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Join the Youthworks Ministry Support Team as they discuss how to have an effective youth and children’s ministry in every church in conversation with local ministry workers as well as national and international voices.
Get in touch - effectiveministrypodcast@youthworks.net
If I told you that my youth ministry was
a youth ministry completely based around
Lego, all we did was play Lego all day,
could I legitimately say that my youth
ministry is a creational youth ministry?
What about if instead I told you
that my youth ministry the model
is we look for financial debt in
the area and we pay off that debt
because I am an atoning youth worker.
What if I told you my youth ministry
is, it has, Three distinct home groups,
but once a month we all meet together
in one single gathering because
I am a Trinitarian youth pastor.
Now I'm assuming you'd push
back at me because these are
doctrines uniquely about God.
There might be great ministries, but
don't name it stuff after God's doctrines.
So where does Incarnational fit into this?
Well, when we talk about Trinity
Atonement, they are using the Bible
exclusively to talk about God, and I
think the same is true of the Incarnation.
So when a Christian doctrine is
used in the Bible to discuss God
and is not used to discuss human
activities, we shouldn't hijack it
Welcome back to the
effective ministry podcast.
My name is Al James.
I'm a youth ministry
advisor with youth works.
And this week on the podcast, we
have a fascinating discussion about
a model of youth ministry that is
likely influencing your work with
children, youth, or young adults.
Even if you don't know its name, it's the
incarnational model of youth ministry.
Our guest is Tim Goff from the UK, who
presented a seminar called Critiquing the
Incarnational Model of Youth Ministry.
And he delivered this at the
YouthWorks Theology Think Tank,
which is a combined effort between
YouthWorks College, our good friends,
and YouthWorks Ministry Support,
which is the team that I'm part of.
Tim is the director of the Llandudno,
I hope I'm saying that right, Youth for
Christ in Wales, and has been a full
time youth worker for over a decade.
He studied at Oxford University, Oak
Hill and Cliff College, and he hosts the
multi award winning blog, youthworkhacks.
com.
Check that one out.
Tim is passionate about training
others, and he speaks on youth
work at events across the UK.
The incarnational model of youth
ministry has its roots in the late 1920s.
It rose to prominence among
ministry practitioners in the
1940s and 1950s, and it became a
widely practiced approach through
organizations like Youth for Christ.
The Billy Graham Evangelistic
Association and Young Life.
And it's experienced a number of
reiterations across the decades as well.
This model emphasizes relationships
and the contextualization of the
gospel to young people in the world
that they live in, which are both
essential aspects of ministry.
with youth and young people.
However, there are elements of
the approach that warrant critique.
And Tim opens up this conversation
to help us think deeply about
our own models of ministry.
This week, you'll hear the audio of Tim's
presentation at the Theology Think Tank.
And next week, we're going to have Tim
Bilhart's, , friend of the podcast and
a one time convener of the podcast.
And Matt Bartlett, one of
my colleagues who is a youth
ministry advisor in Wollongong,
and we're going to be kicking
around insights, questions,
debates, all the things as we
respond to Tim Goff's presentation.
So this is going to be a, stimulating
discussion for both youth and children's
ministers and leaders who want to
get under the hood of their ministry
practices and think about the influences
that they have on their ministry.
I found it to be a really fascinating
discussion and I hope you do too.
, for a couple of years, my wife and I
have been getting hollow fresh box meals.
Now my brother lives in Sydney
in Australia and he tells me he
gets hollow fresh box meals, so
I'm hoping you know what I mean.
They are brilliant.
They are boxes of ingredients
delivered to our house every week
with instructions how to cook various
cuisines from around the world.
But we've learned in this process that
regardless of the country the meal comes
from, Korean, Mexican, Italian, German,
there seems to be garlic in everything.
Is it not sometimes just the case that
no matter how differently we do things,
there are often very similar ingredients?
common threads across our
worldviews and approaches.
And I think this is particularly true
for incarnational youth ministry, the
incarnational model of youth ministry.
Whatever approach to youth work
we do, there is often, if not
always an ingredient or a hint of
incarnational modeling within it.
But what's equally interesting to me is
how little critique The incarnational
model gets considering its status.
So today I aim to provide
something of a dialogue partner
for incarnational youth ministry.
I'm going to be the naysayer.
Sorry.
Hopefully that's okay.
But with that in mind I do want to
make a big caveat from the beginning,
big caveat, and that's this, there
is a lot in incarnational youth
ministry by celebrate, by admire.
and I would really urge us
to retain in our practice.
And there's not going to be any
author that I'll reference today
that I don't genuinely have a lot
of respect and admiration for.
So it's going to come across as quite
a strong critique, but that's because
I'm trying to create the dialogue
partner, not because I despise everything
incarnational youth ministry is.
So what I'll do.
is I'll outline a definition of
Incarnational Youth Ministry.
I'll give a broad overview of its free
stage development throughout modern Youth
Ministry history, and I'll move on to a
critique of Incarnational Youth Ministry.
Does that all sound okay?
Smiling and nodding
from the little windows.
Fabulous.
So what is it?
Like any good professional researcher,
I asked ChatGBT what it thinks
Incarnational Youth Ministry is.
So I went on AI and it told me
this, Incarnational Youth Ministry
is an approach that emphasizes
embodying empathy and connection.
It involves youth leaders immersing
themselves in the lives of young
individuals, meeting them where they
are, understanding them and forming
genuine relationships with them.
For AI that's not a bad response
to a complicated question.
The incarnational model of youth
ministry has been summarized as
doing mission and ministry as
Jesus did mission and ministry.
The thought behind it is, as God
became human and was immersed in a
very specific culture, first century
Aramaic Jew living in Palestine so
youth workers today must adapt to
themselves, contextually, relationally,
in order to bring a Christian
message to people in their cultures.
In Jim Burns words, as the ministry of
Jesus was incarnate in the Gospels, so
our life must be incarnate in the Gospels.
in youth ministry.
Bishop Graham Cray, a British bishop,
described the Incarnational approach
as becoming culturally clothed flesh.
Now, this calls the youth workers to leave
the comforts of church and go out into
the worlds of young people themselves,
and as Kenda Kesey Dean says, become
contextualized even into adolescence.
itself.
I would describe it as immerse in
order to become, to be immersed in
a particular culture in order to
be accepted within that culture.
Now contemporary missiologist Alan
Hirsch describes the incarnational
approach as first going to the
place where a particular people are.
Going to where they live,
where they congregate.
Then that missionary builds a
trusting relationship with the
people who are in that place.
And they become immersed in that
culture, and they live as one of them.
And then finally, once this is done, and
only once this is done, does proclamation
happen, telling them about Jesus.
So this direction, first immersion,
then relation, and then contextualized
proclamation, in that order, is at
the core of the Incarnational model.
So in that order, the three
common pillars of Incarnational
youth ministry are immersion,
relationships, and relationships.
And contextualization.
Immersion first into a given culture
living fully within it or belonging
legitimately to it is the context.
Relationship building that gains
trust is the essential practice.
And contextualization of a
message into culturally relevant
language is the apparatus.
Incarnational Youth Ministry is immersive,
relational, and contextual youth ministry.
Usually, or ideally, in that order.
It prioritizes immersive living,
relational availability, and contextual
relevancy in its project base.
So that's what it is.
Where did it come from?
It's relatively modern it has its roots
in early 20th century mission theory.
So at the 1910 Edinburgh World Mission
Conference, a very important conference
in history for mission, two missiologists,
both from different parts of mainland
Europe, didn't know each other,
they independently referenced in their
paper a new way of thinking about the
Missio Dei as part of the church's
local, not just overseas mission.
Missio Dei Latin Missio Deo,
mission of God's mission focuses it
on, it's God's mission, not ours.
We participate in, but
it's ultimately his.
What they did with it is it rejigged,
they rejigged and reconfigured
the missional direction from being
church based, they come to us, to
being culture based, we go to them.
And this is loosely based on the
directionality of the Trinity.
So God the Father sends a Son, the
Father and the Son send the Spirit
empowers and sends the disciples,
we enter into that through the Great
Commission and are sent into the world.
Father, Son, Spirit,
Disciples, Church, World.
And what these papers did, is they
asked if that perpetual sending, that
motion of sending which we've been
doing, we've been using in overseas
mission, also applied to local mission.
Could we be sent locally?
Could we be sent to different
cultures and subcultures
effectively among our own people?
Now since Hudson Taylor was a British
missionary to China in the 1800s
probably as far back as William Carey
in the 1700s was described as the
father of modern mission overseas
missionaries Hudson Taylor went to
China, William Carey to India they were
practicing what we call inculturation.
in mission.
And what enculturation meant was rather
than going to Japan, for instance,
and teaching English and translating
the Bible into English, instead
you'd go and you'd learn Japanese.
You'd translate the Bible into Japanese.
You'd dress in Japanese clothing.
You'd live in Japanese culture.
And as much as is possible, without
compromising key Christian distinctives,
you become something like Japanese.
And then with as little cultural
friction as possible, you share
the message of Jesus with them.
So what Thinking about missio de
did in local mission was asked
if we could do overseas mission.
What's the overseas missionaries
have been doing enculturation.
But here among our own people,
could we be enculturate?
Could we become like the
people in our home cultures?
So john McKay of the ecumenical
movement speaking at the International
Ministry Council in Jerusalem in 1928.
He used the phrase winning
the right to be heard.
Now, I made a big deal of that
reference because we often
misattribute, in fact we almost always
misattribute that phrase, winning
the right to be heard to his friend.
And founder of para church
organization Young Life Jim Rayburn.
However, even if Jim Rayburn didn't
ultimately initially say that
phrase, we can trace the first
use of the phrase incarnational
youth ministry to Jim Rayburn and
Young Life in the 1940s and 50s.
So the first time we really heard of
incarnational youth ministry was by Jim
and a youth at a a Young Life event.
And they were asking the question
at Young Life, could we, to some
degree, become like young people
in order to reach young people?
And these early pioneers at Young
Life, they grew up saturated in
those convictions of the Missio Dei.
It was a hot conversational topic
in the churches at the time.
And this incarnational
cultured approach to mission.
was fresh on their minds.
However, after the close of World
War II increasing secularization
in the West began drawing
adolescents away from church.
And this really stark and sudden exodus
of young people from church led to a
dramatic church wide call in the West to
intentional local mission to young people.
And it was the parachurch groups Youth
for Christ that's Billy Graham and of
course Young Life that took center stage.
So what Youth for Christ did is they
ran contextually accessible rallies
for thousands of young people using
what today we'd call contextual,
attractional approaches to youth ministry.
Young Life, however, focused on
individual relationship building.
And the emphasis of both groups, the
attractional contextualization and the
relationship building, form the two
sides of the coin of what I call the
first wave of incarnational ministry.
The 1940s and 50s was the first wave
of incarnational youth ministry.
And you could summarise it as
attract and relate to young people
by being relevant to young people.
Very basic, but we still
rightly do that today.
Now soon after this, in the 1960s
and 70s, some of the larger and
better resource churches began to
copy these para church methods in
house and hire the first local youth
pastors with very similar convictions.
And so the first wave continued.
at the local church level not
just in the para church level.
But throughout the 1980s and 1990s, so
moving forward a little bit youth ministry
developed more formally as a profession.
It started to lean towards
more depersonalized programming
approaches, similar to what
was used in public education.
So more structure, more streaming,
more resources, more programs,
more things, more stuff.
And this resulted in a pushback
from those concerned that youth
ministry was losing its relationship,
losing its relational focus.
And so in response to this programming,
In the mid 1990s, there was a huge
resurgence of relational work,
specifically detached projects which
were labelled incarnational projects.
Two big thinkers associated with
that would be Pete Ward here in
the UK and Dean Borgman in the USA.
And this was the second wave of
incarnational youth ministry.
The second wave was a more reflective
version of this earlier expression.
And it could be summarized like being
like Jesus by being with young people
where young people already are.
Now, second wave incarnational youth
ministry, along with the rudimentary
principles of the first wave are still
prevalent in youth ministry today.
I'm guessing that none of this
philosophy of youth ministry,
relevancy, relationships is new to you.
You'd know this.
This is part of our youth work DNA.
Now you'll read about these very
same approaches and practices
and youth ministry books
published the last decade or so.
You will hear conference speakers, seminar
speakers, trainers talk passionately
exactly about this incarnational
approach and they will use the word.
So what happened next?
In some ways, responding to the second
wave of Incarnational Youth Ministry, the
third wave developed in the mid 2010s.
It's very important to make clear at
this point that the third wave didn't
replace the second wave like the
second wave replaced the first wave.
The third wave instead provided a new way
of thinking about it, a parallel track.
So second wave developed and really
replaced the first, but third wave
is happening alongside the second.
Usually in ministry projects today,
Especially with youth workers who are
well informed and well read, they'll
probably blend elements from the second
and third wave into their practices.
So the third wave, which I like to call
Neo Incarnational New Incarnational,
mostly because it sounds like a
cool name that really started in the
mid 2010s, and it's not the same as
Incarnational Ministry, it's gone before.
It is similar, but not the same.
We'll start with similarities.
Why is it still Incarnational?
Well, it still believes
in the three pillars.
It still believes in immersion in
youth culture, relationship building
with young people, and something
like contextualization of our message
and language with young people.
It's also loosely based on the
doctrine of the Incarnation.
So how is it different?
Like Second Wave, Incarnational
Modelling would say relationships
are central in the Third Wave.
However, whereas First and Second Wave
believe relationships serve as a platform
to share the good news of young people,
Third Wave sees the relationships
themselves as the final goal.
Did you all follow that?
first wave was 1950s.
Really it's the beginning of
contextualization is how do we really
start speaking young people's language
and doing that outside the church arena?
And then pushing into how do we
build healthy authentic, long
lasting relationships with teenagers.
They were the rudimentary
principles of incarnational work.
Textualization.
Relationship.
First wave.
Second wave of the 1980s.
I was saying we need to recover what
that first wave was, but take it even
deeper in the relationship sense.
So detached work, particularly going
to streets, not just having gatherings
that are attracting young people, but
going to where they physically are.
And really developing small, intensive
relationship spaces in those zones.
And that was very much Pete
Ward, Borgman second wave, 1980s.
Third wave, no, it's not a
platform to share the gospel, that
will be somewhat manipulative.
Instead, the relationships
themselves are the final goal.
And this is because, they would
say, it is in relationship that
Jesus Christ is chiefly revealed.
Revelation happens in relationship,
not in, not necessarily ultimately
in Scripture or in proclamation
of the Gospel, but ultimately,
mostly, mainly in relationships.
Now this is because they look
at the Incarnation theologically
slightly differently to perhaps
how an Orthodox Christian would.
And so in Neo Incarnational, The
incarnation is primarily an act
of divine empathy, rather than
salvation, God empathizing with us.
It puts a heavy emphasis on the this
world aspects of God's revelation.
That's largely based on the
theology originally of people
like Bonhoeffer and Tillich.
So things that happen here and
now in this world, leaving very
little discussing the atonement or
salvation in relationship to eternity.
We're actually left, I believe,
With very little reason for Jesus
to have died for sins, other than
fulfilling its ultimate act of
relational sharing of empathy in death.
Now neo incarnational approaches, I
believe, frequently moves the goal of the
incarnation from a divine action, what
God does, to a participative human action,
something that we work with God on.
Salvation is reclassified as, quote,
finding your person bound to God.
Sin is redefined as quote, anti humanity,
and new creation is de emphasized in
favor of individual will bound empathy.
And these are quotes from Dr.
Andrew Root.
And there are several aspects that are not
part of neo incarnational writing at all.
You won't find writing on victory,
God's glory, heaven, obedience,
or the place of proclamation
and mission in a positive way.
That's what it is and
where it's come from.
Let's Look on to the, forward to
the juicy bits the the critique.
What are the problems?
Well, we need to start off as a dialogue
partner with what the Incarnation is,
what the doctrine of the Incarnation is.
Now, traditionally Orthodox explanations
of the Incarnation, which I'm defining
here by the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds
they've included six essential limbs, six
parts of the incarnations of doctrine.
The first one is pre existence of the
second person of a trinity, the son of
God, before he became enfleshed in Jesus.
Second is what we call hypostatic
union, or God, or Jesus is fully
God and fully human somehow.
at the same time.
Third is this idea of divine
humility, or what we sometimes
refer to as echinocyn, or emptying.
Jesus somewhat surrendering his
divine rights upon taking up humanity.
The fourth one is atonement.
The incarnation is about atonement As
Jesus died on the cross, as a, as God,
he provided an eternally effective
sacrifice for an eternal problem.
And as human, he provided a just
sacrifice for a human problem.
Eschatology, Jesus ushers
in new creation head.
And then finally, revelation of
God to Humanity, what's God really
like to humans shown through Jesus.
Six aspects of the incarnation that
can only be performed by God himself.
And any appeal to the incarnation
needs to identify how these six vital
theological organs function in the whole.
These are the essential bits.
If you take one away, you're left with
something less than the incarnation.
It would be, by definition, heresy.
I'm not going to say for one second
incarnational euphemism is heretical,
but I will suggest it is theologically
misguided, that it's been unwisely
named, but it hasn't paid proper healthy
attention to doctrine or the Bible,
and it has had an unhelpful impact
on some of our practice and on some
of our understanding of Christology,
all of which is a pretty big deal.
I would like to suggest that Incarnational
Youth Ministry has only tended to pay
attention to one or two bits of the
Incarnation, and really quite loosely.
So we'll break this down,
into four parts, Semantics,
Theology, Bible, and Practice.
It's part one, semantics,
theological semantics.
If I told you that my youth ministry was
a youth ministry completely based around
Lego, all we did was play Lego all day,
could I legitimately say that my youth
ministry is a creational youth ministry?
What about if instead I told you
that my youth ministry the model
is we look for financial debt in
the area and we pay off that debt
because I am an atoning youth worker.
What if I told you my youth ministry
is, it has, Three distinct home groups,
but once a month we all meet together
in one single gathering because
I am a Trinitarian youth pastor.
Now I'm assuming you'd push
back at me because these are
doctrines uniquely about God.
There might be great ministries, but
don't name it stuff after God's doctrines.
So where does Incarnational fit into this?
Well, when we talk about Trinity
Atonement, they are using the Bible
exclusively to talk about God, and I
think the same is true of the Incarnation.
So when a Christian doctrine is
used in the Bible to discuss God
and is not used to discuss human
activities, we shouldn't hijack it.
We shouldn't appropriate
that term for our own praxis.
Now, pieces of Incarnational
doctrine exist in Incarnational
youth ministry, but not enough to
warrant appropriation of a term.
Especially, mainly because the
incarnation is a unique divine
description of a salvation event.
Put another way, it's all about God.
It's a unique God thing.
Only God in Jesus is discussed in
Christian theology in incarnational terms.
Humans, other humans, never are.
We're never actually told to imitate the
specific pieces of the incarnational work.
It's about God.
And the reason this is important is
using the term indiscriminately to
mean it's about us rather than him.
It messes with Christology.
It robs the doctrine of some of its power.
I think it confuses who Jesus is and what
he did with who we are and what we do.
And I think the result could be
a generation of youth workers
who can't properly articulate
the moving parts of the gospel.
Because for 75 years we've been using
the term to mean something else.
Effectively, we nicked the term
without paying proper attention to
what it was, and we repurposed it.
I think any theological term that
centers on God's actions should
be overlaid on human praxis
with very considerable caution.
In the absence of a deep doctrinal
discussion to legitimize using the term
I think we should call it something else,
like contextual relational youth ministry.
Okay, part two, systematic theology
a bit more into the doctrine.
Now, advocates of the incarnational
model they don't look at really five
of the six of those limbs, and they
look at only part of one of them,
which is the revelation attribute.
And I think the result of that is a
detachment of the incarnation from things
like eschatology and soteriology, and
it disbalances what the incarnation is.
And linked with this, it's quite
common in incarnational youth ministry
writing to limit examples of revelation
just to experiences within culture.
which bypasses how God reveals
himself directly to people
or through the Holy Spirit.
And I think one of the results
of this over focusing on cultural
revelation is increasing the disconnect
between incarnation and atonement.
The necessity for Jesus death as
humanity becomes empathy, and the
necessity for his divinity is love.
often sidestepped completely.
And what's diluted here is the
significance of Jesus's humanity as
a just sacrifice for a human problem,
and his divinity as an eternal
sacrifice for an eternal problem.
Now staying with Revelation, a
methodological problem within the
incarnational approach is, it's
often predicated on the shaky
idea that teenagers themselves are
the experts Of teenage culture,
which isn't necessarily true.
And then our interaction with this
culture is explaining theological terms.
And this is symptomatic of a larger
problem within the perspective,
which tends to begin with
observations of youth culture.
And then theology is
applied to fit afterwards.
And the result is that the incarnation
as a doctrine is applied to youth
ministry like a nickname because
it shares some similar ish traits.
Part three of four,
. Biblical hermeneutics.
Throughout the writing and the training
that advocates for incarnational theory,
of the dozens of essential biblical
passages on the incarnation, you
only ever see three passages come up.
John 1, 14, Part A, Philippians
2, verses 6 to 8, Part A, and
1 Corinthians 9, 22, Part B.
Now, you can already tell part
of the problem is only quoting
small bits or bits of verses.
Starting with John 1, almost every
incarnational writer uses the
message translation of John 1, 14.
Jesus moved into the neighborhood.
This is helpful at one level,
but it's also limiting.
It sounds more like relocation, God move.
There are several important aspects
to incarnation in John 1, such as pre
existence, divinity, missed by this.
And missed by Incarnational
writers when they use the passage.
Similar problems extend
from Philippians 2.
The passage is regularly and
unapologetically paraphrased
to fit the conclusion.
Be like Jesus in this way.
And the second section, 8b
to 11, which focuses on Jesus
divinity is ignored completely.
Wonka Revenues 9 is similar.
Language is sometimes even added to it
to make it sound like it's about us.
Jurali, for instance, adds
a likewise clause to it.
He says this, I have become all
things to all men, so that by all
possible means I might save some.
Our goal, therefore, is to become
all things to all adolescents
that we might reach them.
Now, in no case in any of these passages
do we detect serious theological error.
It's not huge misinterpretations.
What there is, though, is serious
omissions or dilution, especially in
terms of who Jesus is and how he saves
as a function of the unique incarnation.
Finally, practical theology practice.
How's it affect what we actually do?
Now as part of my earlier work on
Incarnational Youth Ministry, I
conducted a survey of 57 full time youth
ministers who considered themselves
to be incarnational youth workers,
incarnational in their approach.
67 percent of them distributed their
personal phone number to young people,
53 percent gave their personal home
address, and of these, 60 percent
said they did not give any boundaries.
When a young person could
contact them or stop by.
One respondent said he
had an open door policy.
He said, for the most part, our
door stays unlocked and they
know they have the freedom to
come in even if we are not home.
Now this openness and availability can
lead to both youth worker burnout and
really vulnerable safeguarding situations.
The main practical problems are up
here, not necessarily in the theory
of incarnational ministry, but in the
immature way in which it's played out.
And it is worth saying that several
incarnational writers, including
Pete Ward, Andy Root, they do write
clearly on relational boundaries.
However, despite these warnings, the
practice itself often has this inherent
mugginess of safeguarding boundaries
where unsafe situations follow.
Being alone on a personal phone
to a young person after hours?
Having them come into the house
alone, regularly meeting in
quiet spaces, prolonged private
conversations can provide unhealthy
levels of dependency and exclusivity.
And this dilutes the place of
church, parents, other professionals.
And I remember being at a large
youth ministry conference in London.
This is almost 20 years ago now, but
a large youth ministry conference
in London with the keynote speaker.
I won't tell you who he was, but
I will tell you he's very famous.
And he's Australian.
He advocated.
for all of these practices
that I just listed.
All of them.
And again, it's not necessarily an
issue with the model, but how the
immersive and relational availability
pillars of the model can be misapplied.
And going back to my survey, most
of the people who identified as
incarnational practiced in at least
some, if not all of these ways.
Finally, on practice, in the first and
second wave of incarnational ministry,
there is an emphasis on proclamation,
on talking about Jesus, as long as
you've earned the friendship right
to do and this begs the question, to
what extent is that bait and switch?
It's not something we see from
Jesus, who's the basis for the model.
His early ministry was widely
proclamational, and he said, follow
me, before relationships were formed.
In some ways, this is even
more of a problem in third wave
theory, where proclamation is
downplayed almost entirely.
Gerali asks, would we, would Jesus do
youth ministry like we practice it?
It's a great question.
I think though, in five decades
seven decades almost, cavalier use
of the word incarnational has robbed
Christology of some of its power.
I think the practices suggested
by incarnational perspectives
need clearer boundaries.
There are mandates in scripture to
be Christ like, to go into the world,
to develop healthy relationships,
and there are youth mystery guides
to exactly that approach that
don't use the incarnational idea.
Ashton and Moon Christian youth
work is still one of my favorites.
It's exactly the same age as I am.
It came out in 1986.
I'll let you do the maths.
Or Cheeky Pluck Cheeky Pluck,
my own book, talks about a
facilitation model of youth ministry.
Focusing on authentic relationships, yes,
but as a way to serve the facilitation
of a young person's journey with God.
To land, I think we need a new term.
Contextual relational youth
ministry, something like that,
liberating incarnational to
remain a divine theological
category, not a ministry model.
And although youth workers who learned
their craft saturated in approaches
labeled incarnational can be frankly
fiercely loyal to that label, perhaps it
would be better for youth workers to be of
the incarnation than to be incarnational.
And in that way, continue the
practices healthily without distorting
theology or loosening boundaries.