We Must Become Less

Youth ministry, at first glance, seems the ideal vocation for nurturing humility. We work with young people who regularly mock, ignore, and pity us. We serve with pastors who assign us such holy tasks as setting up chairs and serving tea and cakes at the church fundraiser. We are repeatedly asked by parents and church members if we plan to go into the ministry some day. For these and other countless slights, youth ministry can be the perfect career for ridding ourselves of all conceit. But is this really how humility is cultivated—through insult?

Throughout Christian history, there have been saints venerated for their self-inflicted suffering. Their willingness to starve themselves, inflict physical pain, deprive themselves of all forms of human warmth and kindness all seen as a model of humility and godliness. And yet, when I read of these saintly depravations, I’m left wondering about Jesus’ instruction to ‘love others as we love ourselves’. If loving yourself means self-flagellation, then what does that mean for others? Doesn’t self-loathing obstruct our ability to care for others? Isn’t humility (which refers to ‘humus’ meaning earth) about coming home to yourself, about a willingness to accept the ‘ground truth’ of who you are (faults as well as gifts)?

In Benedictine monastic communities love and humility are encouraged through vows of chastity, poverty, stability, and obedience. Not unlike a monastery, youth ministry is also a ‘school of love’. However, we are not monks. We are not called to live lives in silence and celibacy. What makes youth ministry transformational is the way in which we approach our calling. I would argue that youth ministers grow in humility and love through three practices that are offered to us in youth ministries: poverty, obedience, and receiving love.

Poverty

To cultivate humility is to remember our mortality and make peace with our limits, our inabilities, our spiritual poverty. Luckily, young people are happy to help point out our limitations. Time after time they dismiss our orchestrated lessons, ignore our education and experience, roll their eyes at our testimony and professions of faith. As youth workers we must continually face our helplessness to will young people into the faith. Over time we may realise that young people do not respond to our spiritual accomplishments or knowledge. Young people respond to our humanity. They are far more interested in our doubts, sufferings and struggles - all that makes us approachable and compassionate. Young people want to know our failures more than our successes. They want to see if we trust God in darkness and self-doubt, in loss and betrayal. They want to see if we can allow life to empty us (the same way Jesus was emptied), they want to see if we are safe, if we can be trusted, if we know the barren places within us and the world. Young people call us to embrace our poverty.

In every youth ministry there is at least one young person who we find it difficult to relate to. This young person is a thorn in our side; we feel disgust or anger or irritation every time we engage him or her. No matter how hard we try to act fun and kind and encouraging, this young person exposes us, drawing out everything unhealed in us.

Over the years I’ve recognised that these kids become my real spiritual teachers. These are the kids who teach me humility, the kids who draw me into prayer again and again. They are the ones who cause me to face my own demons and shortcomings, the ones who force me to expand my capacity to love. These kids are a blessing to me because they remind me of my mortality, of my limits, of my need for God, my need for friends and companions in ministry. Without these ‘difficult’ kids, I might feel too self-contained as a minister. I might have no need for the living God; my knowledge of God would suffice.

When we look at the ministry of Jesus, we see a man ministering without the need to possess or control anyone. Instead, Jesus empties himself (Philippians 2). He practices a life of poverty—not simply material poverty (which is only the first step), but spiritual or inner-poverty. It is a willingness not to rely on or cling to his own gifts, a willingness to trust God and people in a way that makes him open and vulnerable. Young people call us to do the same. 

Obedience

Although youth ministers feel great pressure to teach, evangelise, and preach, over time we learn that our real power is in our willingness to open ourselves, set aside our own agendas and listen. This is the invitation that young people offer us again and again — let go of your knowledge, your control, your plans. Humble yourself and listen.

Catholic mystic and author Henri Nouwen once wrote that the spiritual life is concerned with moving from absurdity to obedience. The word ‘absurd’ Nouwen liked to point out, came from the Latin word ‘surdus’ meaning ‘deaf’. Young people live in a world full of noise and distraction, a world of carnival barkers clamouring for their attention, a world deaf to the still small voice of God. This is the absurd world in which all of us live. Within the noise of our culture, the Church and its ministers can become simply one more clanging gong.

Young people invite us to learn humility by moving from absurdity to obedience. The etymological root of obedience is literally ‘to listen’. A commitment to obedience in youth work is a commitment to listen, to be attentive and open to the cry of the young person. So much of youth ministry is based on listening to the cry of the church (‘We’re dying!’), or the cry of parents (‘Keep our kids safe and morally sound!’), or our own cry (‘Listen to what I learned in seminary!’). The invitation that young people give us again and again is to set aside the fears and anxieties of adults, tilt our ears, and listen to the suffering of the adolescent soul.

I used to see obedience as subservience to higher (more powerful) authorities. But in youth ministry, our obedience (our listening) is to the cry of the Spirit within the teenagers we serve. All of the acting out, the posturing, the rejection, the risky behaviour that we notice in young people is a cry to be heard. All of the mixed behaviours are signals from their soul. They are cries that are ‘too deep for words’, cries that long for a receptive ear, someone with the patience and commitment to listen beneath the surface to the deep longings and fears of the young person’s heart.

Obedience does not only mean listening to the cry of the wounded soul of a young person. Obedience in youth ministry is also the practice of listening for the one who loves the young people we serve, listening for the one who names and claims these young souls as ‘beloved’, listening for the word of blessing that we are being called to speak.

A friend of mine works as a hospice chaplain. One day she was asked to visit a dying woman who was overwhelmed with anger and bitterness. My friend Karen met the dying woman and was filled with compassion as she listened to her story. The dying woman had been born in poverty. Her father had died when she was a small child and she was raised by an alcoholic mother who often beat her. She married as a teenager to escape her mother.

Although the woman had wanted to go to college and become a teacher, she spent her life working in restaurants to support her disabled husband. She had wanted children, but because of a childhood operation she was unable to bear any. At the age of 47 she was diagnosed with cancer. Two months after the diagnosis her husband left her for another woman. She now lay in bed with none of her dreams realised, filled with only rage and bitterness at the way life had treated her.

My friend listened to the woman’s story, allowing tears to quietly run down her face at the pain and loneliness the dying woman had suffered. Day after day she came and comforted the woman, rubbing her feet, listening to her pain, weeping with her at the cruelty of life. Karen told me, ‘I had no words for this woman. I felt such pain for her life. It was so unjust.’ Although Karen rarely spoke, one day the woman asked her ‘How does God see my life?’ Carefully, Karen heard herself say, ‘God has great sorrow for what you’ve suffered. In God’s eyes you are his dear child, his beloved.’

The woman listened, but did not respond. A few days later the woman fell into a coma. Day after day my chaplain friend sat by the bedside of the dying woman, massaging her hands and face while whispering into her ear, ‘You are God’s beloved. You are God’s beloved. You are God’s beloved.’

This continued for a little more than a week. Then, one day Karen was rubbing the woman’s hands, whispering these words of blessing, when unexpectedly the woman opened her eyes and became conscious. Karen called for a nurse. The dying woman, barely audible, asked for a drink of water and then noticed Karen and said, ‘Would you please keep telling me that I’m God’s beloved?’ Surprised, Karen placed her mouth next to the woman’s ear and said again and again and again, ‘You are God’s beloved.’ Thirty minutes later the woman died, with Karen speaking the words of love that this poor woman had spent her life longing to hear.

Obedience in youth ministry is a willingness to set aside our own agenda in order to hear the cry of the young people we serve. It  is a willingness to wait until God gives us the words we need to speak, words that respond to the cry of God within the human soul.

Receiving Love

A friend of mine attended a seven day retreat led by a Trappist monk from New Mexico. On the last day of the retreat the monk asked, ‘So what have we been learning on this retreat?’ A young seminary student raised his hand and answered: ‘That no matter what, God loves us.’

The monk nodded his head reflectively and then gently replied, ‘Wrong.’ Startled, the young man (as well as the other participants) looked confused and responded, ‘But Father, I’m just repeating what you’ve said many times over the past week.’ The monk nodded his head silently, looked at the young man with love and replied, ‘When I say it, it’s true. When you say it, it’s not true.’

How many of us teach and preach words that we don’t really embody? How many of us often feel like clanging gongs—speaking words of love that we rarely experience? Before we can know love, we must know our need for love. Before we can speak words of love, we first must come to terms with the absence of love within us. We must know the places in us that hide from love, that refuse love, that feel too ashamed to accept love.

One of the gifts of youth ministry is receiving the love and compassion of young people. In ministry we often set ourselves apart from the people we serve: we are saved, they are in need of saving; we have God, they are in need of God; we are Christians, they are becoming Christians. But this distance between youth worker and youth only calcifies our hearts. How difficult it is for so many of us to accept love. How can we expect young people to practice the Christian faith, to practice compassion and service, if we present to them a person without need? ‘Let yourself be loved’ is the invitation our young people bring to us again and again.

I remember leading a camp for Christian youth. It was the fifth day of the camp and something was amiss. The kids were saying all the correct answers, reciting their Bible verses, singing loudly at worship - yet I didn’t believe them. There was some kind of pretending that had taken over and all of us were ‘playing’ Christian. On the last day of the camp I realised the problem. The adult leaders had spent the week standing at the perimeter of our gatherings, observing and listening to the youth. By keeping themselves separate and distant from the young people, the teenagers felt observed, on stage, while the adults appeared self-contained and invulnerable. Before our last teaching session I told the leaders what I had been feeling. They agreed, but didn’t know what to do. Suddenly it came to me: we needed to become vulnerable to the youth. We needed the youth to minister to us.

We convened for our last teaching session and I told the students the story of the Good Samaritan. I then explained to the students that many of their adult leaders had places within their lives where they felt like the man in the ditch — beaten down, helpless, hurting, in need of compassion. I lay a cross in the center of the room and with the youth sitting in a circle around the perimeter, I asked the adults who were suffering, the adults who felt similar to the Good Samaritan, to come and pray at the cross. One by one, various adults stood and walked into the empty circle to kneel at the cross. After a few minutes most of the adult leaders were kneeling in prayer surrounded by the young people. I then asked the adults to say a word or sentence that expressed some place in their life that was in need of prayer: ‘Marriage’, one man called out. ‘Lack of Family’, stated a young female leader. ‘Depression’, someone said. ‘Loneliness’, said another. ‘Doubt’, said a tearful pastor. The room became heavy with honest suffering. I then asked the young people to come and pray for the adults. The response was overwhelming. Deeply surprised and touched, the young people hurried out onto the floor, laying hands on the adult leaders, praying words of gratitude and blessing for each of the adult leaders.

When the prayer session ended, I asked the youth what they experienced. Many of them were shocked (and at the same time grateful) that their youth leaders were in need of prayer. They had no idea that these adult leaders were suffering, no idea that as youth they could pray and care for adults.

Humility is accepting that we need others to complete our life. One of the ways we learn humility in youth ministry is allowing ourselves to be loved by the ones we serve. If there is one regret I have from my early years in ministry, it is that I kept a distance between myself and the young people I served. I remained a ‘role model’ - a person with the answers, a person who understood God. It was only later in ministry that I recognised the way in which my distance limited God’s movement within our ministry. Humility in youth ministry means giving ourselves permission to be human among kids. It means refusing to hide our limitations and inadequacies. It means refusing to place ourselves above or beyond the people we serve. Humility is a willingness to be obedient, to listen before we speak. Humility in ministry means to receive love. It means we create ministries in which the givers and the receivers are all mixed up. It means we create ministries in which our young peoples’ capacity to love is needed. Youth ministry, like all ministries, is an invitation to ‘empty ourselves’, to make room within us for God’s love and grace to grow and move. It is then that we come home, it is then that we know our name, it is then that we gain the authority to whisper to the young people we serve: ‘You are God’s beloved’.