Jesus is one with the Father, and we are one with Jesus Christ.
The apostle Paul carries on this second fact we learned from Jesus, and he says this in a way that brings all the glory to Christ. Paul overtly asserts two difficult-to-put-together ideas: We are “in Christ,” and Christ is “in us.” And Paul says “in Christ” there is “redemption” and “death to sin” and “eternal life” (Romans 3:24; 6:11, 23). In fact, if you chase down the “in Christ” references in Paul’s letters, you will discover all kinds of benefits: grace, wisdom, victory, new creation, etc.
If we put this all into one bundle, we get this: Christ and the church interpenetrate each other so much we can say they indwell one another. Now to our point: If we are one with Christ as Christ is with the Father, and if salvation comes in union with Christ, then the church mediates that salvation as the visible and spiritual and verbal presence of Christ on earth. But it does so under two restrictions: First, it mediates and heralds salvation only in union with Christ. Second, it does so most effectively only when it is one.
Jesus told his disciples, in the most famous sermon ever, the Sermon on the Mount, they were both the “salt of the earth” and the “light of the world” (Matthew 5:13-16). There are good reasons to think Jesus may have meant they were salt to the Jews (the word for earth is eretz, or “the land of Israel”) and light to the Gentiles, for Jesus shifts from “earth” to “world” and draws on the great theme of Isaiah that the people of Israel, in the last days, would be a light to the Gentiles.
In these two words, salt and light—one evoking the idea of preservation and flavor through penetration and the other enlightening the world through the good news of the gospel—we see how we are to mediate and herald Christ in the world. But we only do this as disciples of Jesus. We don’t do this through our own ideas or our own talent. As disciples of Jesus we get to be salt and light.
But Jesus knows this happens most effectively when the disciples are genuinely one. The words of Jesus both haunt and excite:
I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (John 17:20-23, emphasis added)
We can debate institutional vs. organic vs. missional vs. theological unity until we die, and we surely will, but the point is this: When we are one, as the Father and Son are one, we will be most effective in embodying and heralding Jesus himself to the world.
The church is called to embody and herald Jesus Christ to the world. The church, when it is one, embodies and heralds the love of the Father for the Son. And that same church, when it is one, reveals the truth of the claim that Jesus is who we say he is.
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Comments
Granted, non-Christians can support each other and can emotionally help during hard times, but in a church setting we get to see the actual prayer that results, which is something only Jesus and the church provide. Without that understanding, we never can fully understand what it means to be saved, so community is invaluable for that aspect of salvation.