Helping Young People Develop Missional Imaginations

From the book Almost Christian by Kendra Creasy Dean. Copyright 2010. Adapted by arrangement with Oxford University Press Inc. All rights reserved.

Every church is called to be a "missional church." The fact that we have turned the word mission into an adjective testifies to the American church's frayed ecclesiology. A nonmissional church is not a church in the first place; but in a culture largely devoid of a theological vocabulary, this language has become necessary to remind us the church exists not for ourselves but for the world.

Karl Barth called the church "the missionary community," and viewed witness as the litmus test for determining "whether the Christian is really a Christian and the Christian community the Christian community." Yet we persistently view mission not as the identity of the church but as an instrument of it.

The practical theologian Alan Hirsch points out that while "we frequently say 'the church has a mission,' according to missional theology a more correct statement would be '[God's] mission has a church.'" The church's identity in other words is revealed in our fidelity to the mission of God.

Some youth workers' who recognize postmodernity and popular culture as the natural habitats of teenagers understand the church must be missional.

Adults in youth ministry have long viewed themselves as missionaries to an alien culture, a special breed of theological anthropologists who must learn the language, taboos, artifacts and rituals of the teenage universe in order to make the gospel accessible to them.

Seeking to imitate God's own missional strategies, youth ministers (and youth ministry literature) overwhelmingly advocate incarnational ministries with young people.

Unfortunately, most of youth ministry's missiological leanings are too haphazard to operate as a coherent approach to discipleship formation and too intuitive to avoid being absorbed by other congregational agendas. Like all research and development departments, youth ministry's experiments with mission have a high failure rate. So while youth ministry provides a promising laboratory for test-driving missional ecclesiologies, it may also unwittingly perpetuate anemic understandings of mission and witness.

Ask teenagers in a church youth group what they mean by mission, and most of them will tell you about a hot week in July when they traveled to a poverty-stricken community to do home repair, lead Bible school, and (theoretically) help those who are culturally and/or economically "other."

For all of their benefits (and I am among those who think they have some), we would do well to admit these trips' primary beneficiaries are the middle-class teenagers who can afford to take them.

Mission is not a trip or a youth activity, a silent cousin to evangelism or an optional model of youth ministry. Mission is the business that congregations are in. Christ views young people as participants in God's mission rather than as targets of ours. God does not send out a few teenagers in a church van to represent Christ in the world on behalf of the church; God sends the whole church into the world as missionaries.