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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-119283172016-10-21T03:31:30.121-04:00 Wes EllisSearching for God in all the wrong placesWesley email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-69144671487686611342016-10-14T15:20:00.000-04:002016-10-14T15:20:07.447-04:00Let's Repent
When I was growing up, I remember being taught about repentance. In fact, as I recall, repentance seemed to find its way into just about every youth group lesson my youth pastor gave. Repentance was what Christianity was all about in my conservative evangelical context. And it wasn't just that we should repent because it'd be good for us to do so. It was that if we didn't repent, God was gonna punish us in hell for all eternity. I even remember, for one of our youth group lessons, one of the young people in the group simply stood and read Charles Spurgeon's famous sermon, "Turn or Burn." That was the whole lesson.

And that's what repentance was. It was a "turning." Turning away from sin. Reversing direction on the default path toward hell and damnation.

When I was older, I rejected this view. [Read More]

This article was originally published on the Progressive Youth Ministry Blog on October 13, 2016.
Wesley Ellishttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-70069005928137876722016-09-19T07:51:00.001-04:002016-09-19T07:51:21.723-04:00In Blessing and Tragedy[the following is the pastoral prayer prayed in worship at First United Methodist Church of Toms River on September 18, 2016]

Loving God,

When we got up this morning, we were greeted by so many realities that are outside of our control. Some of those realities are graces, they are gifts. We woke to the brightness of a sun we did not create. We did nothing to make it rise. We woke with air in our lungs and the beauty of the world just outside our windows. Many of us even received the grace of coffee we didn't have to make… mmmm…

God, we know that this is all a gift. We might tell ourselves we deserve this, that we worked for it, but in the end, it is all from you. So we offer you the praises we have with the breath you've given us, with these bodies you made, among the people you love.

And in the same breath, we are reminded of the many other tragic realities to which we also woke up this morning, realities that are also outside of our control. We are reminded of the suffering of people we love; of victims of violence all around the world and right here in New Jersey and New York. We are reminded of the realities of racism, of poverty, of disaster and sickness. We are reminded… perhaps even overwhelmed… by the brokenness around us—just as undeserved as our blessings.

We know, God—because of your self-revelation in Jesus Christ, who was crucified among us—that you are good.

You are good.

Rescue us, Lord, from this brokenness, into the blessing of your love. Make a way for us. Be with us and for us. Because we cannot do this on our own. Come to us this morning, Jesus. Greet us in blessing and hold us close in the tragedy. For we are your people, your children, and you are our loving God.

In Jesus' name. Amen. Wesley Ellishttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-77473515256087529502016-08-12T09:22:00.000-04:002016-08-12T09:24:13.283-04:00Our Authority Crisis

As I was clicking through Facebook this morning, I found myself reading an article about people who believe that the earth is flat... yes, like some did before Galileo. I can hardly believe that I read the whole article, but I couldn't help but find it fascinating. Maybe it's because of my involvement with Science for Youth Ministry, or maybe it's just because I'm fascinated by our culture's dismissive suspicion of academic scholarship and professional research.

As outlandish and (even) kooky as it might sound to most of us that there are still people who think the earth is flat, the bold skepticism that's representative of these people's view is pervasive. I think that the epistemic principles which allow for this kind of bold skepticism are the product of ubiquitous instant access to vast amounts of information via the internet. In other words, this is what happens when people can skip a rock across more information than they possibly have time (or tools) to dive into. "I read it on Wikipedia" is the mantra of a new class of "intellectuals." It seems that among some people, "I saw it on YouTube" is, apparently, seldom less credible than "I studied it at Stanford." When "knowledge" comes so easy, it becomes easier for people to dismiss those who have actually worked for the knowledge they have. I can afford to doubt Neil Armstrong because I can find alternative theories on Google. This is what I call the conflation of epistemic authority--the scholar, the researcher, the professor is now just one voice among the millions of voices I can pull up on my smart phone.

I've noticed that this is true in the church as well. The Pastor may have an M.Div. or even a doctorate, having devoted her entire life to the study of theology and biblical interpretation, but congregations are often reluctant to grant any interpretive authority to their Pastors.

Don't get me wrong. I know the spiritual authority that comes from being positioned behind a pulpit. I know that Pastors have power and I know the dangers of downplaying or denying that power. But there are always those who, having read the Left Behind series or heard a sermon from Francis Chan, are readily defensive toward their Pastor instead of open to hearing their Pastor's studied perspective. If you're a Pastor, I bet you know what I am talking about. Now, this is not all unhealthy. People should be empowered to challenge the claims of their Pastors. The church needs this. But we can't lose perspective on the difference between Wikipedia knowledge and hard earned researched knowledge. Debate is important, but we must be selective in regards to the sources we employ for our debates.

With all the information out there, who can we trust? In our confusion over epistemic authority, flashiness and, above all, simplicity have become king. Hard earned knowledge is no less authoritative than blogs, so let's trust whatever sounds the truthiest (a term coined by Stephen Colbert). This is, perhaps an explanation for why someone like Donald Trump could possibly be receiving any serious political hearing from the American public. How else can we explain the popularity of someone who makes absurd and untrue claims with such regularity?

Some will accuse me of being an elitist. Perhaps I am, to some degree. But I am not saying that researchers are always right in their conclusions. And I am not saying you have to have a Ph.D. to be able to argue with someone who has a Ph.D. What I am saying is that we have a crisis of authority on our hands and one of its symptoms is a pervasive distrust toward academic scholarship. However we decide to move forward, we should address this crisis. The world is complex, we need complex answers.Wesley Ellishttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-55239664227179727342016-07-08T09:58:00.001-04:002016-07-08T10:27:52.715-04:00Hope in Thin Air"What oxygen is for the lungs, such is hope for the meaning of human life." These words are the first words of what has become a classic in Christian eschatology: Emil Brunner's Eternal Hope. And if his words are true, I cannot remember any time in my life when the air seemed so thin in the United States. We are haunted by distrust in our political system, even a sense of betrayal, as corruption threatens us from both the right and the left. We are still grieving the deaths of so many young people in Orlando, rooted in homophobia, hate, and discrimination. We wake up to the horrendous news of white police officers brutally murdering young black men and news of the violent and retaliatory murders of police in Dallas. Let us not even mention the wars (and rumors of wars) taking place all over the globe, in all of which we must claim complicity.

These are hopeless times.

We have time and again struggled in vain to restore our trust in progress but it has become harder than ever, impossible even, to believe that the kind of change we need will come naturally through development. In a world that needs hope, we cannot breathe.

But this is just a time we need to be reminded that Christian hope is not something to which we must ascend, pressing through beyond hopelessness, but something that descends to us, in the midst of hopelessness, inviting us to pray for that which we cannot reasonably expect from progress. Christian hope knows that the air is thin but hopes nonetheless. We are invited to hope, even still; not with eyes closed to the darkness of the present, but with eyes open, tearfully lamenting the godforsakenness of our situation and grieving senseless loss of life through the logic of violence. Even in this death, the crucified God--God with us--descends to us. As Brunner reminds us, "...belief in progress as hope resting upon self-confidence is the opposite of the Christian hope, which is hope founded upon trust in God." (Eternal Hope, p. 10.)

"...The Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him" (Matthew 24:44). Our hope is beyond expectation. "Belief in progress, hope in a better future, was an illegitimate child of Christianity," writes Brunner... "Humanity has a future because it awaits the coming of the kingdom of God in the future of its coming Lord" (p. 25).

So in a world held hostage by the logic of violence and death, when we pray for peace and reconciliation, we are praying for something absurd. But with the hope that meets us in hopelessness, let us pray nonetheless for what we cannot reasonably expect. Let us pray, even in this thin air, "come Lord Jesus, come."
Wesley Ellishttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-36044104261371554762016-06-10T21:21:00.001-04:002016-06-10T21:21:34.672-04:00God is a Teenager

God is a teenager.

How uncomfortable is this thought for you? I imagine that, for many, it's hard to take such a claim seriously. After all, teenagers are so... well, what comes to mind for you? Immature? Unruly? Addicted to technology? Disruptive? Filled with turmoil? Troublesome? Self absorbed? These adjectives represent what has been so assumed by our culture that it's almost achieved the status of "common sense"--teenagers are a problem. Even well-meaning empathizers will concede the notion that teenagers are in transition and have a rambunctiousness, even if an admirable one. Whether we hold them in contempt or think we should be happy to "let teenagers be teenagers," it's just part of the fabric of our culture to assume that adulthood is essentially superior and that youth (or "adolescence") would be solved by a transition into adulthood. In our thinking, maturity is a qualitative term.

So of course it's strange to think that God could be a teenager. That would suggest, given our assumptions, that God is as problematic and irrational as a teenager. God can't be so self absorbed. God can't be so tumultuous. God can't be "in transition." But why are we so much more comfortable with the thought that God is an adult human? Every Christian who confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, the second person of the trinity, confesses that God is a human--that (according to the hypostatic union) human being is taken up into the life and being of God, becoming God's. In Christian theology, it is not that Jesus is human and God is God, "...in the man Jesus, God is God" (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ The Center, p. 45).

Whether or not we've come to terms with what it means (and I'm quite sure we haven't... and can't) there is something casual, in Christian theology, about the notion that God is a human being. And we're even ok with God being a baby. Every Christmas season we're joyfully confronted with images of the "Christ child," with "radiant beams" streaming from his holy face. God as the adult Jesus is fine, we may think, because he's wise and stoic. Baby Jesus is ok too because babies are sweet and innocent. But teenage Jesus!? That's harder to swallow.

All of these notions are assumptions. The fact is, babies are more than their innocence and they're not exactly easy. Adults are not necessarily any more "mature" (in the qualitative sense) or less "in transition" than teenagers. And teenagers, contrary to the conventional wisdom, don't have to be problematic--at least not any more problematic than the next human being. None of us are reduced to or determined by our transitionality. Youth is no more defined by transition into adulthood (i.e. "adolescence") than adulthood is defined by transition into death. It is life and the depth of lived experience that gives meaning to human experience.

The claim that God is a teenager should be no more (or less) unsettling to us than the claim that God, in Jesus Christ, is human. After all, teenagers are no less human than adults.

The hypostatic union should be unsettling. It's scandalous to think that humanity, in all its brokenness and fragility, is taken up into the life and being of God. This has a way of transforming how we see humanity. The hypostatic union, after all, works in both directions. Not only is humanity taken into God, God is also taken into humanity. God assumes all human experience (infant, teenager, adult, male, female, transgender, disabled, etc). Our experience becomes God's so that God's experience and God's future becomes ours. What we discover is that humanity is not just a problem to be solved but, in Christ, it becomes a location for divine encounter.

To claim that God is a teenager is not theologically inaccurate. Indeed, it's important to do so. And not only because Jesus was, in fact, a teenager at one time, but because it allows us to see youth in a different light. It allows us to see teenagers not only as disruptive "adolescents" in transition to adulthood, but as a source of revelation.Wesley Ellishttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-54697534116052778052016-05-07T15:08:00.000-04:002016-05-07T15:08:00.547-04:00American Optimism, Christian Hope, and Jürgen MoltmannThe United States has, perhaps since its origins, been a fairly optimistic country. Both liberals and conservatives are captivated by the idea of progress and the "American dream." Even though our history is full of violence—about 223 out of the last 240 years have been spent at war—the American ethos has been marked by a certain kind of hope for the future. Perhaps this is why, when Jürgen Moltmann, the great German theologian, published his book Theology of Hope in English in the late 1960's, it was so well received. Moltmann gained instant popularity (about as much popularity a theologian can expect) in the United States and found himself being invited to the U.S. to give lectures and talks. The popularity of his book took Moltmann by surprise (see Richard Bauckham, The Theology of Jürgen Moltmann, p. 31). But while I'm sure Moltmann didn't begrudge the opportunity for his work to be so widely read, the popularity of the book may have been based on a misunderstanding. The casual American reader was attracted to Theology of Hope because it resonated with their American can-do attitude. "Things are gonna get better! Yay! Thanks Moltmann!"

The the roots of a theology of hope—and indeed of Christian eschatology itself—run much deeper than the optimism of the American spirit. This is, perhaps, why Moltmann felt the need to offer "the other side of the Theology of Hope" in his second book, The Crucified God (see Moltmann, A Broad Place, p. 144). The real backdrop of Moltmann's theology is not his optimism that things will all turn out ok, but his own experience of hopelessness. Before Moltmann was a theologian, he was a German soldier who experienced the dark side of modern warfare. He writes, "War stories are not tales of adventure. They are stories about destruction and death" (A Broad Place, p. 19). He watched companions die before him, one in his arms. Eventually he found himself defeated, wandering alone on a woodland path, hoping that he might be arrested by some British soldiers. Finally he was arrested and, after he was incarcerated in a prisoner-of-war camp in Belgium in 1945, after the collapse of the German Reich and the destruction of German civilization, his own hometown of Hamburg lying in ruins, Moltmann felt a deep sense of hopelessness. He writes, "I felt abandoned by God and human beings, and the hopes of my youth died. I couldn't see any future ahead of me" (Moltmann, Jesus Christ for Today's World, p. 2). It was in the P.O.W. camp that a chaplain put a Bible in his hands and he began to read. "...When I came to Jesus' death cry I knew: this is the one who understands you and is beside you when everyone else abandons you. 'My God, why have you forsaken me?' That was my cry for God too" (Jesus Christ for Today's World, p. 2). Moltmann's Theology of Hope, was born not out of any optimism regarding the future nor of any preference for the potential of the present. It was born precisely where no future development or progress was discernible. For Moltmann, hope and optimism are two different things. Hope does not expect anything from the present to be developed toward some ideal future. Instead, Moltmann expects the future to invade the present, no matter how hopeless things may seem. Eschatology is not about present being moved toward the future, it's about the coming of God.

We must be very careful that our ministries are not co-opted by American optimism and that, instead, we are grasped by a hope in the coming of God. Optimism will tempt us to mine the present for the things that have the most potential to be developed into the future. Optimism will tempt us to be motivated by what is most effective instead of what is most faithful. But grasped by Christian hope, we can look with hope in the coming of God even to the places (and people) that seem utterly hopeless and without potential. We will even hope, perhaps, in broken bodies and shed blood.
Wesley Ellishttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-88856638725397339992016-04-18T10:03:00.002-04:002016-04-18T10:03:55.172-04:00Why We Need a 'From There to Here' Youth Ministry

You might say there are two kinds of young people in the United States today. There are young people who are ready and excited to change the world, to turn all the problems of society upside down and create a new society--one with creativity, justice, and love. Not yet jaded by the cynical systems we adults have created and perpetuated, these young people are entrepreneurial and passionate. But there's another kind of young person. There're also young people who are tired of being told they can change the world. There are young people who feel they've lost their passion (or never found it) and are crushed under the expectations of their parents, their teachers, their coaches, ...their pastors. There are young people who are just tired and, before they can imagine meeting the great world-changing expectations the adult world keeps imposing on them, they just desperately want to be told that they're ok just the way they are.

This second group is greatly at risk, I believe, in youth ministry. Youth Ministry has recently prided itself on (and judged itself according to) its ability to "empower" young people, to "give voice" to them and help them see their potential. If Kenda Dean's point in her book, Practicing Passion, holds any water (and I happen to believe it holds a ton of water), youth ministry has not always been particularly good at tapping in to or igniting the actual passions of young people. But whether or not youth workers have learned anything from Dean's suggestions (and, I'm afraid, mostly they haven't), there's certainly a movement in youth ministry to put kids to work. Whether or not a kid goes on the church mission trip is, for some youth workers, a direct reflection of their spiritual maturity and commitment to Christ. Nevermind whether or not the mission trip has anything to do with what they're actually passionate about (believe it or not, not every young person finds a lot of life in swinging a hammer. Maybe they'd rather change the world by making music or studying physics). As long as we're all about putting kids to work, we'd do much better to give them a platform to discover where their great passions and the world's great needs intersect (to channel Frederick Buechner).

But youth ministry can't be all about putting kids to work. It can't just be about empowerment. This is clearly true for the second kind of young person I described above. In the frenzy to get things done, youth ministry has tailored itself to the needs of only the first kind of young person. In the frenzy, those kids who are over being "empowered" (we might be tempted to call them burn-outs) are left behind and, if noticed at all, are considered the collateral damage of good ministry. "They didn't get on the mission train? Well, I guess you can't win 'em all."

What this kind of young person needs and, what the first kind might need even more is a different theology of youth ministry.

Our theology of youth ministry is dominated by a from here to there trajectory. It's about how young people get from where they are to where God is--from here to the mission trip, from here to the next church service, from here to a new society, from here to changing the world, from here to maturity. But, the fact is, this is not a good theology of youth ministry. I would venture to say it's not a particularly Christian theology of youth ministry at all.

The truth of God, revealed in Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, is that ministry is always, first and foremost, a from there to here kind of thing. The gospel of Jesus Christ is that when there was literally no way for us to justify ourselves, to bring new creation, to bring ourselves from death to life, to get from here to there... when there was no way for us to get to God, God came to us! God came from there to here... even to the cross. When we are burnt out, when there's no way we can imagine being "empowered," when we are utterly defeated by expectations we cannot meet, the gospel tells us that God is here already. There's nowhere we have to go. We are allowed to be loved before we even think of trying to love God.

It's a little more obvious why we need a from there to here theology of youth ministry for those kids who see no way forward and (sometimes wisely) decline our invitations to hop on the mission train. They can finally be told that they are loved just the way they are. They can finally hear the good news that they can't change the world and they don't need to... that's God's job and God's doing it. They can be comforted (and perhaps empowered) by the knowledge that their work can be play. They can take joy in what they do because their life does not depend on what they do. Their life is secured in Christ in whom God interrupts death with life. They can rest assured in the promise of the resurrection and not be crushed under the pressures of empowerment.

But this from there to here theology of youth ministry might be even more important for the kids who do want to change the world, who have a passion and an idea and are ready to make a difference. This message might be even more important for the kids who are  going on the mission trip. They are unsuspectingly threatened by the risk of their own success. If they do something spectacular, they may be tempted to confuse their accomplishment with their spirituality. They may find themselves unable to experience God outside of their good works. In having made it (let's say they really do make it, just for the sake of speculation) from here to there, in having made it to God, they might assume that everyone else needs to follow the same trajectory. They might find themselves judging (or at least pitying) the ones who didn't make it. And, worse yet, they might think that their identity lies in what they accomplish and what they love rather than in the God who loves them before they have a chance to do or fail to do anything. These kids need the from there to here theology as much as everyone else. These kids need to know the good news that their successes do not define them.

In general, youth ministry needs to know that its success (and failure) does not define it. Youth ministry is not a from here to there kind of thing. It's always about God's coming to us first. The work we do is more like play. It's a playful and joyful (even when it is profoundly difficult and even painful) participation in the life of God in the world.

Wesley Ellishttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-44616521610690383952016-04-13T14:06:00.002-04:002016-04-13T14:06:40.843-04:00On Winning in the Immanent FrameSo, it's been a while since I've been active on my blog. That's usually a sign that my life is in turmoil... and that's mostly been true since February. Because I'll be graduating from Princeton Seminary in May, I've been diligently (perhaps frantically) trying to figure out what's next for me. That's almost completely worked out now, so I'm hoping to be more regular in my blogging from now on.

But, even though I've been silent on this blog, I haven't been silent elsewhere. I've posted a three-part blog series that's sorta about evangelism and sorta about apologetics. I'd say it's mostly about friendship and winning in the "immanent frame." I wrote it for the Science for Youth Ministry writing symposium I attended in December. Thanks to the feedback I received from colleagues at the symposium, I think the article turned out pretty good. Thanks to the Institute For Youth Ministry for publishing it. You can read it here.

Part 1: "Winning"

Part 2: "The 'Real' Argument"

Part 3: "The Real Win: Friendship"

Wesley Ellishttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-84390876590241510682016-02-08T13:14:00.001-05:002016-02-11T00:13:52.756-05:00A Thought on Innovation in Ministry

There's a lot of talk in the church right now about "innovation." Of course, it's not everywhere. There are certainly those who'd say there isn't a lot of talk--not near enough!--about innovation in the church. Some say that's the very problem with the church! But, from where I am sitting, as I finish up my M.Div., and keep an eye on the jobs that are out there, it seems like everyone wants innovation.

I get it. We're discovering that the methods and strategies we've been employing in ministry for the past several decades aren't working the way we want them to. They're no longer cultivating healthy congregations or nurturing good attendance. We're shrinking in significant ways (or so the research would suggest), and we don't want to shrink. So what's the answer? It must be innovation. We must come up with new methods and strategies. We must innovate. So we're becoming all about innovation. Any church, we think, that wants to revitalize its ministry and get more people involved has to be innovative and hire innovative leaders.

There's something a little discouraging to me about that. Not only is it discouraging because I rarely think of myself as an "innovative leader," so there are fewer and fewer job descriptions out there for which I feel I really fit the profile. And not only because it seems that with "innovation" at the fore, words like "attentive" and "patient" are going out of style. But what is really discouraging to me is that, while it seemed like the church (and especially youth ministry) was beginning to take a "theological turn," it seems that our anxiety has gotten the best of us and we're running back to methods and strategies again.

Now, don't get me wrong. Methods and strategies will always have their place. But to to take a theological turn is to leave methods and strategies for later. A turn to the theological is not fundamentally concerned with fixing the "problems" which the church faces--low attendance and waning influence--but with attending to the presence and action of God in the depth of lived experience. That is to say, effectiveness and strategy take a back seat for attentiveness and faithfulness. And, where innovation is so focused on moving forward--not taking "no" for an answer and not accepting failure as an option--a theological pastoral attentiveness is open to the possibility that where God is present and active is in a place that isn't improving and isn't going to improve. Our first motivation is not innovation, vitality, or expediency. Our first motivation is God's invitation. And if we import any assumption concerning where and how God is moving, we may miss what God is actually calling us to be.

Ministry is about going where God has already gone and participating in what God is already doing. In this sense, the concept of "innovation" in ministry is misleading. And ambition can be dangerous. sometimes God goes where there's no potential to accomplish anything. Sometimes you must "...make it your ambition to lead a quiet life..." (1 Thes. 4:11). So, while I understand the impulse to be innovative, it's much more important to be theological. If we're willing to minister not out of anxiety but out of faithfulness, then we must begin not by being "innovative leaders" but by being patient and attentive followers of the crucified Christ.Wesley Ellishttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-27207849390214670542016-01-18T11:56:00.001-05:002016-01-18T11:56:41.565-05:00Some thoughts on creativity in parenting

Parenting is hard, precisely because it requires such incredible amounts of humility and creativity to do it well and to do it without giving in to our retributive and authoritarian impulses. We will all--those of us with children, at least--likely agree that parenting is difficult. But how we respond to the difficulty and indeed where we place the difficulty is where we run into disagreement (and there's no shortage of disagreement among parents regarding best practices). Some would say that the difficulty of parenting merits reactions and forms of discipline that are pragmatic, though not necessarily agreeable or particularly gentle. Others (and I would include myself in this camp) would say that a major part of the difficulty of parenting is found in resisting some of those forms of discipline and communication that are our first impulse. It is creativity in parenting that turns out to be its real difficulty--finding creative alternatives to those practices that might seem, in the moment, to be most effective but actually do more harm than good in the long term.

We must come to terms with the fact that while, physiologically speaking, parenting comes natural to us, culturally speaking, parenting is quite unnatural. Relations between adults and children are relations marked by cultural differences that necessitate care and intentionality that don't just happen on accident. There are power dynamics at play which, if ignored, are easily exploited and will naturally, in the United States, be exploited by adults who do not carefully consider the complexity of their orientation to children. Expecting our "natural" impulse to be the best one without considering our cultural inclination to personal retribution and instrumentalization is a short-cut to real ethical and social-personal problems.

In America, we are conditioned toward a kind of individualism that protects that buffer between ourselves and others. In service to this individualism, retribution and punishment are privileged as inherently good. We grow thorns so that if someone transgresses our personal authority, they bleed. so if someone wrongs us, our impulse is to see them punished. This is problematic enough when applied to adult relationships. It's much more problematic in relationships between children and adults. When a child transgresses a parent, the "natural"impulse is to manufacture a punishment in order to change behavior. The power dynamics that exist between parents and children make it almost effortless. We can spank a child, we have that power. But have you ever tried to "spank" an adult for cutting you off in traffic? It would be effective, wouldn't it? That person would probably behave differently behind the wheel in the future. But because of the way we have constructed power relations in our society, that would be simply inappropriate! It would, in fact, merit legal conviction for "assault" or worse. But when it comes to children, we basically allow it... we permit ourselves to respond to our impulses in ways we would never permit ourselves if the situation involved an adult. What is exposed in the ways we employ punishment toward children is our cultural inclination toward personal retribution. Our impulse is to act on self-preservation (the preservation of our authority) and not on the human dignity of the other, considering how they inhabit their world and conceive of their situation.

Also problematic is our cultural inclination toward instrumentalization. We are conditioned to conceive of our relationships as transactions of influence with control as its currency and effectiveness its gross domestic product. Effectiveness becomes the metric by which we judgement the merit of a given practice or form of discipline. If it works, we do it... even in relationships. We may not see the power of instrumentalization over our social imagination and cultural existence as clearly in relations among adults as we might in relations between adults and children. The trump card in disputes over what parenting techniques we should use is effectiveness. "Hey, it works!" has replaced "it's good and it's appropriate." What should drive our choices as parents (indeed, as humans) is not effectiveness but love. We should consider not only what "works" but what action actually corresponds to the dignity and the humanity of our children in their own right. We need to replace influence with participation and ask ourselves not what will most effectively influence the behavior of our children but what will allow us to participate most deeply in the humanity of our children.

Our relationships to the weakest people in our society--the ones over whom we are afforded so much control and social superiority--provide a window into our imbedded orientation to others more generally (perhaps this is why Jesus took our orientation toward "the least of these" so seriously in Matthew 25). Our impulses toward retribution and instrumentalization are not justifications for our parenting choices, they're indictments of our cultural existence.

As parents, we are called to resist, not give in to, our cultural impulses of retribution and instrumentalization. We are called to think first of the dignity of our children, not as the subjects to our authority, but as human beings who face social challenges with their own agency. To respond creatively to their "disobedience" is not to come up with a punishment, but to listen carefully to those conditions that affect their agency and their sense of security and to offer guidance and care and to face consequences with them as their parent. To creatively decide how we will respond to and relate with our children is to all but abandon metric of "effectiveness" and replace it with the metric of love.

This creativity is the true difficulty of parenting and it is also its true elegance... it is the chance for us to participate in (not just influence) the life our children and to learn from them as children what it truly means for us to be their parent.Wesley Ellishttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-67906343938526655662016-01-15T12:30:00.000-05:002016-01-15T12:32:07.369-05:00Movement, Not Improvement

I've never been big on "New Year's resolutions"... and no! Not just because I suck at keeping them. They also bother me because they are unadulteratedly drenched in the American obsession with progress and "self-improvement" that already haunts our imagination at every turn. January (or at least its first couple of weeks) is the time when we are given permission to take our lives into our hands and become better than we were last year (even though we said pretty much the same thing the previous January... and the one before that).

Instead of resisting this impulse in the church, we tend to baptize it. Instead of resisting the American proclivity to progress and ambitious self-improvement, we simply spiritualize it--we might call it "sanctification" or something like it--and continue headlong in pursuit of "improvement" by another name. But the Christian life, sanctification in particular, is not just the "Christian" version of progress. The Christian life is about the movement of the Spirit, not the improvement of the people.

New Year's resolutions, and the proclivity to progress more generally, are deeply invested in measurement. Whether it be of the waistline, the bank account, the clock, or the scale, we rely on measurements to help us assess our status. But Henri Nouwen wrote,"In a society that overvalues progress, development, and personal achievement ...it is of great importance that we leave the world of measurements behind when we speak about the life of the Spirit." He goes on to say, "...Spiritual formation, I have come to believe, is not about steps or stages on the way to perfection. It's about the movements from the mind to the heart through prayer in its many forms that reunite us with God, each other, and our truest selves" (Spiritual Formation p. xv-xvi).

In the United States, we effortlessly associate movement with improvement. We are almost incapable of disassociating them, in fact. But this default association inevitably leads to a kind of restlessness, an anxiety, that is rooted in judgement against the present. I think that Robert DeLong (with whom, incidentally, I went to college) captures some of this anxiety associated with the need for improvement in his song, "Just Movement."

We baptize our restlessness. We baptize our discomfort with the present, with where we are--"I want to be anywhere but here"--and we call it progress, we call it sanctification. But sanctification is about movement, not improvement. Yes, we will be moved. But more fundamentally, it is God who moves. Sanctification is, like justification, God's job.

This time of year, it is our ritual to think about taking more and more control of our lives and the things by which we measure them, even spirituality. But sanctification, the Christian life, is not about taking more and more control over our spiritual status. It is about taking less and less control--relinquishing our control over our spirituality to the Spirit--and abandoning the metric of improvement altogether. This is the irony we Americans are so prone to miss. To truly "improve" in sanctification, is to stop trying to improve and to start simply delighting in the things that delight God.

Now there's surely work to be done! The claim here is not that we should be content in doing nothing (remember there is movement even where we don't need to think about improvement). But the work that is associated with sanctification is more like play. It is not driven by "purpose" or "outcome" or "measurement." It is the work of participating in what is true of us according to God's grace and it is the impulse of having been justified in Christ. It is the work, then, of joy and passion. It is the work of love.

So this year, instead of focusing on all the room you have for improvement, focus instead on the movement of the Spirit and take delight in what delights God.Wesley Ellishttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-14459283351418586052016-01-08T10:44:00.000-05:002016-01-08T10:50:32.293-05:0015 Books of 2015Lists are great! I think they're helpful. I like to challenge myself to make lists, to rank things, to help me think through different things; be they priorities, favorites, options, or influences. The following list is my jab at ranking the top 15 books (in terms of their positive influence on my thinking) that I read in 2015. You'll quickly notice that they weren't all written in 2015... that's just when I finally got around to actually reading them (and some of them were written in 2015). So, obviously, there are books that by all means should have made the list, had I read them in time (I'm thinking of Andrew Zirschky's Beyond the Screen, I expect that one to make my 2016 list).

15. Saying is Believing by Amanda Hontz Drury
This is a wonderful argument for the importance of the practice of "testimony" an giving voice to young people's experience in youth ministry. We discover that "...engaging in the practice of testimony develops and deepens authentic Christian faith for adolescents" (p. 19). And beyond merely throwing around theories (though her theory is robust), Drury offers examples and concrete practices that can (and should) be taken up in youth ministries.

14. Let the Children Come: Reimagining Childhood From a Christian Perspective by Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore
Bonnie Miller-McLemore is one of the leading thinkers in the field of practical theology and also one of the only thinkers to deeply reflect on childhood. This book, which I believe started out as a book about parenting but became a book about childhood, offers an approach to childhood that avoids the foreclosure of meaning that often comes with psychologically essentialized or biologically determinative approaches to understanding children's experience. She centralizes the experience of the child on its own terms and thus teaches us lessons we couldn't learn from simply studying children as "potential adults."

13. Raging with Compassion by John Swinton
John Swinton has become a huge influence on my thinking!
He is a rare example of someone who is steeped in pastoral care (as opposed to Christian education and formation... there is somewhat of a division between these in practical theology) and privileges the theological nature of practical theology with a robust theological methodology (a trait more common on the education/formation side of the field, i.e. Richard Osmer, Ray Anderson, and Andrew Root). In Raging with Compassion Swinton takes up "the problem of evil" (theodicy)--a problem usually reserved or outsourced to the systematic theologians. And in approaching the problem as a practical theologian, he teaches us lessons that the systematic theologians simply couldn't. Helping us discern the presence (and absence) of God in the human experience of radical suffering and evil, Swinton offers concrete practices that churches should take up in helping and allowing the people in their congregations face this haunting problem.

12. Spiritual Formation by Henri Nouwen

If I had only read Henri Nouwen, and no one else, for the entire year, it would not have been a waste. Nouwen is always nourishment for the soul and stimulation for the mind. In this book, Nouwen explores the concept of spiritual formation--a concept that is much more enigmatic than most theologians are willing to make it. Nouwen moves us away from progressivist approaches to spiritual formation that are built on the assumption that formation is univocally related with development and the achievement of higher levels of formation. "In a society that overvalues progress, development, and personal achievement ...it is of great importance," writes Nouwen, "that we leave the world of measurements behind when we speak about the life of the Spirit. Spiritual formation, I have come to believe, is not about steps or stages on the way to perfection. It's about the movements from the mind to the heart through prayer in its many forms that reunite us with God, each other, and our truest selves" (p. xv-xvi).

11. Cross Talk by Sally Brown

Sally Brown takes the theology of the cross to the discipline of homiletics (preaching). In mainline American Christianity, there has been a hesitancy among preachers, for all the right reasons, to preach on the suffering and death of Jesus. The hesitancy is merited by the damage that has been caused by wrong-headed approaches to the theology of the cross--approaches that are built on unhelpful "theories of the atonement" that have legitimized various forms of abuse or have justified the resignation of sufferers to their suffering. Brown believes that by moving away from such theories and moving toward the ambiguous and fluid theology of the cross that's present in the New Testament, we can reclaim the centrality of the cross and its meaning in our preaching.

10. The Disabled God by Nancy L. Eiesland
I think it's fair to think of The Disabled God as a seminal work in the theology of disability. Drawing from sources in liberation theology, Eiesland introduces us to God revealed not as "perfect" and "powerful" but as disabled in the imperfect scarred body of the resurrected Jesus. What we discover is that disability (a cultural construction) does not preclude wholeness and that the human experience of embodiment is an experience of glorious difference. Read this book!

9. Gifts Glittering and Poisoned by Chanon Ross
Chanon Ross is not only a brilliant scholar... he happens to be my boss (at the Institute for Youth Ministry). However, don't you dare begin to think that's the only reason his book has made my list this year. I learned a lot from this book! In Gifts Glittering and Poisoned, Ross explores the disordered desires of American consumer society through the lens of an historical interpretation of ancient Roman imperial pomp (specifically its games in the colosseum), interpreting both of these distinct cultures--the United States and the Roman Empire--as "society of the spectacle." Through spectacular displays that feed on and fetishize our individual desires (disordering them), we are formed as a dimembered society. But Ross invites us, as the church, to be re-membered and to resist, subvert, and reframe the spectacle through the remembrance of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. ...P.S. Gifts Glittering and Poisoned (or GG&P? Wonder if that'll catch on...) is going to be featured in a symposium on Syndicate in the not-so-distant future. You should check it out!

8. A Secular Age by Charles Taylor

Not every book on this list is here because I found enjoyment in reading it. A Secular Age is one of those books that you just have to read... even if you find it fairly boring (which I did). Don't get me wrong. A lot of people find this book to be a real page turner (I believe Andrew Root has already read it 5 time... btw, be impressed by that 'cause it's about 900 pages long). I forced myself to bite the bullet and read this whole book this Fall because I'd read James K. A. Smith's short summary (How (Not) to Be Secular) and realized that I really just needed to read Taylor himself (I guess Smith did his job). The reason this book has made my list is because I simply cannot unlearn the lessons I learned from this book and the framework of interpretation he offers has become a standard interpretive lens for me. Taylor offers a lens for understanding the world, specifically how society moved from its predisposition of belief to a predisposition of disbelief. In other words, Taylor's big question is, How did we go from a world in which it was difficult not to believe in God to a world where it is difficult to believe in God. Our sort of imbedded understanding of the world no longer includes transcendence. We live in what Taylor calls, "the immanent frame" where we are at best only "haunted" by transcendence. So even our most devout attempts to speak and think of God are encased in an epistemological posture that complicates and even precludes the very suggestion of divinity. This is not all bad, however, since ours is a God who is not pure transcendence but a God revealed in the particularity of human life, even the human life of Jesus of Nazareth--God is transcendence in immanence.

7.  Theology and the Philosophy of Science by Wolfhart Pannenberg

This book was not what I had come to expect from Wolfart Pannenberg. I had basically associated Pannenberg with Jurgen Moltmann and had learned to expect a similar theological style. Having only read Jesus--God and Man and maybe two or three short articles or chapters by Pannenberg, I did not realize how incredibly dense and robust Pannenberg's scholarship could be. (No offense to Moltmann, but it turns out Panneneberg is a bit more rigorous and a lot more dense in his scholarship). This book was a real challenge for me, but once I finished reading it (and it took some patience through 450 pages of confusion to finally get to a place of understanding), I could appreciate how important this book is. Panneneberg's project, as I understand it, is to argue for the legitimacy of theology as a "science" (which, in his german mind, is more like what we might mean by "academic discipline"). But he does it in a way that is quite distinct from the way Schliermacher did it. Rather than trying to elevate the theological to the level of "hard science" that can objectively quantify, prove, and generalize its content, Pannenberg brings every science, even the "hard" ones down to the level of the theological and the subjective. He does this by contending that a science is something that explores and apprehends reality. He then goes on to set up science's problem as a problem of meaning. To put it simply (and probably simplistically... remember, this was a tough book for me) reality itself is not compatible with a hard bifurcation of "natural" and "human" sciences, nor is it limited only to nomological forms of understanding--rules on how things are. Reality, to be understood, must include its meaning--it must include the transcendent and ideographic. Therefore, whatever methods we have to explore reality, including the exploration of its meaning, must be considered a science. Theology, the science that explores the transcendent, unquantifiable, and qualitative grounding of reality and its meaning (namely, God) is a science in its truest sense. And as such, in turn, it must take seriously the whole of reality of which God is at the heart.
There's actually a lot more to this book and I'm sure many of its themes went far over my head. But it will continue to be an important resource for me.

6. Tattoos on the Heart by Gregory Boyle
After talking about Taylor and Pannenberg, turning to Gregory Boyle might seem like taking a rest in the shallow end... and it is, if we're only speaking in terms of readability. But Boyle is more challenging than you'd think. Boyle started a gang-intervention program located in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. In Tattoos on the Heart, Boyle tells the stories of the people there, people we'd perhaps be tempted to dehumanize through stigmatization. In biblical fashion, these stories work as parables, exposing the presence and action of God in the lives of marginalized and sometimes even frightening people (have you heard the story of the Good Samaritan lately?). This book cannot help but give its reader hope and a renewed sense of compassion and love for humanity through the revelation of God's extravagant love for humanity.

5. Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman

Howard Thurman is someone that everyone should read and Jesus and the Disinherited is a good place to start. Before the emergence of black liberation theology, Thurman offered a liberating spirituality grounded in the poor Jewish Jesus who was disinherited under Roman oppression. Grounding the gospel itself in the story of this Jesus, Thurman offers a view of Christianity that actually offers good news to people who have found themselves on the under-side of society, even so-called "Christian" society.

4. Letter From Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr.
It's almost embarrassing that I didn't get around to reading this short but undeniably powerful book until 2015. A classic, to be sure, Letter From Birmingham Jail simply must be read and re-read, especially right now! This letter (either a long letter or a very short book) is a defense of non-violent resistance to racism and segregation. It outlines the moral responsibility to break unjust laws and to take direct action instead of waiting for change to slowly develop. The letter itself is beautiful and important, but the context is what gives it its power. Anyone who thinks that non-violence is the comfortable path or that racism is simply going to fade away if we wait needs only to remember that when Dr. King penned the words, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. ...Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial 'outside agitator' idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider," he was sitting in a jail cell, imprisoned, in Birmingham.

3. Giving an Account of Oneself by Judith Butler
Judith Butler has messed me up.... in a good way. I will never be able to think of the idea of "story" in the same way again. She reminds us of the truth that we already know in our gut--that our identity, the who of what we are, simply cannot be contained in a "story." We know in our bones, even as we give account of ourselves or try to tell our story, that the cracks in the narrative, the places where we simplify the story, tell tiny little lies so that the story makes more sense, or omit certain details for the sake of the listener are, in themselves, significant and real. In giving too much authority to the story, we foreclose on the meaning of those things that don't fit and those truths to which we have no access through analysis. We are not, in truth, our story. Rather, we are who we are in the very "structure of address" of which the story is only an interruption. I am not my story, I am the one who stands before you, the me of the story is no more real than the me who addresses you and is addressed by you. There's a lot to this book. Read it so you can get messed up too!

2. Childhood (second edition) by Chris Jenks
Yes! This may be the best work in Childhood Studies to date. Exploring childhood as a social construct rather than a 'natural' developmental process, Jenks challenges the reader on one traditional assumption after another and encourages us to reimagine childhood for it's actual social content and not just it's potentiality toward achieving adulthood. This book... even before Erickson and Piaget... should be required reading for anyone who works with children and youth or endeavors to understand the experience of childhood. For the youth worker and the practical theologian, this book is a wonderful resource for re-theorizing "adolescence" (and we need to do that!).

1. Theology of Play by Jurgen Moltmann
I can hardly believe that it's been less than a year since I've read this book. It has become so important to my own thinking that I can hardly remember being without it. This is one of Moltmann's greatest works, I believe, and yet it remains among the most difficult to acquire (since it is, as of now, out of print... but you can find it under the title Theology and Joy). In following with the spirit of its subject, this book is written with a playful and experimental (even curious) posture. It may, therefore, frustrate the extremely careful and scientific dogmatic theologians among us, but it exemplifies Moltmann's more doxological approach to theology--"We study theology properly because we are curious and find pleasure in the subject" (66). Thus, Theology of Play is as perplexing as it is profound and mysterious as it is illuminating. Moltmann wants to see a paradigm shift--from work to play, from necessity and outcome to freedom and spontaneity, from adult notions of purpose and goal to childlike enjoyment of God for its own sake, from law to gospel. For Moltmann, the whole of the Christian life is at stake. For as the Christian life itself is awareness of God in Jesus Christ, and ultimately, delight in God "...to confuse the enjoyment of God and our existence with goals and purposes" (19) sacrifices the freedom of liberation that is the good news of Jesus Christ.
"Life as rejoicing in liberation, as solidarity with those in bondage, as play with reconciled existence, and as pain at unreconciled existence demonstrates the Easter event in the world" (31). We are to learn from children and learn to play, to play without any "purpose" as such. Indeed the very question of purpose is the "question of the adult in the child who does't want to play anymore but needs goals in order to make something respectable of himself" (18). The Christian life, according to Moltmann, is not to be envisioned as a 'purpose driven life' but, perhaps, as a game of delight in the God who creates and redeems the world for nothing. Find this book and read it!Wesley Ellishttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-28029327791135140312015-12-11T07:41:00.000-05:002015-12-11T07:41:24.641-05:00An Open Letter to Falwell from Christian Students
40 Ph.D. students from Princeton Theological Seminary composed an open letter to Jerry Falwell, Jr. of Liberty University in response to some disturbing things he recently said at Liberty University's Convocation on Dec. 4. Falwell "recommended arming Christian students with the object of killing Muslims..." and, needless to say, there's nothing "Christian" about that.

Many of us at Princeton Theological Seminary were alarmed and deeply troubled by these comments and those that followed in the media. We feel compelled as Christian scholars to testify to the love of Jesus Christ and to address your statements.

Read the letter, share it, and if you are a Christian student anywhere, please sign the petition to join your voice to theirs.

Wesley Ellishttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-51597024403680987142015-11-17T09:12:00.000-05:002015-11-17T09:12:54.112-05:00Bending Our Gendered Prayers

We're doing more than we think we are when we pray, "our father…" or "father God." I don't usually get hung up on it, but recently I've found myself distracted when someone begins a corporate prayer with the paternal address. But why should I get hung up on "father"? After all, it is biblical, isn't it? In the New testament, Jesus prays to his "father," he even teaches his disciples to pray, "our father…" (Matthew 6:9, NRSV). It's also strung throughout the Hebrew Bible. For example, Deuteronomy 32:6 is explicit: "Is this the way you repay the LORD, O foolish and unwise people? Is he not your Father, your Creator, who made you and formed you?" (NIV). And we can't ignore the Prophets, can we?—"Have we not all one Father? Did not one God create us? Why do we profane the covenant of our fathers by breaking faith with one another?" (Malachi 2:10, NIV).

The fatherhood of God is biblical. But what's also biblical is the motherhood of God! Passages like Isaiah 42:14 scandalize any notion of God as a differentiated and unconditioned male figure who watches the world from a distance (the bearded old man in the sky motif, if you will)—"For a long time I have held my peace, I have kept still and restrained myself; now I will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp and pant" (NRSV). And there's also Isaiah 49:15, "Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you" (NRSV). Isaiah is not alone. Hosea, too, uses such language; "I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them" (Hosea 11:4, NRSV).

Might we consider such passages examples of "gender bending?" Gender bending is what it sounds like—it is bending or challenging, without completely breaking or abolishing, social norms of masculinity and femininity. Gender bending helps us to correct strongly held, though essentialist, interpretations imposed on women's and/or men's experience (if we can even use such a term without ourselves essentializing). When Miriam speaks against Moses (Numbers 12) or when Jael defeats Sisera (Judges 4:17-22), they do not completely solve the problem of patriarchal and paternalistic viewpoints in scripture, but they do bend them, they do offer resources to help us push beyond such views. The problem, however, in considering motherly images of God as examples of gender bending is that we may not want to admit to a paternal starting-point. We may not want to give credence to the assumption that fatherhood is the "norm" for God and motherhood is "bending" it. We have theological reasons to resist imposing any such norm onto God. And it is disputable to what extent we might need to start with such a norm. Nowhere in scripture is there such a claim that God is univocally a male. Nowhere, in fact, is there any explicit claim to the gender of God. In fact, if there is any claim, it is that God in some way transcends human categories and social constructions—"God is not a human being, that he should lie, or a mortal, that he should change his mind" (Numbers 23:19, NRSV).

But the problem is that fatherhood, not motherhood, is a theological position that's been held throughout church history—from Augustine to Calvin to Barth. It has not helped that men were, for so long and in so many contexts, the only ones given voice in the discipline. In his book, The Christian Life, Barth defends and even establishes the exclusivity of praying, "our father…," by asserting that to be dissuaded from doing so on socio-political or other temporal grounds (i.e. someone has had a bad history with their earthly father) is to mistake the address for having analogy in human experience—to subsume the objective reality of God into subjective human experience. This is an interesting theological argument, and in some ways a convincing one, but in preserving the function of theological language and in preserving the relational address in prayer (God is a person, not an idea, so the vocative is indispensable), Barth also establishes an exclusively paternal address where maternal address could be (would be!) just as biblically and theologically appropriate for personal address.

So what we're doing when we pray, "father," with exclusivity is we are establishing the masculinity of God as a social norm. It is only against this backdrop that we can consider motherly metaphors of scripture to be examples of gender bending. And it is against this backdrop that it becomes vitally important to privilege these passages as correctives. It's not that praying to God as "father" is wrong or unbiblical, it's that not praying to God as "mother" may be wrong and unbiblical. In any case, what we're after is the vocative, a personal address, so that God does not become accessible as an immanent intellectual construction, but is encountered as an acting subject (indeed, a social actor) who cannot be contained in essentializing constructions of language. If there is a way to bend the gendered vocative address, we must find it. We must find a way to address God in such a way that certain conceptions of human attribution are not imposed on God so that such attributes are made "godlike" in a way that others are not (thus placing the latter in subordination to the former). As Virginia Ramey Mollenkott has said, "If God is always 'he' and imaged as Father, Husband, or Master, then human husbands, fathers, and employers are godlike in a way that wives, mothers, and employees are not. And the stage is set for exploitation."* Herein lies our ethical-theological imperative to think differently about how we gender God in our prayer and in our speech. There is a potential dehumanizing (or de-divinizing, if we are careful with our meaning) effect in our exclusively gendered language. But herein also lies our ministerial imperative. If ministry is essentially participating in God's action and if God's action is located in the concrete and lived experience of human beings, then to obscure someone's experience through the theological essentialism of imposed gendered norms is to obscure the very location of divine and human encounter and to obstruct our participation in God's action.

*Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, "Sexist Language: The Problem and the Cure," in Language and the Church: Articles and Designs for Workshops, ed. Barbara A. Withers (New York: National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., 1984), 14. Cited in Sharon H. Ringe, "Feminist Theology and The United Church of Christ," in Theology and Identity: Traditions, Movements, and Polity in the United Church of Christ, Revised, ed. Daniel L. Johnston & Charles Hambrick-Stowe, (Cleveland: United Church Press, 2007), 121.
 Wesley Ellishttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-87039012092105903942015-11-08T16:31:00.003-05:002015-11-08T19:14:57.880-05:00Jimmy Kimmel and the Savage ChildYou're probably familiar with Jimmy Kimmel's "I told my kids I ate their Halloween candy" tradition. Each year Kimmel invites parents to tell their children that they ate all their Halloween candy and to post their reactions on Youtube. Kimmel then features a compilation of many of the videos on his show.

Now, by and large, reactions to these videos have been positive. In our culture, this is taken as good comedy and good fun. In fact, it's difficult to find, at least through a Google search, critiques of Kimmel's practice. Consensus, it seems, would be that this practice is basically innocent and ethically sound. However, I think it's important to think critically about what's going on in this practice and in the popular response to it.

In the late 19th century and early 20th century, a popular form of entertainment in the United States was what we call "Wild West shows." These Wild West shows were a sort of circus spectacle offering a romantic and exaggerated image of life in the "Old West," featuring equestrian acts, gun slinging and marksmanship performances, and reenactments of famous battles between "cowboys" and "indians" such as the "Battle of Little Big Horn." These reenactments and some of the other performances featured Native American performers. The Native performers were one of the major draws. According to Linda Scarangella McNenly, "Wild West shows consistently produced both romantic and stereotypical representations of Native peoples as exotic noble savages..." White Americans, fascinated with this "savage" culture, attended the performances as a sort of cultural voyeurism, to see and be entertained by the played-up wildness and savagery of the "Indian" other. Native performers who faced constricting and often oppressive conditions on their reservations were, of course, willing to travel with Wild Bill and go on tour with these performances. But, nevertheless, these performances are largely understood today as a form of exploitation. White Americans, up until the 1930's, enjoyed observing the "less developed" and "less rational" native culture as a form of entertainment--"look how they dress! Look at their savagery! Aren't they strange and interesting?"

Around the same time in history there were such things as "human zoos" where savage people were literally put on display in exhibits for whites to enjoy. One such exhibit opened in 1906 at the Bronx Zoo. "At first, some people weren't sure what it was. It — he — seemed much less a monkey than a man, though a very small, dark one with grotesquely pointed teeth. He wore modern clothing but no shoes. He was proficient with bow and arrow, and entertained the crowd by shooting at a target. He displayed skill at weaving with twine, made amusing faces and drank soda" (NYT: "The Scandal at the Zoo"). The young man's name was Ota Benga, a Congolese native. In the same day, whites could go see the monkeys, the elephants, and then... oh yes... the "savage." People loved to watch him and laugh at his antics without the slightest thought given to what his account of his own experience, what he felt of his situation. It was just good entertainment. It shouldn't come as a surprise, though, that Ota Benga, at the age of 32, became depressed and shot himself.

These spectacles of entertainment--Wild West shows and human zoos, entertainment we'd broadly describe as unethical today--are just examples of the kind of things that emerged during a time in history when the narratives of progress and development were in full swing, when we thought that Western civilization was the civilization and everyone else needed us to help them catch up (unfortunately, the church's history of missionary evangelism was deeply grafted into this narrative). Those who were less developed and less rational, the savages, were entertaining to us. We were fascinated by them and yet we were oblivious to their exploitation and dehumanization because we were blinded by the "innocence" of our fascination. It was good clean fun, good comedy and entertainment.

You could say we have come along way. You could say that we're better at seeing the humanity of people who are "other" than us. This is reflected in the fact that the term "savage" is no longer considered ethical academic terminology. To theorize a culture as "savage" would be to succumb to an overt ethnocentrism and to face the ethical charge. But we're not out of the woods yet.

What does any of this have to do with Jimmy Kimmel? I'm getting to that.

I think we know (or should know) that we're not out of the woods yet in a lot of social locations (take some popular media representations of the Black Lives Matter movement, for example) when it comes to ethnocentrism. It's perhaps more complicated, in some ways, than it was when we were putting human beings in zoos, but I think we know that our biases still tend to lead us to cultural voyeurisms of various sorts. But one place we may be surprised to discover our own ethnocentrism is in the lives of our children. And the Jimmy Kimmel Halloween candy phenomenon is reflective of this.

Now before you write me off as a prude--too uptight to appreciate the good clean fun of pranking a 5 year old--consider the possibility that we've made the child out to be a "savage."

Where, in our culture, is the narrative of progress and development most uncritically alive today? Where, in our society, is it acceptable to consider someone as less "advanced," less developed, and less rational than we are, on a scale of progress and cultural achievement? Chris Jenks writes, "Just as the early 'evolutionist' anthropologist, self-styled civilized person, simply 'knew' the savage to be different to himself, on a scale of advancement, and thus worthy of study, so we also, as rational adults, recognize the child as different, less developed, and in need of explanation" (Childhood, Second Edition, p. 4). Through naturalist developmental theorization, we have so other-ed the child that it is currently socially acceptable (and remarkably popular!) for us to voyeuristically marvel at their distress as a form of entertainment.

What cultural assumptions must exist to create conditions wherein it is not only morally acceptable but entertaining and humorous for us to prank children and watch their response? It is, after all, not the prank itself that entertains us, like pranks we might play on other adults. Telling someone you ate their Halloween candy certainly isn't creative enough for us to consider it as entertainment. It's the reaction that's entertaining; it's the fact that the one being pranked is a child and that, by virtue of their childhood, their reaction is dramatic.

The only context where distress becomes entertainment is in what we might call a culture of condescension. The distress of the other, in this case the child, is humorous to us because we consider it to be irrational and therefore illegitimate. This is because we have placed childhood on a scale of advancement on which adulthood is given the highest seat. We consider childhood to be, as Jenks puts it, "...a 'becoming;' tabula rasa; laying down the foundations; inadequacy; inexperience; immaturity; and so on. Such metaphoricity all speaks of an essential and magnetic relation to an unexplicated, but nevertheless firmly established, rational adult world. This adult world is assumed to be not only complete... but also, and perhaps most significantly, desirable" (Jenks, p.8). This is, in perhaps different terms, a classic example of ethnocentrism.

When we consider someone to be fundamentally our equal, when we treat them as human beings, their distress (no matter how superficial its' object) becomes not a source of entertainment but a source of empathetic encounter. Sure, some of the children in these videos probably knew they were being silly, so their reaction cannot genuinely be considered distress. But many of the children in the videos were deeply troubled. And it's worth speculating that the source of their distress is not so much the loss of candy but the violation of trust. The one who is supposed to care the most for them has taken advantage of them. So they cry, they yell, they lash out. To this, could we consider laughter to be an empathetic response? I don't think we could if we took seriously the humanity of the child... not just their potential for humanity, but their current status as human beings.

In the culture of condescension, the voice of the "savage" is ignored, left unaddressed. We stare at their other-ness but do not consider their own accounting of their situation to be an enlightened or legitimate one. In other words, we do not consider them to be credible sources for the interpretation of their own experience. We think we know better than they do.

When you first watched the Jimmy Kimmel video, did you consider whether or not the child at whom you were laughing would give an account of their experience as one worthy of laughter? Did anyone consider interviewing the children to see what they thought of the prank? It'd be absurd to do so, right? But why?

Jens Qvortrup rightly asks the question, "Are children a group of people who may legitimately claim to be heard?" (Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, p.85). The fact that the question could even be considered an interesting one is telling of our position in orientation to children. "All our knowledge on children and childhood seems to remain deeply and unreflectively centered around the experiences of adults..." (p.89). This orientation of adults to children is a direct result of our concept of the child. According to Allison James and Alan Prout, "...there can be no concepts of childhood which are socially and politically innocent" (p.21). We do not consider children's accountings of their own experience because, according to our theory of them, their accounting is subordinate to ours. It doesn't matter if they are distressed (or even traumatized) by an experience if our (adult and therefore rational) accounting of the experience is that it is innocent and funny... it's no big deal, even if the child thinks it is.

If the videos featured by Jimmy Kimmel don't bother us, our indifference is exactly what should bother us. And what should bother us more is, perhaps, the cultural consensus surrounding this practice--that it is innocent and funny. What this calls from us is not just a new sensitization toward the distress of children (even over seemingly superficial things like the loss of candy), but a whole new approach to children and a whole new concept of the child--not as "savage" or as potential adult, but as human beings worthy to be listened to and worthy of empathetic encounter.Wesley Ellishttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-47374182017420271762015-10-17T14:57:00.002-04:002015-10-18T06:43:18.509-04:00The Pastor as FriendThe following collection of thought should be credited to (or blamed on) conversations I've recently had with my friend, Marcus Hong.

We are often handed a paradigm for ministry which prioritizes an outcome, an ideal. We are pressured to adopt a goal-oriented paradigm for ministry wherein relationships in the church are instrumentalized in service of the church's "mission." In his book, The Relational Pastor, Andrew Root creatively documents how such a paradigm—the paradigm of the "entrepreneurial manager"— has come to such prominence (see pages 23-44). This is now so commonplace, and has been so concretized into the ecclesiology (even if its rare for such an approach to explicitly ground itself theologically... this, too, is part of the problem) and pastoral identity of the preceding generations, that it is difficult for young pastors to see it another way; even if, in their bones, there is great tension. But Root is hopeful that a new paradigm is emerging—one which, as I see it, is compatible with Dietrich Bonhoeffer's notion of Christian community (see Life Together) wherein the Pastor is free to share the place to the congregation of which they are a part rather than to some essential standard or "dream" about what they could be. Root identifies the new paradigm as fundamentally relational—seeking to "reconceptualize ministry as participation in the life of Christ through the personhood of the other…" (Root, 44). In this paradigm, it is not the Pastor's role to be a "leader" or a "visionary." The Pastor is not called to be higher than the congregation (no matter how many steps they need to climb to get into the pulpit... which wouldn't likely be relevant if your Pastor was in a wheelchair... this, again, is also part of the problem). Rather, it is the Pastor's fundamental role to be a friend and to create opportunity for friendship.

Now, as Root is clear, this is not a superficial kind of friendship where we are constantly subject to the "wants" of individuals (it's about empathy, not sympathy), but the kind where we subject ourselves to the "needs" of persons (seriously, you should just read The Relational Pastor, then read The Church in the Power of the Spirit by Jürgen Moltmann). This new paradigm is rooted theologically (...where should we start? The Incarnation, the theology of the cross, the Hypostatic Union, Eucharist, feminist theology, Philippians 2, John 15, the Road to Emmaus, Luther, Calvin, Moltmann, Moltmann-Wendel, Tanner...)... and it had its prophets even in the height of the "professional" paradigm (Henri Nouwen, Brother Roger of Taize, Eugene Peterson).

In an interview in 2002, when Eugene Peterson was asked about the "boundary ambiguity" in pastoral ministry, especially in his more empathetic approach to ministry, he answered,

I grew up in a small town and my dad was a butcher with a shop in the middle of town. Between that shop and our home, in a sense, there was no boundary. So I had modeled for me a way of life in which work and home were not distinct things. My dad addressed everyone who came into our shop by name. At one point I realized that I'm doing as a pastor just what my dad had done as a butcher.

I also remember early in my ministry listening to colleagues who often seemed irritated and angry with their congregations, as if the congregation was the enemy. I remember making a conscious decision to not adopt that view. The congregation is not the enemy. They are my friends. I am their friend. We are in this together, even when we don't like each other very much.

If there was any substitute for having boundaries, it was knowing when and how to ask for help. Some advice I have remembered well is this: "The two most powerful words in the world are 'help me."' So I asked my congregation to help me.
Peterson went on to be clear that "you can't be naïvely open all the time to everybody" (indeed, that wouldn't be friendship either). But what he was offering was a way forward wherein the Pastor need not suffer the anxiety of protecting herself from the congregation by keeping a "safe distance," but is free to encounter their congregation as persons and to discover there the presence of Jesus Christ.

It is no coincidence that a new relational paradigm for pastoral ministry, of the Pastor as "a convener of empathic encounter of personhood" (Root, 44), should arise at a time when we are more aware than ever of power relationships, inequality, and the social construction of race and gender. We are realizing that in a world inescapably haunted by "social difference," we must do something about our "social distance" (to borrow some terminology from Erin Raffety and use it completely out of context). Deep down, we know that what the world really needs is not more ideas or another tidy system to implement them. Some will see no way forward but to dig in their heels and build higher and stronger walls between themselves and "the laity." But we know that what we need is friendship. ...and we need leaders who will show us how to be friends.Wesley Ellishttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-71092151082968045602015-10-12T09:54:00.000-04:002015-10-12T09:55:21.211-04:00Genesis 2 and the Transgendered HumanThe Biblical world, if it is possible to make so broad a generalization (and it really isn't), was a world of patriarchal hegemony [1]. The text consistently reflects a preferential option for maleness and masculinity over femaleness and femininity. It also assumes a gender binary. Throughout subsequent history and into the context of 21st century Western society, the texts of scripture have been instrumental in perpetuating such hegemony and the marginalization of women. The dogmatic masculinization of divinity, the demonization of women as the catalyst for the "fall of man," the exclusion of women from church leadership, the shaming of women though the imposition and over-sexualization of the "ideal" female form, the hierarchical appointment of men over women in familial structures, and indeed the essentialization and binarism of gender and "gender roles" which contributes to many of the aforementioned issues in society—all these, and many more, have not only been supported by certain interpretations of scripture but are indeed products of many dominant interpretations throughout history, many (if not all) of which are quite alive in our current context.

This clearly raises the important question: should we still be reading this collection of books? Why are we still reading the bible at all if it has been used to inflict such pain and oppression? I do not wish to resolve this question here. It is a question we must consider not only ethically but theologically. We must discern God's presence and action in and around a text that has been weaponized against the very people that, according to the same source, God created in God's image [2]. Here, without resolving the lager question, I will assert that although the bible has been weaponized as it has, we are not without resources, within the text itself, to correct the oppressively hegemonic hermeneutic with which the text has so often been read. I will examine just one such resource, the creation of "Adam and Eve" in Genesis 2:18-25, as an example.

By the time we reach Genesis 2:18, God has created the world and planted a garden in Eden. God has created a human being and placed this person in the Garden to till the soil and tend the garden. It is in verse 18 that God resolves to create another human being. God decides that this person should not be alone, it is "not good" for this person to be alone. The NRSV translation puts it this way: "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner." It is important to note that in this passage and throughout the preceding passages of Genesis 2, this human being has been addressed in masculine terms—"…the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground" (v7), "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden…" (v15), "And the Lord God commanded the man" (v16), "It is not good that the man should be alone…" (v18). We must recognize that as a deliberate, yet somewhat subjective, translation decision. The Hebrew term being translated as "man" to this point, in all these instances, is not the more straightforward Hebrew word אִישׁ (eesh), but the more ambiguous הָֽאָדָ֑ם (adam, from which the classic idea that this human being's name is Adam. The fact is, Adam is not so much a name, like Eve, in this part of scripture as a simple classification of species—human). While the translators of the NRSV are clear in their decision to use the term אָדָם (adam) as a sex or gender, there is evidence in the text itself to show that it was not originally intended to be used this way. The term אִישׁ (eesh) for "man", within the text itself, is used differently and only after the creation of the woman. What we have is not a "man" but an אָדָם, an undifferentiated human being made from the earth. Indeed, sex and gender are not yet explicitly part of human identity.

Because translators have traditionally chosen to use "man" for אָדָם, the logical interpretation of the following passages is that the woman was created "second." As Susan Niditch writes, "Jewish and Christian traditions postdating the Hebrew Bible and a long history of Western scholarship have viewed woman's creation in Genesis 2 as secondary and derivative—evidence of her lower status" [3]. Much has been made of this throughout history and the argument could be made that there has been no more influential text for the perpetuation of a relational hierarchy of male over female in society. But with a careful look, it appears that the text is not nearly as explicit here as we have made it and, in fact, we have resources in the text itself to correct this assumption.

The first place we actually find a word which differentiates sexes or implies gender bifurcation is after God creates "the woman." If אָדָם (adam) simply means "human," the first mention of maleness comes after the creation of the woman, in verse 23. It is important to note that when first the word for "man" is ever used in the text, the word "woman" precedes it—"…the rib that the Lord God had taken from [the human] he made into a woman…" (v22). The word for "woman" here is אִשָּׁה (eeshah). אִישׁ (eesh), for "man," is only used a verse later. The woman is not some "new" creature, formed from the ground all over again. The woman is made from the side (not the foot) of the human being. In a sense, it is from the same human being that both male and female emerge, "this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" (v23). This means that not only is there no argument here for the subordination of women but there is also no argument for binary essentialism. The human being is human, fully human, given life by the spirit of God and, by implication, loved by God (this is why God recognizes the need for a "helper" in the first place) before the bifurcation of the sexes [4]. Indeed, the first human being is, in a very important sense, transgendered or, more precisely, non-gendered.

What we have in Genesis 2 is not, under careful scrutiny, a patriarchal subjugation of the woman under a man. Nor is it an imposition of a gender essentialism. What we have instead is a clear mutuality and reciprocity within the human being, echoing (or imaging) the reciprocity and mutuality of God and the reflexivity of gender and sexuality in humankind, even in the event of differentiation so that the human will not be alone. If this informed our hermeneutic from the very start, we would have actually been hard pressed to make such strong binarist and androcentric claims as have been made in the classical interpretations of this text.

This does not free us of all tension. There are still problematic passages here and throughout scripture. But what this example may suggest to us is that when apply the right hermeneutic, the text itself becomes a corrective for unjust and oppressive interpretations. While we will still have problems (interpretation is always complicated). We may even hope trade the problem of rogue feminist passages challenging an androcentric totalizing discourse, for the alternative problem of androcentric human writers complicating our apprehension of a just and ethically symmetrical divine Word of promise.

[1] See Michael Coogan, "He Will Rule Over You," in God & Sex: What the Bible Really Says (New York: Twelve, 2010), 19-60.
[2] This is a reference to Genesis 1:27 where, as Susan Niditch helpfully points out, "the male aspect and the female aspect implicitly are part of the first human and a reflection of the Creator." Niditch, "Genesis," in Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley, eds. Women's Bible Commentary: Twentieth-Anniversary Edition, Third Edition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), 30.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Indeed, before the creation of conditions possible for the existence of gender. Gender, as a social construction, cannot exist prior to the existence of social address. Wesley Ellishttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-18139883366105077522015-10-07T10:33:00.000-04:002015-10-07T10:33:35.556-04:00The Church is Dying!

Too many youth ministry books I open lately are written out of anxiety over the apparent decline of the Church. These books (and articles too) are worried about survival. Ministry becomes a sort of means to an end... a solution to a problem. And typically, their solution is keeping at least one of two things in the church -- kids and money.

'The Church is gonna die if we don't find a way to keep kids in it! We're running out of money, how can we get money back in the church!'

But I am just not convinced that anxiety is the best reason to do ministry. In fact, it may be impossible to do ministry out of anxiety. It may be that whatever you're doing out of anxiety, it's just not ministry. Ministry is definitively not a practice done by necessity. It is, since it is fundamentally about participation in God's action, something done in freedom -- freedom from anxiety, freedom for the worship of God. In this way, ministry is no different from any other spiritual practice (yes, I am suggesting that ministry is a spiritual practice). We don't pray because we must, or else. We pray because we are invited. Jürgen Moltmann writes, "we do not pray freely if need has taught us to pray... we pray because it is the privilege of the liberated to talk with God" (Theology of Play, 66). Indeed, Moltmann is a helpful resource for the thinking of a church that finds itself in decline and feels the pressure to save itself.

Moltmann refuses to allow us to commodify faith with the questions of its usefulness. He recognizes the complicated relationship that theology has with need, but reminds us that theology (and ministry and spirituality) is not born of need. He writes,

It is one thing to discover the need which makes talking about God necessary; the freedom to talk about God in that situation is quite another matter. This freedom is being offered by God alone. Theology therefore is both necessary and unnecessary. It has relevancy for men in the realms of need and necessity. Yet it springs from man's wonder at the story of Christ and from his rejoicing in the uncaused grace of God of which it speaks. In that wonder the realm of liberty is already entering the realm of need and necessity and bursting its chains. (Theology of Play, 27).
In other words, authors who see ministry as necessary for solving a problem, meeting a need in the church, or even saving the church from annihilation may have a point... but (and this is a big but) ministry is not done out of need, rather, "...it springs from [humanity's] wonder." It is a product of God and God alone, and that makes it a product of love and freedom, not expediency and preparation.

Thus, even if ministry does solve a problem, we do not need to value it only for its productivity or efficiency with time. We are free to see it as a waste of time. As Kenda Creasy Dean has said, "those who waste their lives for Jesus, who squander their talent on the church, who throw away their lives in ministry -- in youth ministry, for goodness' sake -- will gain it. Following Jesus is a waste. The Bible tells us so" (Almost Christian, 87).

And actually, as it turns out, these anxious authors and practitioners may not have a point at all. Even if talking about God meets some need in some way, I don't know for sure that it meets the need we want it to meet. The need we're trying to meet when we minister out of anxiety over the decline of the church is the need that comes from death. This is, in fact, a problem that cannot be solved. It is a problem that must be endured. We cannot save the church from death. The church will die. The church is only human.

As Dr. Richard Osmer put it yesterday in a seminar conversation on practical theology, "every church is terminal."

There is no church that will not one day close its doors. When we talk about dying churches, we should remember that we're really talking about every church... even the ones that are currently very much alive. This is only to say that the church is temporary and must be thought as such. If we're interested in self preservation, then we're building our house on the sand. What we should be interested in, and what theology should teach us, is the love and worship of God. This is all a dying church can actually hope to do. It cannot hope to save itself by widening its nets, by getting more butts in the pews, or by filling the offering plate (or starting a lucrative business). But the dying Church, the one we all find ourselves in, can freely worship the crucified God and find its future in Jesus Christ.

That is the motivation for ministry! Not a hope which only breeds anxiety -- an optimistic "hope" to preserve that which is here and nurture the potentiality of the present -- but a hope which springs from God's action and gives us new (and liberated) eyes for the present and eyes for the future. We are liberated to trust God for the outcomes. As Moltmann writes, "The images for the coming new world do not come from the world of struggle and victory, of work and achievement, of law and its enforcement, but from the world of primal childhood trust" (Theology of Play, 35).

So I am not interested in a book or an approach to ministry birthed only from anxiety over the decline of the church. I am not interested in whether or not I can save the church from death by employing the right strategy. What I am interested in is worship as ministry, ministry as worship. I am interested in participating in what God is doing in the world whether or not it will ensure my survival. Indeed, I am interested in a ministry that is willing to take up the cross and follow Jesus.Wesley Ellishttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-59994523229001236842015-10-05T16:17:00.000-04:002015-10-06T09:53:10.915-04:00Not All Youth is Adolescence
I have spent a lot of time, over the past year or so, thinking about "adolescence." I've been trying to figure out how (and if) the term should be used to describe the people we're trying to describe when we use it.

Despite some recent work that's been done to try to suggest otherwise, the term "adolescence," in all its conceptual glory, is a new one (originating with G. Stanley Hall in 1904). Now, before you try to cite Aristotle or Chaucer to refute me, consider what is actually meant by the term, "adolescence." It doesn't just mean a specific group of people who are no longer children but not yet adults (or "emerging adults" or whatever comes next) or even just a time of transition between childhood and adulthood. "Adolescence" - since it entered the conversation as a categorical concept - constitutes a specific interpretation, a psychological and developmental discourse regarding the experiences of human beings who find themselves living under specific cultural, biological, familial, and political conditions. This is what we mean when we say that adolescence is a recent invention. It's not that these people didn't exist before 1904 and G. Stanley Hall created them (and Erik Erikson made them famous). Youth has always existed and the research suggests that it has constituted a distinct social space (or class) - distinct from both childhood and adulthood - in more than a few social contexts throughout history. But it didn't get interpreted through the psychological developmental lens of "adolescence" until recently. As we know it, developmental psychology itself, the discipline to which adolescence actually belongs, is itself a fairly recent phenomenon.

Andrew Root was right to talk about adolescence the way he did in his book Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry. He compares it to Santa Clause. The Santa Clause that we know (the rosie-cheeked fat guy who hangs out with elves on the North Pole) was invented in the 1930's by the Coca-Cola company. Of course Saint Nicholas is old, but Santa Clause is an invention no older than some of our grandparents. Adolescence is similar. The people we're describing have been with us for far longer than the terms and discourses we've made up to describe them.

But I want to raise the question of whether or not "adolescence" is always the best word to describe the people we're talking about. Already in the question there is a potentially controversial implication that the people we're describing are people before they are "adolescents." The question itself calls us out of the pattern of using adolescence as a totalizing discourse. We're already moving away from allowing "adolescence" to close the case on these people's experience. "Adolescent" (even when we use it as a noun) is adjectival. We should not assume that every human being we meet, within a certain age spectrum, must fit the description explicated in developmental theories of adolescence. Instead, it only becomes helpful after we engage them as human beings and then decide to turn to psychological interpretations of their experience. But we need to be open to the possibility of turning somewhere other than psychology - other than "adolescence" - for our best understandings of these people.

I've been careful, so far, to avoid defining "these people" we're describing when we use the word "adolescents." I don't want to foreclose on the meaning of a person's experience by imposing my own categories. But I would like to suggest that, in taking an ethnographic approach to understanding them, we'd be better off using a term like "youth" or "young people." Because what we're trying to describe is not foremost "adolescence" (for reasons already addressed) in its psychological framework, but something like "youth" as a real cultural construction (even if its not as "recent" as adolescence), a social practice or social space that is distinct from adulthood and childhood in its symbols of meaning and social rituals. In other words, we're talking about "youth culture."

As annoyed as we may be by it, "youth culture" has been part of the Youth Ministry tool kit for a long time. But we've rarely (if at all) approached it the way we should approach a culture, avoiding ethnocentrism (or in this case, perhaps, "gerontocentrism") and operating on ethnographic principles without imposing developmental presuppositions.

"Youth," as opposed to "adolescence," is not a totalizing discourse. It does not carry with it a criteria to be met or a thesis to be proven. Instead, it allows us to interpret (not just translate) and find meaning in the social and cultural experience of occupying a unique social space. This helps us to avoid foreclosing on the meaning of such experiences by over-theorizing them prior to our encounter with them.

I could go on and on with why this is important for us as theologians... I hope it's obvious (but it probably isn't). But to put it simply, I'll appeal to Andrew Root's definition of the "theological turn in youth ministry." He writes, "A youth ministry that turns to the theological seeks to share in the concrete and lived experience of young people as the very place to share in the act and being of God" (see here). If we are committed to the idea that God is active in "concrete and lived experience," then we have to concern ourselves with discovering the most faithful understanding of that experience.... not simply for the sake of the experience, per se, but for the sake of participating in the life and being of the God whom we are experiencing.
Wesley Ellishttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-9835927750015727752015-09-22T23:10:00.001-04:002015-09-22T23:10:57.430-04:00A short and underdeveloped thought on ministry and businessWe do not need more "business savvy" Pastors. And seminaries should continue to disappoint people who are looking for business training.

If we continue to train Pastors to think like CEO's with business "savvy," where manipulating systems, "navigating" institutions, and leveraging people's spirits for our own (or even "God's") ends is not only permitted but encouraged, then we can be assured that we're not training them to be ministers. We are, in fact, omitting that which makes them ministers (relationship in participation with Christ) and replacing it with the kind of anxious, narcissistic, and instrumentalizing behavior that has been ripping the church apart since it first married itself to capitalism. A church which privileges its own existence and measures itself according to its expediency and effectiveness will always have people who hunger for control as its leaders (and "leadership" will be its primary metaphor for pastoral identity). This might sound familiar because it isn't new. A church which loves its own development and seeks to extend its territory and expand its walls will always produce refugees. But ministry should not create refugees but is to be with  and for the refugees of development--those who suffer under the tyranny of others' success. When it comes to the church of the crucified Christ, self preservation, efficiency in development, and conquest of influence are only temptation and never virtue.

May we never let success or relevance or influence be our driving motivation. And may we always settle for being present and loving to those who cannot contribute to our success or even our survival. May we find our relevance in our love for the least of these and not in the outcome of our business strategy.Wesley Ellishttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-82738981394971289042015-09-15T19:55:00.000-04:002015-09-15T19:55:17.141-04:00A Review of 'Emerging Adulthood and Faith' by Jonathan P. Hill

This is a really nice little book that should serve to temper the alarmism and anxiety over the "exodus" of young people from the church, the "danger" imposed by "secular" institutions of higher education on young people of faith, and the apparent "faith crisis" raised by modern science.

If Jonathan Hill is right (and we all know statistics can be a great vehicle for lies) then it turns out that "roughly the same percentage of young people are sitting in the pews (or folding chairs) of Protestant churches today as were there in the 1970s" (p.17). "College graduates are actually more likely [than people who never go to college] to practice their faith and say it is important in their daily life" (p.30). And "the supposed crisis of faith brought about by mainstream science and certain readings of the early chapters of Genesis simply does not exist for most young people" (p.57). Who knew?!

I don't put a lot of stock in these kinds of quantitative research projects anyway, but I'm glad this one exists if only to balance out the extreme fear mongering that takes place in some of the other sociological interpretations of data. If nothing else, this book helps us to chill out. Fun little read!Wesley Ellishttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-69156920301509093732015-09-14T10:58:00.000-04:002015-09-14T12:00:10.993-04:00Can we talk about God now?Not long ago, on my daily commute to campus, I got into a conversation with a fellow commuter about classes and such--the normal bus ride chit-chat. She told me that she was taking a course on ethnography, which peaked my interest, so I began to tell her about my own interest in ethnography and Childhood Studies as an interpretive conversation partner for Youth Ministry. She asked me what drew me to ethnography, and without much hesitation I answered, "frustration."

I don't think I'd thought about it in quite those terms before. The answer just sorta slipped out. But once I said it, I realized how true it was. It was frustration that drew me to a Childhood Studies approach to constituting youth and an ethnographic approach to interpreting the experiences of young people.

It'd take a while for me to give a good introduction to what Childhood Studies is and how ethnography would provide the right interpretive framework for the kind of theological engagement in Youth Ministry that's necessary (in fact, it might take two full academic articles... one of them will be out in the Journal of Youth and Theology very soon and the other's under review). But the shorthand of it goes something like this:

Childhood Studies is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of children and childhood which constitutes childhood as a cultural construction and a social practice, rather than a stage of development with an inherent and natural trajectory toward adulthood. It understands "the child" not as a pre-social potential adult, purely subject to developmental, pedagogical, and parental processes, but as a "social actor" who lives in a distinct social world and participates in the social practice of childhood. As such, Childhood Studies offers Youth Ministry a lens through which to interpret the experiences of young people that does not over-theorize or essentialize their experience by imposing gerontocentric social or developmental norms.

Ethnography is the qualitative "science" of describing peoples' social experiences. It seeks a "thick description" (Clifford Geertz) wherein one can interpret cultures on their own terms, relinquishing control of the interpretive categories to the research subjects, rather than simply transliterating their experiences into the categories imposed by the researcher. In other words, ethnography is the art of non-selective hearing. With an ethnographic methodology, we can attend to the actual experiences of young people (where, as youth ministers, we expect to discover God at work), without the obscuring psychological and developmental assumptions that come with traditional categories of "adolescence" and "life cycle" theories.

Now, I'm a theologian, not a sociologist or an anthropologist. So when I come to these interpretive conversations, I take my own theological motivations and concerns. It's theology that's lead me to these conversations (I actually think that gerontocentrism reflects a mistake in eschatology). But it's also frustration...

For years, I've been studying Youth Ministry. And for years, I had been under the impression that the primary (if not the exclusive) interdisciplinary conversation partner for Youth Ministry was developmental psychology. Whatever sociological work we did consider was quantitative and filtered through a developmental hermeneutic. Young people were always "adolescents" and adolescence was a "stage of development" under the rubric of the "journey" to the "integrity" adulthood and generativity (see Erik Erickson). Even our approach to young peoples' spirituality was co-opted by developmentalism (see James Fowler's Stages of Faith and the more enigmatic James Loder's Logic of the Spirit). A good understanding of developmental psychology seemed to be more important in my Youth Ministry education than good theology (indeed, most of the youth workers I've known have had a better handle on the former than on the latter).

This is one of the big reasons I didn't get a B.A. in Youth Ministry. When I went to college, I started our as a Youth Ministry major. And in the school I was attending, Youth Ministry classes were heavy on development and light (I'm being generous) on theology. The concern was developing young people into mature Christian adults, not attending to God's action in the experiences of young people. I got bored.

I got frustrated.

And I think I got frustrated for two reasons.

1. Developmental psychological interpretations (transliterations, really) of adolescence as a struggle of "ego identity vs. role confusion" (Erickson), an endeavor to complete "tasks" in transition to "individuation" (I forget where Chap Clark gets this, Elkind? Santrock?) and to achieve the virtue of "fidelity" (Erickson again) never really resonated with my own experience. I never really understood what these people were talking about. Of course I could relate to struggles over identity and role, etc. But I could see that my parents and grand parents were going through similar struggles. And I could see that there were children and teenagers in my life who seemed to have a better handle on their "identity" than many of the most "generative" (read: successful) adults I knew. I just never found it helpful to theorize these kinds of things into discrete "stages" or to see them as normative and universal (what about people with developmental disabilities!?). It was obvious to me that there were people whose experiences were just not being taken into account, who weren't being heard by the selective hearing of developmentalism. And I wanted to find some way of attending to these people. This made it difficult to stay motivated in interpretation and made me all the more eager to think about theology instead.

2. I wanted to talk about God. In lecture after lecture on why teenage boys are horny or why teenage girls are so emotional (ugh!) I found myself thinking, again and again, "can we talk about God now?" I wanted to ask theological questions, not just psychological ones. I wanted to know where God was at work and how I could participate in God's action (it took me reading Andy Root, years later, to figure out how to articulate that), not just how to keep kids sober or make sure they weren't having sex on the mission trip. Intuitively, I knew that there had to be something more to ministry... and I thought it might be God. So I switched majors. And my theological path has brought me to where I am, still thoroughly concerned about doing ministry, but seeing ministry as a theological task--searching for God in the lives of young people in order to participate. My concern is not for human experience, per se. My concern is for the God that people are experiencing. And if I'm going to discover God's work in the lives of young people, I need a lens that allows me to see the actual content of that experience and not just in the places where it conforms to the standard of maturity.

The reason I think Youth Ministry needs Childhood Studies and ethnography is not because we need Childhood Studies and ethnography... it's because we need theology. To be more precise, we need the theological, we need God. I want more people in Youth Ministry to ask, "can we talk about God now?" I want more people in Youth Ministry to be on the lookout not for developmental conditions in order to affect them, but to be on the lookout for what God is doing in the actual content of people's experience, regardless of its conformity to standards of maturity, so that they can be a part of God's ministry.

Wesley Ellishttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-25320525881401763212015-09-04T23:47:00.002-04:002015-09-05T00:10:51.117-04:00Offering One More Semester To God
"We study theology properly because we are curious and find pleasure in the subject." -Jürgen Moltmann
When I first began my studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, I had an intense feeling that I did not belong here. It wasn't for lack of theological compatibility or because of any feeling that other people believed differently (although some of those initial conversations surprised me). In fact, I remember feeling liberated because I was finally in a community where I could use the term "eschatological" and people knew what I was saying. And it wasn't because people weren't hospitable (though not everyone was). Most people were very kind and extremely welcoming. The reason I felt I didn't belong was because I didn't feel smart enough to be here. Somehow, I must have tricked someone or slipped through the system. Why would a kid with a 2.3 high school GPA and 2.8 college GPA, who barely passed basic math his senior year, be accepted at such a good school (and even though PTS students are quick to downplay the school by reminding people that it's not Princeton University, it is a good school)?

Somehow I'd slipped in ...but I wasn't going to argue. The only problem was that now I had to actually perform. I had to convince people that I wasn't a fraud. Around here, we call this "imposter syndrome" ...and it's an epidemic.

I did whatever I could do to sound smart, or at least not to sound stupid. Sometimes I even fell for the temptation to try to make other people feel stupid. This is what makes Christian community so very difficult in seminary, especially in such a good seminary; perhaps even more difficult than in the church. We all have imposter syndrome. Or at least enough of us have it to make thing hard on ourselves.

I did discover, at some point, that I wasn't alone. And when I discovered that I wasn't the only person who felt like a fraud, I realized, however briefly, that I did belong.

I say briefly because now, in the beginning of my fourth and final year of seminary, as I prepare my application for Ph.D. program(s), it's all come rushing back. Why am I pretending that I should be considered for candidacy for the highest academic degree in my field? Why am I expecting to slip through the system yet again?

I am coming off of perhaps my most difficult summer in the last decade (if not my whole life). Working three jobs including a pastoral ministry position, finishing an article I had no business writing, studying for and taking the GRE (a comprehensive exam used to evaluate graduate applicants across all sorts of academic disciplines), and giving what little I had left to be a good father and husband (of course I know this is wrong and my family should come first...you don't need to lecture me, I can do that myself), I put my spirit through more than it should've had to bear. My insecurities are screaming as I enter one more semester.

I say all this with some hesitation. Should I be confessing so much? Am I being too hard on myself? Perhaps I am. I do, in fact, feel a sense of calling. I did, from the beginning, feel called by God to the place where I am. And I feel called by God to pursue the path that I am pursuing. It certainly isn't just about trying to measure up. But I fear that if I do not consider the deepest confession, if I do not release even this to the will of God, I will carry the burden with me into the semester and squander the blessing of this place--the blessing of truly doing what I love to do and participating in the calling to which I have been invited.

Confession is how we offer ourselves to God. This is why confession is essential to worship.

And that's what I am here to do. Not to study, not to get good grades, not to impress anyone, not even to change the world. I am here to worship God. I am here, not out of some necessity. I am invited to be here and do this for joy. I am here to enjoy God. The only fraud is the one who does theology for any other reason than the glorification and enjoyment of God. And this makes us all frauds--a community of imposters--made right and accepted only through the grace of God and not according to our own merit.

So my prayer this semester is that God would be worshiped in my life. My prayer is that all of this--the articles, the grades, the test scores, the recommendation letters--may be counted as loss for the sake of Jesus Christ.

I am offering this year--with every page I read or write--to God. And I'm coming back to what I have been invited here to do.Wesley Ellishttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-81365961551291026922015-08-27T15:43:00.000-04:002015-08-27T20:40:44.384-04:00Dr. Capps, You Will Be Missed

Last night the world lost one of its greatest pastoral theologians. Professor Donald Capps was killed as a result of a car accident in Princeton yesterday. Capps joined the Princeton Theological Seminary faculty in 1981 and has been prolific in his writing and influential in his thinking ever since. Capps loved to teach and he loved his students. Even after his retirement, Capps taught courses at his leisure (I was registered to take his class on Ministry and Mental Illness this Fall... it was supposed to begin in just a couple of weeks). I am grateful to have had the opportunity to get to know him a little and to study under him. He was known by all of his students as someone who invested an incredible amount of energy into responding to them and helping them get better at what they do. You could bet that Capps put at least as much energy into responding and giving feedback to his students' papers as the students put into writing them. And he was extremely constructive and charitable in doing so. If you wrote a 7 page paper, it wasn't uncommon to get 7 pages of thoughtful feedback from Dr. Capps.

I wrote a paper for his class on "Pastoral Care and The Life Cycle" which, unsurprisingly if you know me, was critical of stage theory - an approach which Capps himself found very helpful. He didn't get defensive. He was much too comfortable in his own skin to do that. And he didn't take the opportunity to school me on all the problems with my critique, though I am sure he could have. Instead, he helped me. He gave a charitable reading of what I was trying to do, sympathized with my motives, and helped me strengthen my own argument. His feedback helped me construct a major section of what became my first published article. I will forever be grateful for Dr. Capps.

A model of his own work, Dr. Capps embodied in his teaching the pastoral attentiveness, patience, and grace about which he wrote. The Princeton Seminary community is better for having had him him among them.

Dr. Capps, you will be missed.

Wesley Ellishttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11928317.post-3145873008921749172015-08-20T22:42:00.000-04:002015-08-20T22:42:16.083-04:00Reading the Bible With YouthThe following post was published on the Institute for Youth Ministry Blog:

Many of my youth ministry colleagues know me as a bit of a theology nerd. I definitely have a lot more patience with abstract theological questions—you know, the stuff that's not immediately "practical"—than a lot of my friends who work with young people. When I am feeling insecure, I like to curl into a corner and read Moltmann or Tillich (because it's a world I understand!). But before you figure, "this guy's got issues" and stop reading, hear me out. Read MoreWesley Ellishttps://email@example.com