Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Youth Worker

Youth ministry is addicted to the adjective game, and I’m sure the blame for this rests squarely in the US. We love to throw descrip­tive adjectives in front of all of our youth ministry activities, not only to hype them, but also to brand them. You’ll be familiar with them, adjectives such as: family-based, purpose-driven, peer-centred, and relation­al stuck in front of ‘youth ministry.’ I’m as guilty as anyone for playing this game.  

Lately the adjective game has become more complicated and, potentially, theologi­cally confusing. As sociological research has reported adolescent church participants drift­ing from involvement during their university days, and faith formation has become a more central talking point, some in youth ministry have responded by adding adjectives in front of ‘faith.’ We are now told, ‘we need our young people to have vital / robust / vibrant / conse­quential / real / sticky faith.’

Is this still ‘faith’ we are talking about? Can faith, as a theological conception, be adjective-ised? And if it can, what is at stake in doing so? To explore this, I turn to a much-loved but under-appreciated youth worker, the theo­logian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Since reflection on Bonhoeffer’s life began in the 1950s, it has been mostly overlooked that Bonhoeffer was, most consistently and passionately, a youth worker. All of Bonhoeffer’s ministerial work from 1925 through to 1939 (when the war broke out) was with children or young people. Bonhoeffer wrote a number of rarely read essays, sermons and letters about youth work.  

In my new book, Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker, I explore this material. In this article we’ll exam­ine a Confirmation sermon Bonhoeffer gave to a small group of young people to hear his thoughts on what faith actually is, and how we might think about it in the context of youth ministry. The sermon was preached on April 9, 1938, on Mark 9:24: ‘Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help my unbelief!”’ Bonhoeffer’s words are bold as he wrestles with young people on what it will mean to have faith both in a time of war, and next to the failures of the Confessing Church to hold back the Nazis. Bonhoeffer preaches:

This confirmation day is an important day for you and for us all. It is not an insignificant thing that you profess your Christian faith today before the all-knowing God and before the ears of the Christian church-community. For the rest of    your life, you shall think back on this day with joy. But for that very reason I admonish you today to full Christian soberness. You shall not and may not say or do anything on this day that you will remember later with bitterness and remorse, hav­ing said and promised more in an hour of inner emotion than a human being can and may ever say. Your faith is still weak and untried and very much in the beginning. Therefore, when later on you speak the confession of your faith, do not rely on yourselves and on your good intentions and on the strength of your faith, but rely only on the one whom you confess, on God the Father, on Jesus Christ, and on the Holy Spirit. And pray in your hearts: I believe, dear Lord, help my unbelief. Who among us adults would not and should not pray the same with you?

…Let us be thankful that God grants us this hour of common confessing in the church. But all of this will only become utterly serious, utterly real after confirmation, when daily life with all its decisions. Then it will become evi­dent whether even this day was serious. You do not have your faith once and for all. The faith that you will confess today with all your hearts needs to be regained tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, indeed, every day anew. We receive from God only as much faith as we need for the present day. Faith is the daily bread that God gives us. You know the story about manna. This is what the children of Israel received daily in the desert. But when they wanted to store it for the next day, it was rotten. This is how it is with all the gifts of God. This is how it is with faith as well. Either we receive it daily anew or it rots. One day is just long enough to preserve the faith. Every morning it is a new struggle to fight through all unbelief, faintheartedness, lack of clarity and confusion, anxiety and uncertainty, in order to arrive at faith and to wrest it from God. Every morning in your life the same prayer will be necessary. I believe, dear Lord, help my unbelief. 

(This is only an excerpt of the sermon. The full sermon is available in Bonhoeffer’s Theo­logical Education Underground.) 

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR US?

This sermon, like Bonhoeffer’s book Disciple­ship,   cannot be read outside the backdrop of the Church struggle; there is a soberness to the sermon, which seeks to call youth themselves into sobriety. Those before Bon­hoeffer are being confirmed and made part of a Church that is under great temptation. Therefore, their faith will inevitably face doubt: they may even face prisons and firing squads. And they must face doubt because they are being confirmed into faith in Christ Jesus, held not by a stable institution but by a persecuted and threatened community. Like the father in the text, so too these young peo­ple face the possibility of suffering, and their faith will only be faith when such times come, doubt surrounds them and they trust; the times when they believe, though they doubt. Faith itself, Bonhoeffer asserts, is only found in pleas of doubt.

Bonhoeffer starts the sermon with a kind of anti-pep-talk, calling his youth not to think too highly of the commitment they are making, not to confuse the ceremo­ny of this confirma­tion with the need to profess Jesus Christ in the world. Bonhoeffer is disconnecting faith from institutionalised Christianity and binding it to the lived and concrete existence of Christ in the world.

If we ever assume that young people can find a faith so firm, so adhesive, that it will safely stay with them into young adulthood, Bonhoeffer tells us we’re kidding ourselves. This is not the nature of faith. He says boldly that this youth ministry ceremony means little. It is done before God; it is worship, and therefore significant, but it will not be in this service or program that these young people will confirm their faith. They will confirm their faith only in the world, only in places of doubt and conflict, only where suf­fering is near. This service is no finish line, for these young people are at just the begin­ning. This Confirmation service is only the processional into the world; it is in the world that they will find Jesus Christ.

Faith must be, not against the backdrop of youthful possibility, but against the back­drop of the impossibility of a broken world. It is only in shouting, ‘I believe, help my unbelief!’ that  faith can be, for it is only in this statement that faith is bound to Christ.  Faith is weak — not weak in the sense of pathetic, but weak because it takes the form of its Lord, found on a cross.

Faith is weak because faith can never be solidified in sight or certainty, for the faith of the young person is only bound to the young person through their need, through their wrestling with God and the human con­dition. It is not their potential and possibil­ity that is the fertile ground of faith, but their weakness and need. It is their unbelief that is the soil of faith, like the father in Mark 9, where faith busts forth in bloom. 

So, for Bonhoeffer, faith can never be ‘vital’, ‘vibrant’, or any other adjective. If any adjective at all can be con­nected to faith it must be ‘weak’, for the God that calls for faith comes into the world as the weak one, as the crucified king. And this weak one calls us into faith in and through our own weakness, in and through our own unbelief. 

So much youth ministry lacks the sober­ness that Bonhoeffer gives these young people, confirming them into the weak­ness of faith. Youth ministry often serves as pep rallies for institutional church commitment rather than a place of honest articulation of the struggles of faith itself. In contemporary youth ministry we like to remind kids of what their faith can do, of what difference they can make with com­mitment. Instead Bonhoeffer throws water on the ambitious fire of youthful faith, calling his young people instead to a weak and sober faith that follows the lead of the father in Mark 9.

WHY ‘WEAK’ WITH ‘FAITH?’ 

Bonhoeffer calls his young people’s faith weak, telling them that getting to this day and being evolved in youth ministry is beau­tiful, but it is not proof that their faith is strong. For it is only in the world, up against suffering like the father’s in Mark 9, that they will experience faith, and only through their weakness (not around it or beyond it) that they will find the strength of faith.

Bonhoeffer does not call their faith weak to take the young people down a peg or belit­tle it next to its adult version. Rather, he says, ‘Who among us adults would not and should not pray the same with you?’ This prayer Bonhoeffer wishes them to pray is the sober prayer of belief next to doubt; it is faith born, not just for the young but for all, through weakness, through the unbelief of our wres­tling with God in the world. These young  people are not being invited into strong faith, turning their commitment from fluff to steel; Bonhoeffer believes there is no such thing. There is only trust, that up against the weak­ness of human impossibility, the act of Christ comes, transforming what is dead into life. 

Bonhoeffer explains that this faith must be prayed, that their prayer must be the same as all the adults, ‘I believe, help my unbelief.’ Adult faith is prayer; it is not chest-beating com­mitment, but the weak act of pray­ing constantly. And it is prayer because in prayer we are reminded that faith is not our doing, that we cannot in our power, potency, or potential create faith. It is only the act of God, next to our impossibil­ity (like Sarah’s womb, Hebrews 11:11). Youth ministry cannot call young people to create faith for themselves. Youth ministry, Bon­hoeffer believes, can only invite young people to prayerfully confess their unbelief, so that a community of faith might share in their unbe­lief, and that through the confession of this unbelief, God might give faith to young people. 

Faith is the gift of God, given by the Holy Spirit to those who seek God through the cru­cified Christ, through weakness and impos­sibility. Bonhoeffer tells us that when young people confess their faith we should encour­age them to confess it in soberness, not as a place of arrival but as invitation deeper into the mystery (the unbelievable mystery) of the love of the triune God. Faith is not some­thing young people pro­duce; it is not something youth workers can forge as real, vital, robust or consequential. Faith is a gift of God given to those who will seek God in doubt and fear.                                                                 

BANKED FAITH, SPOILED FAITH, AND FAITH AS DAILY GIFT  

Faith is a gift of God, so it comes like manna, Bonhoeffer says. So often when we add adjectives to faith we see youth ministry as a form of ‘faith-banking.’ Believing that vital, real, vibrant, or consequential youth ministries will increase the dividends of the faith bond that young people commit themselves to, we act as though the very point of youth ministry is to enrich young people with enough faith in their bank account that when they enter adulthood they can live off its interest. But this is to see faith as locked within human possibilities; it is a perspective that believes that faith is something that human beings create through investment.

When faith is the gift of God, it cannot be banked; it is only received as a daily gift. For faith can never be arrived at, it is always becoming. We are always moving into faith, praying for the gift of enough faith to make it through the day. Because faith is a gift of God, given like manna, it cannot be saved up. When gifts are banked and interest is accrued, we are often deceived into believing that it was us, through our own wisdom or talent, who made our own fortune, forgetting the one who gave the gift. 

We often want strong youth ministries to act as investments for the future, so our kids will have faith in the future (and therefore the congregation itself will stay afloat into the next generation). But if faith is only for the future, there will be no faith; like manna, faith saved-over spoils. It is only by learn­ing to prayerfully confess their weakness in sobriety each day that young people learn to take the gift of faith that comes from the hand of the triune God. Western youth min­istry looks beautiful on the surface, with big youth rooms and conferences full of excited kids, but underneath the shine is rot, for it has been more about mammon than manna, more about investment in ‘banked faith’ than inviting young people to partake with par­ents and other adults in the daily gift of faith that comes to us all as we pray and confess, ‘I believe. Help my unbelief.’

Faith that is the gift of the triune God comes only daily, like manna, moving us through our weakness to the very side of Christ. Adjective-adding youth ministry often is framed more by the mistake of seeking to bank faith, try­ing to produce faith reserves in young people, than by the goal of teaching them to trust daily for the bread of faith that comes from the hand of God. Youth min­istry that takes the daily gift of faith is youth ministry of prayer and confession – praying to God to give us this day the bread of faith next to, and with, our many doubts.