Listening for God in the Being of Young People

In modernity, we have an anthropology problem.

We’ve reduced the meaning of human life to growth and improvement—to becoming more or better. We’ve succumbed to what I call a developmentalist anthropology, the belief that to be human is to grow and mature. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. Everything exists on a scale of improvement.

Within that frame, the “fully developed” adult becomes the standard of human life, the vantage point for understanding and interpretation. Youth, then, are defined not by their being, but by their becoming—their not-yet-being. According to this anthropology , youth and children are “human becomings,” not human beings.

This is not only a sociological problem—it’s a theological one.

In youth ministry, this developmentalist vision distorts our imagination of what constitutes ministry itself. It makes youth ministry about getting kids from childhood to adulthood, from immaturity to maturity. We begin to measure our success by growth—spiritual, emotional, numerical, what have you —much like the market economy measures its worth by expansion.

But youth ministry is not about growth.

Youth ministry, like all ministry, is about encounter—an encounter with the living God, the God who became flesh. More precisely, it is about God's encounter with us in Jesus Christ. The initiative in ministry is always God's. Human beings are participants in the divine encounter with creation.

In the incarnation, in the hypostatic union, God takes on flesh and blood—human being—and joins it to the divine being forever. This means that the life of God is not found in abstract improvement or spiritual ascent—it is not constituted in the human being's realization of potential—but in the concrete and lived experience of actual human beings, including young human beings.

I go into all of this in much more detail in my book Youth Beyond the Developmental Lens: Being over Becoming. There, I argued that youth ministry must reorient itself away from the obsession with development, progress, and outcomes, and toward being with—toward listening for God’s self-disclosure in the lived experience of young people and participating in that self-disclosure through ministry.

In theological purview, to listen is not a tactic or a strategy. It is a sacred act. I am grateful to Josh Packard and for his new book Faithful Futures, where he offers a sociological validation of this fundamentally theological truth. "At the heart of every ministry, every community, and every relationship is listening," writes Packard. "...this is not the kind of listening where you nod along, waiting for your turn to speak. This is listening with intention. It’s the kind of listening that starts with the understanding that each person we encounter is created in the image of the divine. It’s listening that seeks to uncover the sacred in every interaction" (Josh Packard Faithful Futures: Sacred Tools for Engaging Younger Generations. Baker, 2025).

Listening is how we do what some have called "incarnational ministry"—not using relationships as a tool to achieve a growth point, but as the very space in which God is encountered (see Andrew Root, Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry). When we listen, we are joining what God is already doing rather than trying to make something happen.

I once knew a young person named Maggie.

Maggie came to youth group regularly but never joined in on our mission trips or retreats. After about six months, I finally asked her why she came at all. Funny, it took me 6 months to ask the most basic question. She told me she was actually agnostic—she didn’t believe in God in any traditional sense and she hated institutional religion—but she felt like she belonged with this group of kids. She flet like these were her people. And, she confessed, it actually annoyed her that I kept inviting her to things she didn’t want to do, like join the leadership team and pray with her friends.

That night, I stopped trying to make Maggie “become” something different. I agreed to stop pushing and start listening. I decided to listen—to join in what God was already doing in her life right under my nose rather than try to get her to get on the train to spiritual maturity as I understood it..

Maggie never went on to become a pastor. She might still be agnostic, in fact. But she still speaks fondly about her time in youth group and has said that she felt closer to God during those years than at any other time in her life.

That, to me, is holy ground.

Because when every program, every metric for success, and even our very notion of what it means to be human are oriented toward becoming, our vision is obstructed from being—from the real presence of God in the people before us.

Even our best attempts to listen can be distorted by hidden assumptions—especially ableist ones that equate worth with productivity, growth, or generativity. The Gospel, however, calls us to something radically different: to see the image of God not in who someone might become, but in who they already are. We are called to see God's action in actuality, not merely in potentiality.

Listening, then, is sacred.

It is not passive. It is participation in the incarnate life of God. It is a joining of our being with the being of others, where the God revealed in Jesus Christ continues to speak, act, and be encountered.