Kenda Creasy Dean on Young People s Faith and Youth Ministry By Tracy Schier Kenda Creasy Dean is Professor of Youth, Church and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary and author of Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church (Oxford, 2010). Named one of the Top 20 Most Influential Divinity Professors based on accomplishments, publications, and teaching methods by the Divining Blog, Dean specializes in youth and young adult ministry, Christian education/discipleship formation, teaching and pedagogy, practical theology, creativity and education, and religion and culture. Her 2004 book, Practicing Passion: Youth and the Quest for a Passionate Church (Eerdmans, 2004) was named one of the Top Ten Books of 2004 by the Academy of Parish Clergy and one of five must read books in practical theology by The Christian Century. Dean has held a number of grant awards for research, including a Louisville Institute Summer Stipend Award for work on passion, youth and the church; a grant from the Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith; a Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development grant for a project on youth development through community programs. She was co-director of the Lilly-Endowment funded Faithful Practices Project, principal investigator of the Ten Year Assessment of Youth Ministry Projects for high School Students in ATS Seminaries funded by Lilly Endowment. She also served as co-investigator of the Page 1 of 7
groundbreaking National Study of Youth and Religion (2000-2005) with Christian Smith, and recently has been a participant in the Lilly Endowment Youth Ministry Think Tank (2008-2011). Prior to her arrival on the PTS faculty, Dean was Associate Pastor of University United Methodist Church in College Park, MD. She also served as campus minister for the Wesley Foundation at the University of Maryland. She holds her B.S. and M.A. degrees from Miami University (Ohio), her M.Div. from Wesley Theological Seminary, and her Ph.D. from PTS. The conversation is edited. Q. You are in agreement with Christian Smith and Melinda Denton that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is an alternative faith, held by teenagers, that widely replaces established religious traditions in the U.S. Please remind our readers what is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and why is it described as default position for adolescent religiosity in the U.S.? A. First of all, when I say it is a default position I see it as the automatic background set of assumptions about religion in American culture. And these assumptions about religion are both culturally and civically shared. They bubble up as the interpersonal equivalent to American civil religion. Now to get back to your question, what do we mean by Moralistic Therapeutic Deism? I summarize it like this. The moralistic part has to do with God wanting people to be nice, to be good, and to be fair to one another. The therapeutic part has to do with the belief that you should be nice, feel good about yourself, and be happy. The Deism part means that God stays in the background and only becomes involved in my life when I need to have a problem solved. This homogenized outlook about God and religion is intended to reduce potential conflicts. But the view that faith is something nice to have but is not really necessary to my life undercuts the life-shaping force of Christian teaching, and does not communicate what Christianity really is all about. Without a faith vocabulary, neither young people nor their parents can frame their experience of the world in terms of God s action. People have religious differences, but to honor the otherness of those who might view religion differently requires us to unashamedly claim our own religious identities as well. Having a particular religious identity should not make us ideologues. In fact, the more closely we align our lives with Jesus and attend to movement of the Holy Page 2 of 7
Spirit, the more we are going to love and cherish God s creation including people who are different from us. Q. Pogo memorably said, We have met the enemy and he is us. I am reminded of that when you say that lackadaisical faith is not young peoples issue, but ours. You say that the solution lies with adults to model the kind of mature, passionate faith we say we want young people to have. How do you define a more faithful church that you say is the solution to Moralistic Therapeutic Deism? Where do we start? A. The church needs to intentionally and thoughtfully build people s lives around the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If we say we follow Jesus, we need communities to show us what that can look like. Christian adults can no longer treat Jesus like an embarrassing relative. Teenagers look to adults in their lives to live out, and talk about, the values we say we have. If we adults are not truly living and speaking our Christian faith, young people see that and decide it must not really matter. Where do we start? I m a big fan of doing youth ministry with grown ups. We tend to assume that faith language is new to youth and that they are not fully socialized into the church but that s true of adults as well. Adults often envy the quality of ministry we offer young people, and they long for many of the same things. We need to pay attention to the condition of adult faith if we want them to act as mentors for young people s religious journeys. Like youth, adults need to be able to articulate the mystery of faith as they understand it. We need to be able to describe how God encounters us in the world and in our lives, and not just present information about God. Young people are not practicing Moralistic Therapeutic Deism because they have misunderstood or misinterpreted what we have taught them in church. They practice it because this is the only version of religious they know. This is the faith adults are passing on to them. Q. If it is true that much of what we call youth ministry is ineffective and inadequate, what should the seminaries do to remedy this and produce more effective youth ministers? A. Of course, a lot of people s lives are changed by youth ministry sometimes because of what churches are doing, and sometimes in spite of it. But we can do a lot better. The first steps are obvious. Theological education has to hold Page 3 of 7
ministry to youth as theologically significant, like every other form of ministry. Churches have to recognize the mistake of treating youth as a separate species after all, youth are just people who need ministry and who Christ calls to be in ministry. Granted, youth ministry is a highly contextualized form of ministry; every church leader must know his/her flock. But at the end of the day, young sheep are still sheep. I tend to think about youth ministry the way Bonhoeffer felt about denominations they are artificial and sinful but necessary because humans are limited. We tend to gravitate towards those who experience God the way we do and some of that has to do with life experience. So I m not against age-level ministry. I m against age-level segregation. Q. In your book you talk about a missional church and how its realization might be so important to urging young people away from MTD? Please talk about this missional church that you see as needed. A. As I have said, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is focused on ourselves, on personal fulfillment and being nice. But there are some risks in that. For one thing, the Holy Spirit did not bring the church into being simply to make people feel good. We re called to continue Christ s work in the world and that always carries with it the risk of crucifixion. The second risk is that, even thought MTD seems to have emerged out of good intentions to reduce interpersonal friction, any time we become radically focused on ourselves, we become less attuned to others, not more. I think that has happened in American churches. A missional church is simply a community that remembers that God did not call us here for ourselves. I think Karl Barth was right the church exists for the world, not to perpetuate itself. Q. I want to go back to what you said about how handing on the faith means sharing our love for Christ and not just passing on information about him. A. This idea is predicated on relationship. Unfortunately our understanding of religious experience is so thin that we cannot communicate our encounters with God, with Christ. Creating opportunities for young people to encounter Jesus and indeed, creating opportunities for adults to encounter Christ is so different from merely giving information about him. What if we shifted our emphasis so we talk less about belief and more about trust? Belief is a cognitive category but trust is a rational category. Belief allows us to approach Christ as a curious bystander, but in an abstract way. Trust is Page 4 of 7
born out of love, and confidence. To believe in Jesus Christ is to trust him. Think about the huge difference that exists between believing somebody and believing in somebody. The problem here is that we are afraid of manipulating religious experience and so we are not good at creating spaces that invite holy encounter. Q. Expound on what you mean by the statement that teenagers need to become comfortable speaking Christian conversationally? It seems to me that we need to explore the role of language and communication here when we are talking about encounters with God. A. Kids are no more inarticulate about faith than adults are. If parents cannot talk about their faith and their encounters with God, how can we expect their children to do this? We talk about Christianity in civic categories because we come to religion as citizens and consumers rather than as people who traffic in mystery and grace, who practice joy and sacramental love ways Christ encounters us through other people. I often wonder why Christians have less of a language about religious experience than Jews and Muslims and Mormons seem to have. When you can t talk about something and philosophers, sociologists, and linguists all agree on this it s as if it is not real. To be inarticulate about religion is to render it unreal. I think we would make headway if we recognized the importance of conversational Christianity. We know English as our first language because we are immersed from our childhoods in a culture where English is spoken. So too, if we are to be engaged in conversational Christianity we need to be immersed in, participate fully in, become full members of communities of Christians who speak Christian to quote Stanley Hauerwas. Learning a language is not just an internal, intellectual activity. It is a social exercise. Young people will acquire a conversational faith when the adults around them talk about their lives in light of the promise of what we call the gospel. All of this so rightly highlights the importance of reclaiming community reclaiming Christian community. Q. You elaborate on one of the important and little understood findings of the NSYR, something that Christian Smith re-emphasized to me in conversation. And that is what teens say about their families, that if there was one thing they could change it is this: I wish I was closer to my parents. What can the seminaries do about this? Page 5 of 7
A. Yes, this finding emphasizes the fallout from our age-segregated culture. Parents just assume their teens don t want to hang out with them. I think one of the overlooked ministries in the church is unmasking the myths that keep kids and their parents apart in conversations about faith and life. Q. Christian Smith also told me that there is a national discussion now going on across denominations about re-thinking the standard model of youth ministry and youth programming. He said this a few years ago and I am wondering what your take is on how this effort may/may not be progressing? A. I think Smith is right. For one thing, we now have research showing where our practices of youth ministry in congregations are and are not very effective. At the same time, the field of youth ministry has gone pro and it is seen as a legitimate pastoral vocation in ways no one imagined thirty years ago. We now widely assume kids need advocates. Yet the data also shows that as professionalism has grown, the disconnect between church and youth has also widened. Fewer kids are coming to faith even though there are more youth ministers, more education, more resources, and more books. The churches, and the seminaries that educate our ministers, need to understand that transformative faith changes us it is not based on how much we know, how many facts we know about Jesus. More time needs to be spent understanding exactly what transformation really is about, because it can only be through transformation that young people and adults come to know the other God as other and neighbor as other. Q. As you survey the landscape, do you see that any one denomination or denominations are having true successes with youth? A. Yes and no. That s a little like asking who does ministry better, Catholics or Presbyterians? I don t think we can frame the question that way because obviously there are some Catholic and Presbyterian churches that are doing amazing youth ministry and many more who struggle. I want to learn some things from every tradition about how to more faithfully point Christ out to teenagers. Our current cultural situation forces churches to learn from each other: each denomination and faith tradition invests in certain faith practices with young people that may come naturally to them because those practices embody important theological markers for that tradition. In times of crisis, for instance, many Episcopalian kids respond deeply to communion, while Baptists may be Page 6 of 7
more likely to turn to prayer. Nobody does confirmation like Lutherans, or musical harmony and social justice like Mennonites or Methodists. Youth ministry means involving youth in a constellation of faith practices scaffolding for a way of life that follows Jesus and so we should both celebrate the practices we re good at and be on the lookout for ways in which other faith communities help young people recognize and commune with God. I d rather think in terms of faithfulness than success (you could argue that Jesus ministry on earth failed, and that it is through our human failure that God is glorified). Every church has some practices that help young people recognize God s presence in their lives which may or may not be on the youth ministry menu. I d like to see us name them, cultivate them, and practice them with youth even as we scan the horizon for other Christian communities whose young people are known for different faith practices. Q. We live in an era in which social media are a huge part of the lives of our young people. I have a couple questions here: Do you see the ubiquitous social media having an impact on teens and their religious beliefs and expression? Do you see social media as having potential for helping young people to encounter Christ? If so, how so? A. I m won by the dissertation research of Andrew Zirschky at the Center for Youth Ministry Development in Nashville. He argues that young people use social media as a way to make connections with other people. Youth thrive on connections but, as Andrew points out, what they really want is communion, not connections. Only the church can provide that. Q. And finally, are you hopeful or not about young people and Christian faith? A. I am hopeful, especially for the young people who see themselves following a path toward Christian leadership. These are the young people I see in seminary. My students make me hopeful. What seminarians and youth have in common is the fact they have not given up on trying to change the world. Very recently one young pastor explained his philosophy of youth ministry excellence to me this way: You can do a good job, or you can do a great job, or you can change the world. I want to sign on with the folks who want to change the world. So do I. Page 7 of 7