Andrew Root is assistant professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary, and he’s on the advisory board of The Journal of Student Ministries.
Why Relationships Can’t be Solely about Influencing Young People
“Get the f--k away from me!”
That’s the reply I got when I approached a kid I knew and asked, “Hey, what’s up?” while he was talking with his friends.
Of course the circumstances were atypical. I’d just started at a
What’s Wrong?
Although I’d just finished three years with Young Life in suburban
I kept trying to influence them, and though I succeeded at getting them to actually come into the church building, I was clearly failing to get them to commit themselves to the importance of the church and (more significantly) the faith.
How could I impact them? I knew all about classic relational youth ministry. I’d gone through Young Life training, earned youth ministry degrees, and read all the most important books on relational youth work. But it seemed in this context such perspectives didn’t fly. Still I did as I’d been trained, meeting these adolescents on their own turf, trying to start conversations with them, and focusing on things they liked.
Missing the Mark
Get the f--k away from me!
I mean, what do you do when an adolescent who only a half hour before—through long, sad faces and shoulder shrugs—expressed how deeply it hurt to never see his father ... and is now calling you “a rapist” for expressing any care for him?
How do you influence a group of young people when they return your favor of a ride and burgers by tagging your car windows with gang signs—rival signs of the gang territory you’ll have to drive through after dropping them off at home?
How do you influence young people who refuse your care but nevertheless continue to ask for it with their constant presence?
And how can you be a relational bridge between adolescents and a congregation when these teenagers steal money from the church, tag the sanctuary, and use the church parking lot to sell drugs, exchange sexual favors, and harass elderly church members?
And what do you say to a congregation when its commitment to these kids has turned from honest desire to all-out fear, frustration, and new assertions that teenagers must earn the right (by good behavior) to be at the church?
“More Difficult than I’d Thought”
I started to realize that relational youth ministry was much more difficult than I’d thought. It appeared that because of their deep suffering these teenagers were unable to be influenced toward the ends I desired for them. Their deep wounds of poverty, abuse, abandonment, and violence kept them from trusting me.
But it wasn’t just these adolescents. As I recalled my ministry in suburban
“Just Be with Me”
Then, in the middle of an argument with my wife, it all started to make sense. Frustrated with me for continually trying to make things better between us, my wife turned to me, exasperated: “Stop! Stop trying to make things better! Relationships aren’t just about making things work; they’re first about being together in the crap of life. It’s only when we’re together, really together, that things can get any better. Just stop trying to fix things and just be with me.”
Okay, if it’s true that relationships aren’t first and foremost about making things better, getting them right, or making them work, then what was I doing with these neighborhood adolescents?
I had to be honest with myself.
I was trying to influence them. I was trying to get them to accept, know, trust, believe, or participate in something—believing that was best for them, believing it would fix them.
Still, my desire to influence them was keeping me from being with them in a truly relational way. The influence-centered relational youth ministry I’d learned was more about my agenda for these adolescents than it was about them. As my wife had reminded me, when two people are in a true relationship, they set their own terms for interaction rather than letting only one person define it.
Sensing the Problem
It was no surprise when I heard some voices in youth ministry calling for a move beyond relational ministry to something they called “post-relational ministry.”1 It sounded interesting; yet the argument made no sense to me.
The call was to focus on community practices more than one-on-one relationships. But community itself is a network of relationships, and surely focusing on community practices wouldn’t solve the issues I faced with these kids.
It was also odd that these voices seemed to imagine that adding post before relational freed it from the “scandal” of modernity. Yet, as any good postmodern theorist will tell you, the turn from modernity to postmodernity (or whatever you want to call the milieu in which we now find ourselves) is characterized by an acknowledgment of our interconnections, whether in physics (Einstein), culture and economy (globalization), psychology (object relations theory), or theology.
Therefore, they couldn’t possibly be calling youth ministry to become truly “post” (i.e., “after”) relational, could they? Surely they weren’t calling us to do ministry without relationships, were they?
Rather, what I suspect these voices wished to say—and what my own ministry experience most definitely did say—was that youth ministry needed to re-think what it really believes about relationships.
What’s needed isn’t a post-relational ministry but a truly relational relational ministry—a ministry that’s truly incarnational by being truly relational.
We’re Sorry
It may be that we owe a great many adolescents (and now adults) an apology. We may have talked about wanting to be in relationships with them, but upon deeper association it became clear that we were more concerned about influencing them. We cared more about getting them saved or confirmed or involved in positive activities or abstaining from negative activities than we cared about truly being with them in the midst of their deepest joys and sufferings.
Of course it’d be way too simple (and inaccurate) to say that every relationship in youth ministry has been more about influencing adolescents than being with them. We can all recall relationships with a few kids that have been truly relational, that were sincerely about being together in the mess of life. But the problem is that when it comes to the history and theology of relational (i.e., incarnational) youth ministry, relationships are used for instrumental purposes.
More Than Just a Tool
In other words, we’re often taught—and thus teach our volunteer leaders—that relationships are tools to make ministry more effective. And if these tools are used correctly, they can provide us with the leverage we need to influence adolescents in the direction we desire. (It doesn’t sound as bad when we say that what we desire to influence them toward is “a relationship with God.”) But is “influence” really what relationships are for? Is this really what the incarnation is about?
I’m certain my wife wouldn’t be happy if I viewed our relationship as a tool that allowed me to get what I desired from her or to influence her to behave a certain way. And by extension, I have trouble believing that God sent Jesus because Jesus was the most effective tool to get us to do what God wanted us to do. (As if we actually do everything that God wants us to do anyway!)
I believe there’s a deeper theological motif.
Theology of Influence
The depth at which “influence” has been wed with relational/incarnational ministry is found in the writings, for example, of Doug Fields, one of youth ministry’s most well known leaders. In Your First Two Years in Youth Ministry Fields’ discussion of relational ministry exudes an influence focus.
“I’m thrilled that youth ministry has become more professional…but it isn’t rocket science—youth ministry is about adults loving students, building relationships with them, and pointing them to Jesus.”2
This quote would work wonderfully at the top of a leadership-training manual, but is it true? Are relationships really as cut-and-dried as Fields asserts?
I imagine it would be so if we ignored the deep messiness of our lives. It may be that relationships are actually more difficult and complicated than O-rings, countdowns, and shuttle landings. Just ask a parent driving his son to drug rehab, a woman packing her bags with a broken wrist while her drunk husband sleeps, or a seven year old waiting at the curb for three hours for her once-a-year visit with her father who has yet to arrive.
It appears that, for Fields (who is only one example of many who espouse such relationship, relationships are more important than programs because they’re a more effective tool to influence youth to commit to the church and its faith. Relationships are what grow a ministry, he says. When discussing the need to include leaders in relational ministry, Fields notes, “If you’re the only one connecting with students, you’ll be a bottleneck to any potential growth and [he adds] genuine care.”3 Yet when this is all boiled down, a problem emerges.
The Influence Equation
Imagine for a moment that this is a math class and the following is a word problem:
Relationships are a more effective tool than programs to get young people committed to the church and its faith. Relationships are what grow a ministry.
Now imagine that you’ve been asked to turn this word problem into an equation. What would you have? Maybe something like:
Programs ≠ Influence
Relationships = Influence
Therefore: Relationships + Influence = Growth of the Ministry (as measured by commitment to the group & conversion to the faith)
What becomes clear when it’s broken down this way is that relationships aren’t the answers—they’re just pathways to a goal. The goal is the growth of the ministry as seen in the commitment level to the church and the number or depth of conversions to the faith.
But what happens if after two days, two weeks, or two years an adolescent is unable to be influenced? Maybe something stands in her way, such as deep suffering (like the adolescents I knew in
Not Real Relationships
Within this influence equation, the very humanity of an adolescent, the fullness of her person (dreams, joys, pains, fears), isn’t as important as her ability to know, admit, believe, and commit. In the end I really only care about her dreams, joys, pains, and fears so I can use them to help get her to know, admit, believe, and commit.
Maybe this is cynical and harsh; Fields or others may say that it’s only by getting her to know, admit, believe, and commit that all of her dreams, joys, pains, and fears find healing or fulfillment. But this answer only works on paper, in math problems—not in real relationships.
True Incarnation
Just ask my wife. I must learn to make her dreams, joys, pains, and fears my own; I must enter them with her, and she must enter mine. To love her, I can have no other agenda for her but to know her through the windows of her dreams, joys, pains, and fears. If I ignore them in order to convince her to be what I want her to be, I have effectively ignored her. I’ve decided that what matters is only her will and not the beauty and depth of her fragile-yet-powerful humanity.
Or worse, I could use my knowledge of her dreams, joys, pains, and fears to manipulate her. But then I’m not in a relationship with her, but with an idealized form of her that we’ve both agreed she will be. She’ll then live as a stunted person, ignoring the depth of her existence, snuffing out the flames of her pains, fears, dreams, and joys. Or eventually the embers of her dreams will grow and warm her, thawing her from what I influenced her to be, and she’ll realize that I never loved her—all I loved was an idea of who I thought she should be.
Don’t we face this same kind of danger with the adolescents in our churches? We must be brave enough to ask ourselves, Have we convinced them to be who we want them to be? Have we tried so hard to get them saved or changed that we’ve ignored their deep dreams, joys, pains, and fears? Have we somehow told them through our influence-based relationships that there’s no room for the messiness of human existence in the Christian faith?
And how many have awakened after the divorce of their parents or their first stressful semester in college to realize that we don’t really care about them—just about their abilities to know, admit, believe, and commit to the faith we’ve offered them?
How many realize, before we do, that a relationship built on influencing another is not a relationship at all, and is therefore unworthy of reflecting God’s own ministry in the world through Jesus Christ?
1 See “Post Relational Youth Ministry: Beyond youth work as we know it,” by Dave Wright and Dixon Kinser from the September/October 2004 issue of Youthworker.
2 p. 84
3 p. 86
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