I rather like the revolutionary spirit that seems to be taking hold in this Youthwork blog series. The conversation in the comments seems to me to be very important and hopeful. There is a growing consensus that business as usual in youth ministry won’t do, that things have got somewhat stuck. I actually get rather excited when things get stuck because it tends to generate energy - energy that comes from frustration, from anger, from passion, from grief, from saying enough is enough. When things are ticking along this doesn’t seem to happen in the same way. If we have the courage to lean in to this frustration it can generate energy for change, for newness to come.
I am a big fan of a writer called Walter Brueggemann, and he has this extraordinary phrase ‘only grief leads to newness’. I work with pioneers who are all about building new things out of what they see, but invariably this seeing comes from pain or grief of something that they perceive is broken. I’ve got three thoughts to share in this blog post which is really a reflection on how newness might come in youth ministry and the first is simply that we need to name what is broken and shout, wail, lament, express our frustration, and seek God in prayer. This grief needs to be articulated and ritualised. Forget the sugary sweet choruses which say peace, peace when there is no peace and let the poets and prophets loose. And may God hear our cry.
Radical Imagination
Once we’ve reached the place of being profoundly unhappy with the status quo, we must channel this into dreams. Create spaces for imagination, for knocking round ideas, for playing with what is possible, for asking what if and why not, for suspending disbelief. These spaces are best away from the usual work or church environment - get away somewhere. Depending on your personality you might want to get away alone or you might want to get in a space with others to dream. I love the latter. In my team at work I hold three dreaming spaces a year where we pick an idea or theme. We go away for 24 hours, get in some good food and drink, lots of pens and paper and start to draw and build a picture and see what emerges. They have all been wonderful.
I was inspired by a book on research in social movements (yes I know I must be getting old) called the Radical Imagination. The single idea that has stuck with me the most in the book and anyone who knows me well will have been subjected to it over a meal conversation or a work discussion is prefigurative research. What the authors mean by this is to design the present on the basis of an imagined future that is not already here. In their case they are based in universities and don't like the way the academic world is configured so they imagine how the university might be and design research on the basis of that - i.e. it prefigures it rather than settling for the current status quo. Brilliant eh? So when you dream about youth ministry make it prefigurative.
Their research involves facilitating focus groups, hosting events, and even a radical imagination festival. One of the issues for activists, and I suspect the same is true of youth ministers, is that you get bogged down in the day to day tasks. One thing research does is pull people together to reflect and talk about what is going on with others. It opens time and spaces in a cycle of imagination, strategy and tactics. These are the kinds of questions they discuss which might get you started:
- What events or ideas brought you to youth ministry and (how) have your thoughts changed through your involvement?
- What is the role of the imagination in your movement and your own youth ministry?
- What would it mean to win? What’s your vision of a better society? Do these visions matter to you and your movement?
- What are the barriers to the radical imagination that you face?
(I have changed the word politics to youth ministry in their questions).
Missional entrepreneurship
Grieve and dream. In doing so you will be in the company of all the great prophets. Then, thirdly, we need to build some stuff, make it happen, innovate and get entrepreneurial in the gaps we see, formed out of the tears we shed and the dreams that we dream. How do you build new stuff? We run a module on missional entrepreneurship that looks at how you take something from an idea and then make it real, so I am learning lots in this area. The traditional business thinking is that you need to work on an idea, get your business plan developed, product designed perfectly, strategies and plans in place, funding and investment landed and then launch to the world.
Eric Ries who wrote the Lean Startup has challenged this approach. He says the problem with it is that invariably our assumptions and strategies are wrong or not what the customer wants and it takes a lot of time and effort to build something new in this way. He suggests we’re far better to design something quite quickly and get it out there and develop a culture of continuous disruptive innovation. The key to it is a cycle of build-measure-learn. You build something, but crucially you develop relationships with the customers and measure their feedback and response which you learn from and then adapt and change what you have designed.
Sometimes you need to totally change the direction of what you are doing and other times keep on that track. This cycle of innovation simply continues. I think this lean startup approach could suit youth ministry pretty well as a way to build and develop new approaches. Rather than the perfect fully formed solution, it much more calls for experimentation and constant adaption. There are two keys to it - the relationships with young people, measuring their feedback and learning as a result, and creating environments in which we nurture and welcome imagination and innovation and take the risk of breaking with our youth ministry orthodoxy. Surely this is exactly what communities birthed and infused by the Creative Spirit of God should be like?! So grieve, dream, build and may newness come.
Jonny Baker heads up the CMS pioneer mission leadership training and blogs at http://jonnybaker.blogs.com.
