Practicing Passion in Youth Ministry

“If adolescents and Christianity are both so full of passion, then why aren’t young people flocking to church?” (Practicing Passion, p. 4). This is a central question of what is to be considered one of the most important books on youth ministry ever written.

Kenda Creasy Dean’s Practicing Passion: Youth and the Quest for a Passionate Church marks a turning point in youth ministry—away from just trying to get young people to stay in church and toward learning from and partnering with young people in ministry.

Dean ushered in a new conception of youth ministry as coming alongside young people and listening for the voice of God in their experience. Instead of locating the problem somewhere in the young person or in the “culture” in which they are situated, Dean locates the problem of youth ministry in the church itself. Dean argued that God is already at work in the lives of young people, whether or not they come to church, and that “if youth invest their passions elsewhere… the church must receive this news as a judgment not on adolescents, but on us” (p. 25).

The church, through youth ministry, should not assume itself as the norm to which young people must assimilate, but should discern that God is doing something in the lives of young people and that we can be a part of it. Dean’s great discovery was, in essence, the theological discovery that youth ministry is ministry—active and faithful participation in God’s passionate action in the world. [Read More]

This article was originally published at Kindred Youth Ministry in January, 2017.

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