Religious Lives of Young People - “Cultivating Testimony” with Dr. Amanda Drury
Shownotes:
Offering a testimony creates space to witness to God’s real and present hope in the world. Testimonies are necessary elements to spiritual development in adolescents as they are navigating their own journeys of faith. However, for many Christians, sharing a testimony can be an intimidating practice and a source of comparison. Personal testimonies offered on a Sunday morning or at a church camp tend to follow a three-step pattern: one was lost, one found Jesus, and now one’s life is changed. How can we view testimony in light of our past experiences and current experiences? How do we help adolescents build a faith language that helps them gain confidence in their identity?
In this episode, Chris and Eddie are joined by Dr. Amanda Drury, associate professor of practical theology at Indiana Wesleyan University. Dr. Drury defines a testimony as “a story we tell where Jesus pops up.” She believes that our testimonies are shaped by small, everyday moments and that they make space for every person from every background to be heard. Dr. Drury challenges us to broaden our definition of testimony in terms of past, present, and future storytelling. She talks to Eddie and Chris about the importance of building a faith language, and how to display appropriate vulnerability when telling your story, and the power of narrative and story in therapy.
Series Info:
Over the past several decades, religious beliefs and habits among young people in America have been on the decline. A 2020 survey from Pew Research Center showed that only 24% of US teens say religion is very important in their lives. With mental health issues on the rise in adolescents and young adults, pastors and churches across the nation are desperately seeking new ways to attract and engage young people to adopt a faith tradition that provides peace, community, and a sense of purpose. In this series, we’re bringing in some of the leading voices in the conversation about the religious habits of young people and their families, focusing on the larger sociological, philosophical, and theological questions surrounding this issue. This will be a helpful series for anyone asking questions about why and how they’ve lost their faith, for pastors and youth workers trying to bear the weight of faith formation in the next generation, and for parents grappling with the importance of faith in the lives of their children.
Resources:
Purchase Dr. Drury’s book Saying Is Believing: The Necessity of Testimony in Adolescent Spiritual Development here
Learn more about the Scripture Squared App here:
Full Transcript:
Eddie Rester 0:00
I'm Eddie Rester.
Chris McAlilly 0:01
I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight.
Eddie Rester 0:03
Today, we have Dr. Amanda Drury with us. She is a professor at Indiana Wesleyan University.
Chris McAlilly 0:10
Yes, she is. And she also wrote a book called "Saying Is Believing: the Necessity of Testimony and Adolescent Spiritual Development." We found out about Mandy's work through our our last guest, Andrew Root at the end of the conversation. After we had finished we asked who else should we be talking to, and he said that we should talk to Amanda and I'm glad that he did.
Eddie Rester 0:35
I am, too. What I love about the conversation today and her book is just it's a practical way for us to think about helping kids articulate their faith, if they can't. One of the things she talks about is they can't speak their faith. It's not real. And I think that's very true until you say the words, "I love you," to someone specific, you might be thinking it, but it brings a whole new reality to it.
Chris McAlilly 1:00
Yeah, one of the things that Andrew says is that Amanda is one of the most creative and thoughtful people thinking about youth ministry in North America. That's a bold statement. But I think that you'll find that the conversation bears out because she's thinking about an old practice--testimony--but she's thinking about it in some very fresh and interesting ways in light of narrative psychology, social construction of reality from kind of sociological research. She's thinking about it in terms of language acquisition. We talked a lot about trauma therapy and the way in which narrative and story can be a useful tool within that form of therapy. It is a wide-ranging conversation, incredibly helpful.
Eddie Rester 1:44
One of the things that she said that is just resonating with me about kids articulating stories, so the kids are already storytellers. They're telling their story on TikTok. They're telling their stories on social media. And so they're already getting this skill, but are we helping, and the word she uses is curate?
Chris McAlilly 2:02
Yeah, curating stories and helping, you know. I think adults have a hard time sometimes finding a way to a faith language. And she talks about that, that we're talking about language acquisition here. And if you're learning a foreign language, it's hard to do when you're older. It's easier when you're younger. And she specifically talks about the emergence of adolescence as a really good time to learn a language and particularly the language of faith.
Eddie Rester 2:28
You're gonna really enjoy this, particularly if
Chris McAlilly 2:31
Parents,
Eddie Rester 2:32
parents,
Chris McAlilly 2:33
pastors,
Eddie Rester 2:33
pastors, grandparents, people who are
Chris McAlilly 2:37
Great-grandparents, nieces, nephews, uncles, aunts,
Eddie Rester 2:41
All those people. I'm gonna come across the table at you again.
Chris McAlilly 2:45
I'm just kidding.
Eddie Rester 2:45
But I think it's a conversation that's helpful for us as we think about trying to be the church, but more than being the church, passing the faith down. So make sure you give it a listen, share with your friends and others. You're going to enjoy this conversation. I think I say that about all the conversations.
Chris McAlilly 3:01
You do. It's alright. Because you will.
Eddie Rester 3:03
You will.
Chris McAlilly 3:03
It's a great podcast. And if you're listening to it, you're on the inside, and you want others to be there, too. So tell people about it.
Chris McAlilly 3:09
[INTRO] We started this podcast out of frustration with the tone of American Christianity.
Eddie Rester 3:16
There are some topics too heavy for sermons and sound bites.
Chris McAlilly 3:19
We wanted to create a space with a bit more recognition of the difficulty, nuance, and complexity of cultural issues.
Eddie Rester 3:26
If you've given up on the church, we want to give you a place to encounter a fresh perspective on the wisdom of the Christian tradition, in our conversations about politics, race, sexuality, art, and mental health.
Chris McAlilly 3:38
If you're a Christian seeking a better way to talk about the important issues of the day, with more humility, charity and intellectual honesty, that grapples with Scripture and the church's tradition in a way that doesn't dismiss people out of hand, you're in the right place.
Eddie Rester 3:54
Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
Chris McAlilly 3:56
We're here today with Dr. Amanda Drury, who is a professor at Indiana Wesleyan University. We're in a series called "Religious Lives of Young People." And we were talking to Andrew Root a couple weeks ago, and we asked him who to talk to next. And he said call Mandy, she's got this awesome book. And so we're glad that you're here.
Amanda Drury 4:18
Thanks. Thanks so much. Happy to be here.
Eddie Rester 4:21
Well, tell us a little bit about your background. What has led you to your interest and your passion for ministry to young people?
Amanda Drury 4:32
Sure, well, my passion really stems out of my own experience with the church. I had a great experience in the church growing up. I grew up in a place where it didn't quite click with me that women could be ministers for whatever reason and found myself in seminary kind of by accident, because my husband was going. And I entered into seminary almost as a way to kill time. And in my first class, I heard Kenda Dean make a comment about the high percentage of high schoolers that graduate and then tend to walk away from the church. And I was so troubled by that. I remember looking around at my peers like this is a problem, we have to do something about this, oh, my goodness. And that was kind of a, I suppose some kind of a call in that moment that got me interested in youth ministry. After I graduated from seminary, I became a youth pastor for a few years and then felt drawn back into the academy. And that's ultimately how I've ended up here.
Chris McAlilly 5:32
I wonder if you could talk about, kind of, you've written this book a few years back called "Saying Is Believing." I wonder what would you say motivated kind of a deep dive in research into the necessity of testimony and adolescent spiritual development?
Amanda Drury 5:51
Sure. Well, a lot of it was actually actually Christian Smith's work. So I was fascinated by this thought, or disheartened by this thought, that you could have teenagers that were attending church regularly. I mean, some of them a Sunday morning evening and midweek Bible study, and yet when you ask them, "What is it that you believe?" they were they were Tongue Tied. They didn't have much that they could say. And I was troubled by that, and just started looking into okay, what's at stake when someone cannot articulate their faith story? Is there something at stake? And if there is, is there something that we can that we can do about this?
Eddie Rester 6:28
I was a youth director for a long time. And you know, what Kenda Dean talks about his kids leaving the church at graduation, and you might have seen this as well, is that for all that we invested in all the volunteers and trips and all that, I can tell you--I could probably count--kids just left. Left the church, some of the most active and involved and invested kids in youth ministry in the places I served have left the church. It's not a part of their lives anymore. And when you begin to talk about the power of testimony and and kids articulating their own faith, I think one of the things I realized is that that just wasn't a part of it when I was doing youth ministry in the 1990s. So when you talk about the power of testimony, what are you really talking about there? What does that mean?
Amanda Drury 7:25
Sure. I mean, I guess the the simplest way to put it would simply be a story you tell where Jesus is, pops up. A story you tell where God is one of the characters, if you want to put it that way. And what we see is that people have a hard time believing the things that they cannot articulate. So I don't know if you've ever had the experience of you think something and then you say it, and it comes out horribly wrong. And you might say, oh, that sounded a whole lot better in my head than when I said it out loud here. I just said something completely offensive to you. But there is some similarities with faith, where we might think or assume, okay, it's there in our head, ut then when we're explicitly asked to try to articulate that, we can't quite make that connection. And so without the ongoing conversations with other people, it's hard to maintain, and really articulate our faith without that.
Chris McAlilly 8:25
I remember a sermon that I heard when I was in seminary, from Tom Long, he was preaching professor, if you don't know the name Tom Long, he's a wonderful Presbyterian pastor and minister and teacher of preachers and a great preacher. He was telling the story about--I can't remember the name of the short story. You may know it--of this girl that grew up and she was a preacher's daughter, and she went to religious camp, and it was this fundamentalist Bible camp. And the expectation is that everybody by the end of the week would give a testimony. And so she, being the preacher's daughter, figured out that she can make a little side hustle, a little money on the side, by writing fake testimonies. Do you know the short story, Mandy?
Amanda Drury 9:09
I do. It's been a long time since I've heard it.
Chris McAlilly 9:13
I just, you know, what I think is fascinating about just the category of testimony or bringing it back or recovering it, is that it just has a long history in the church. And I think for some people, you know, maybe, yeah, you kind of described at the beginning of the book that, you know, hearing testimony in the church growing up and kind of, you know, the place that testimony had in your life. Talk a little bit about that, kind of the history of testimony in Christian circles.
Amanda Drury 9:42
Sure. Well, yeah, it is a troubling history. I did grew up in a church that tended to have times of testimony on Sunday evenings, and my father was the pastor. And I remember, I'd walk into the sanctuary and anytime I'd see the microphones in the middle of the aisle, I'd always get excited, because I knew we were going to hear stories from people. My dad, I remember always being really anxious about this. And I asked him about that a while back, like, "Okay, so, Dad, that was exciting for me as a child. But clearly, as a pastor, this was terrifying for you." And he said, "Well, yeah, you never knew what was gonna happen." I mean, there's a sense in which you really let go of control when you open up a floor to testify.
Chris McAlilly 10:26
Yeah, I was a pastor in this small country church. A wonderful, wonderful community, and they kind of taught me how to be a pastor. But there was a part of the service order--and it was about 20 people on a Sunday--was this prayer time. And it really, it was more than a prayer time. It functioned almost like a testimony time. And we would hear the craziest, some of the craziest things, but also some of the most beautiful things. We would hear about schizophrenic sons and daughters. We would hear about, you know, I remember this one particular time where this man was sitting on the pew with his ex-wife and his ex-mother-in-law. And he said, you know, somebody on the other side said, "I want to praise the Lord today, because I'm married for 30 years to my wife," and everybody cheered. And he said, "I want to praise the Lord, too. I've been married for 30 years, but not to the same woman."
Eddie Rester 11:24
[LAUGHTER] Oh gosh.
Amanda Drury 11:24
[LAUGHTER] Oh, my goodness!
Chris McAlilly 11:27
You open up the floor, you just never know. You never know.
Eddie Rester 11:30
I remember going to, we didn't have a lot of testimony in my home church, but I'd go to revivals at friends' churches and there would be testimonies, and they always followed the same pattern.
Amanda Drury 11:41
Yeah.
Eddie Rester 11:41
"Life was good. I messed it up terribly. God has fixed it." And you could almost, you know, after several years of going to the revivals, you just kind of knew that, okay, you were going to try to get convinced because life was good. Life was terrible. God made life life better. And for me, I got really cynical about testimony and witnessing about that. Do you find that that's kind of where maybe the church got to with the history of testimony? Or maybe that's just my experience?
Amanda Drury 12:16
No, I think that's a common experience. And it's important to note that testimony is a high risk practice. I think we've been, yeah, we've been addressing that along the way. I know of stories of people that were, they stand up, and it seems like they're just trying to get attention on themselves. Or I'm remembering the story of one guy who had some testimony of being a former satanist. And it was this long, drawn out story about what it was like to be in the occult. And then the very last 30 seconds, it was you know, "and then I became a Christian and blah, blah, blah."
Amanda Drury 12:46
So there's a lot of room for cynicism here. One of the things that I try to stress is that there is more than one way to give a testimony. So I grew up with the central image of testimony being someone standing up in a formal service, spontaneously sharing whatever is they want to share. That is high risk, high anxiety right there. But there's, I can't draw a quadrant, obviously, on this podcast here. But there's spectrums here. So you do have the formal settings, but you also have the informal settings, when you can testify in a small group, perhaps, and then on the other axis, then you've got spontaneous or ordered or planned.
Amanda Drury 13:25
So you can have those times when you are in a formal worship service, and you're spontaneously speaking, but you might also be in a place where you're in a small group, and you're sharing something that you've written out the night before, or it's a one sentence prompt that your pastor has given you. And so one of my hopes is that we can push people away from a very simple, one dimensional understanding of what testimony is.
Chris McAlilly 13:51
Yeah, I think one of the things that I appreciated about the kind of the way that you texture, you know, what it would mean for the church to recover testimony is that you kind of drew my attention to the ways in which it's not just a practice that emerges out of a particular holiness, revivalist tradition, which is kind of, I think, where maybe most folks, particularly in the American South, where we are, kind of associate the practice. But you talk about the way in which it gets utilized kind of across the spectrum. I think about recovery communities and the importance of testimony there. And then also, you mentioned kind of the conversations among feminist theologians who want to empower marginalized communities, people, a marginalized person to tell their story, and that that has a powerful impact, not just in--and I think that kind of you really put the emphasis on testimony, not just as a description of past events. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the way you think of testimony as constructive of current, present identity and kind of future identity
Amanda Drury 15:02
Sure, so I want to quick jump into what you were saying about a voice for the marginalized people, if you don't mind.
Chris McAlilly 15:08
Sure.
Amanda Drury 15:09
When I was writing this book, I was, well, I still am attending a church that's very much white, upper middle class, a very dignified church, if you will. And they normally don't do time for testimony, at least they didn't at this time. And it was New Year's Eve Sunday. And the pastor got up and said that we're going to have a time of testimony. And so I immediately pull out my notebook, and I go, "Field research! What's gonna happen here?" And it didn't normally happen in this church, like I said, and so the pastor was holding on the microphone, he said, we're gonna give you a chance to simply stand up, share one or two sentences about how God has been present in your life this year. And already, he's kind of setting the parameters. He wants something short, something current, and he is holding on to the microphone the whole time, which is, you know, the ultimate power grab there.
Amanda Drury 16:02
But I was fascinated to see who spoke up. So as I mentioned, this was a predominantly white church, but out of the eight people that stood up, four of them were from underrepresented races. They were, we had a man from from Haiti. We had two African Americans. We had someone from Israel. And we heard from people that we didn't normally hear from in our congregation. So there's a sense in which the practice of testimony has the ability to almost level the playing field, to allow us to hear voices that perhaps we haven't listened for before. Okay, that prompted me from the first part of the question that you said, but the second part, can you repeat that for me?
Chris McAlilly 16:46
Yeah, just kind of, as you kind of worked through the book, one of the things that's really apparent for you is just the power of language to shape reality, you know, current or future reality. So that the idea that testimony is not just description of the past, right? But rather kind of construction of current or future identity.
Amanda Drury 17:09
Exactly. And you look at someone like J.L. Austin, who talks about these speech acts, that there are certain things that we say that it doesn't just describe something like you said, it actually creates something. So you look at marriage vows. You know, what are marriage vows? They're words [INDISTINGUISHABLE] "Will you? Will you? I will. I do. I now pronounce you." Or you think about in relationships, words, like, "I'm sorry." Okay, it's just two words, but it changes the relationship. Without those two words, there can be some some blocks there. Or even "I love you." Three words, but they're game changers in relationships. And so words construct our understanding of what it is that we're experiencing. And then of course, we've got the whole Christian narrative of God saying, "Let there be light," and all of a sudden there is. So this understanding that we speak things into existence, I think is important to our faith.
Chris McAlilly 18:10
Yeah. And I think one of the things I appreciate about your book and your approach to that question is it's interdisciplinary. You're not just coming at it from a theological perspective, but you're you're taking into consideration linguistics, the, you know, kind of narrative psychology, social construction of reality, from a kind of sociological perspective. I wonder if you could just kind of tease out some of those. I know that the narrative psychological one was one of the ones I wanted to ask you about. Kind of how did you get interested in that as a kind of, I don't know, maybe like a theoretical backdrop for some of the claims and kind of the more kind of theological, prescriptive things that you wanted to ask the church to do again?
Amanda Drury 18:56
Sure. I'm not sure if this will get your questions. So you can redirect me here, but a place of connection that is really important to me is this understanding of trauma therapy and the role that testimony can play in trauma therapy, essentially. So I don't know if you've seen the movie "Inside Out." But there's the main character Riley and you get inside her brain, and all of her memories, all of her experiences are represented by these marbles, these well ordered marbles.
Chris McAlilly 19:26
I've seen this one. Eddie, not so much.
Eddie Rester 19:28
My kids...
Chris McAlilly 19:29
My kids are younger.
Eddie Rester 19:30
I missed it. My kids grew up past it. Yeah.
Chris McAlilly 19:33
That's great. I've seen him like seven times.
Amanda Drury 19:35
Yeah, yeah. And so whenever something traumatic happens, it's like these marbles just kind of fall to the floor, and they're all over the place. And it's this disorder inside of Riley's brain, which I think is such a great picture of trauma, that you have this experience and everything kind of becomes jumbled. You've got fragments of what happened but telling a cohesive narrative is difficult. People have spoken of this as a fractured imagination that comes. And one of the key elements in trauma therapy is the ability to reclaim your narrative and to be able to tell it in a cohesive manner. Not because it's important to us to tell complete stories, but because there's something about helping the person reorder their story to put it into events, so that it can feel almost like it's coming back together again.
Amanda Drury 20:30
Another example of that would be when you have a child that has a horrible experience, a traumatic experience, you try to have them explain it to you, but you also have them give the follow up, the ending of that story, and you have them keep talking until they're to a place of safety. So an example of this would be one of my children was outside playing on the playground, and just got bullied by someone and hurt his feelings. And he's crying, this kid said some really hurtful things. And Sam comes running inside. He's in tears. And he's telling me, you know, he said this. And then he said that about me. And then he said this, and he's focusing on what was done to him.
Amanda Drury 21:11
And so I'm listening, I'm asking questions, but the question I kept asking was, and then what happened? And then what happened? And then what happened? And eventually he gets to the point of the story where he says, "And so I ran home." "Okay, and then what happened?" "And then I found you, and I gave you a hug." And to help Sam and the story in a safe note so that you're not just kind of stuck in the repetitive narrative of, you know, this happened, and this happened, and I was hurt here. But to help them safely land the plane, essentially.
Amanda Drury 21:47
I think there's some overlaps there too, with testimony, especially when we think about doing testimony with young people. Where I, you know, I've mentioned it's a high risk practice. And one of the things that I'm always afraid of is I don't want a teenager to say something that they're going to later regret, that they're going to have, you know, shame for later on. And so sometimes I think it's helpful even for a youth pastor, a youth worker, to be almost curating testimonies, whether it's interviewing them fully, "And then what happened? Okay, and then how did this fit in?" But so ultimately, to be teaching people how to share their stories, with the connection being we see a lot of that in the trauma therapy world.
Eddie Rester 22:29
As she talked, I was just thinking about how many influences, young adults, young people, older adults, all of us have, that really try to define our stories for us, whether you're watching TikTok, or you're following someone on Instagram, there's so many forces, I think that are trying to say, "this is what your story has to look like," or "this is what your story really is." And what you're offering, I think, is that the body of Christ being a place that helps people, you use the word "curate," think through the story, not through a lens of out there, but a lens of what God is doing, what Christ is doing, how the spirit may be working in their lives. "And then what?" I love that.
Eddie Rester 23:21
One point you wrote, "what we need is for our teenagers to be nurtured to see the world through a spiritual lens that allows them to live in a state of perpetual Advent, looking for the ways God interacts with their stories." And what are some ways that you find healthy and productive for churches, youth ministries, young adult ministries to really help teenagers and others do that?
Chris McAlilly 23:46
The parents, too.
Eddie Rester 23:47
Parents, yeah. And parents, too, I think.
Amanda Drury 23:47
Yeah, thanks for that question. I think it's worth noting, too, you mentioned TikTok. Our teenagers are already testifying.
Eddie Rester 23:56
Exactly.
Amanda Drury 23:58
They are sharing stories. And so this curation, this shepherding, I think is so important. Well, okay, so this first one is just very simple. And that's ask them. Christian Smith talks about how the teenagers that were able to articulate, they often had someone who had flat-out asked them, but that most of the teenagers had never had someone explicitly ask them, "What is it that you believe?" Oftentimes if we are asking teenagers to testify what it is they believe, it's maybe once or twice a year, following camp, or maybe after a missions trip, which is fine, although the impression that we're giving them is that God only shows up once a year. God only shows up twice a year.
Amanda Drury 24:47
And so this perpetual advent understanding is, okay, what does it look like to live with the expectation that God could show up on a rainy Wednesday in April? And when we are regularly asking teenagers questions like this, we're asking them to look for those small things. So a lot of churches will do things like highs/lows, roses/thorns, happies/crappies, there's, you know, different terms for the small group practice of tell me a good thing, tell me a bad thing that happened. And in some sense, we can almost lean into the practice of testimony by asking things like, where did it seem like God showed up this week? Or where did it seem like God completely was absent this week? And so I'll often tell youth pastors to look for those places where teenagers are already talking, and see if you can lean into the practice that way.
Amanda Drury 25:49
With parents, and this is so hard with teenagers, it's so much easier to start things like this when you've got younger kids. But a faith language really is almost like a foreign language. And so it's easier to pick up foreign languages when you're younger, you know, you're used to hearing it, it's easier. And it's much harder, the older you get, in a sense. And so it can be tricky, even for teenagers, as they're trying to learn this new language, but I'll encourage parents.
Amanda Drury 26:23
So when my kids were little, we had a journal, and we'd pull it out at dinner time. And we'd say, okay, you know, "where did it seem like God showed up? You know, where did it seem like..." and we had to watch our language there, too. I remember one time saying, "Sam, where did you see God at work today?" And he just threw his arms up, he said, "I don't even know where God works!" So clearly, that language was not was not working. So we moved to story or things like that, and the things that my kids said, as little kids, it didn't make sense. I mean, there was nothing deep or meaningful. It was, you know, "I want to go on a trip with God. I want I want to go to Disney World!" But they're practicing with the language, and just like any foreign language acquisition, it's those immersion experiences where you tend to pick up language the most, and you expect mistakes. But you stick with it anyway.
Eddie Rester 27:15
You said that was number one, ask them.
Amanda Drury 27:17
Oh! Yeah. Number two, I'll point them to hear--thank you--to hear from other people. So this relies on number one, but when you are in a youth group setting where there is an expectation of this, so you've got one or two teenagers that you have talked with ahead of time that you've worked with on a testimony, "Hey, you have a story that's worth telling. Would you be willing to share this with the rest of the group?" When teenagers hear other teenagers testify, something just clicks differently for them.
Amanda Drury 27:53
I remember traveling around to a few different churches that seemed to be doing this really well and interviewing some teenagers. And I spoke with 16-year-old Maddie who would describe herself as a wallflower, as an introvert. And she said, "You know, I thought it would be all the popular kids, all like the loud kids that were sharing their testimony," "sharing their stories," is what she said, "but it was a lot of kids like me that were just kind of quiet. And I thought, well, if they can do it, then maybe I can as well." So she said "I'm going to share my story on February something something." And I said, "Maddie, that's grea!. What are you going to talk about?" And I love her answer. She said, "I don't know. But I have my eyes open to see where God might pop up."
Chris McAlilly 28:37
Come on! Come on!
Eddie Rester 28:38
My goodness. Yeah.
Chris McAlilly 28:39
Come one!
Amanda Drury 28:40
And this was a conversation we had in November. So she's got now November, December and January, where she is thinking, "Okay, I get to share something with my youth group about God." You know, "where am I seeing God?" things like that. Now, of course, that would be one of those higher stakes, high risk experiences. Another thing I'll encourage youth pastors to do, especially if this is a new practice for them, is just a simple, one-line, fill-in-the-blank, that they're even writing down and standing up and reading off of, you know, "I sensed God when," or I don't know if you've seen these cardboard testimonies where they might hold up a large poster board with one word on one side, a before, and then the word on the other side for an after almost like, you know, "anxious" on one side, "peaceful" on the other. It's just two words, but it's a start there. There is an element of testimony in there.
Chris McAlilly 29:30
I wonder. Do you mind if I jump now?
Eddie Rester 29:33
Yeah, no jump in. I've been writing down here. So this is great.
Chris McAlilly 29:36
Yeah, you put an emphasis on the emergence of adolescence as an ideal time to begin cultivating this kind of articulation. You mentioned, you know, language acquisition, but why is early adolescence or the emergence of adolescence a good time to practice?
Amanda Drury 29:55
Okay, I do want to pop in on that that latent semantic analysis which I so fascinating, LSA, it's abbreviated to. But it's the study of language acquisition, and how the average seventh grader learns between 10 and 15 new words every day. So but only one of those words would be from formal instruction, okay, only one of those words is going to come from seventh grade English vocab lists.
Chris McAlilly 30:22
Right, mostly from urban dictionary.
Amanda Drury 30:24
Yeah, exactly.
Eddie Rester 30:25
TikTok.
Amanda Drury 30:27
Everything else they're picking up through socialization, they're picking it up in context, you know, they're listening to songs, they're figuring things out in conversation. And oftentimes, the church is focused on that formal instruction, which is great. I'm all for Sunday School, but we need to know our limits of, you know, if I'm going to stand up here and tell you what it is you believe, okay, there's a good chance that I might be able to influence one out of the 15 words that you memorize. So I'm really encouraging churches to move away from formal instructional settings, or I should say, add on to those, these places where teenagers can talk, where they can practice their language.
Chris McAlilly 31:14
You said Latent Semantic...
Amanda Drury 31:17
Analysis.
Chris McAlilly 31:18
Analysis. Yes, I will be looking that up later. I wonder, the other question I wanted to ask you, in light of Andrew Root's work, which we just had this conversation with him about faith formation in a secular age. I wonder if you would talk a little bit about what is the power of testimony, particularly in a secular age, you know, in a moment when perhaps the larger culture, which may... At one time we could have assumed that the culture kind of reinforced Christian beliefs, values, etc. Perhaps we can't do that as much. What would you say the power of testimony and particularly Christian testimony is, in an age such as this?
Amanda Drury 32:03
That's a great question. So, you know, grand biblical narratives don't go over too well at this point. But interestingly enough, testimony still does. For people to share of their own experience, there is still places carved out for that, in fact, if anything, that's sometimes even more highly valued, I think, than other forms of communication. Because there's a lot of emphasis on honoring one another's experience, allowing it to stand on its own, allowing people to narrate their own understanding of how they fit into a situation. And so in some ways, even though it might seem like there's not a lot of room for Christian talk, there does seem to be space for for personal articulation.
Eddie Rester 32:54
When you talk about testimony, and Andrew Root talked a lot about having people come up front with unfinished stories, talking to students with not stories that wrapped up nicely in a bow. And I thought that was powerful, to show them that not all stories end easily or are ending at that point. That sometimes you struggle with your faith and with God, over the course of time. Are there limits to testimony? Are there things that at some point it becomes maybe not value to it, or there's just something that it doesn't offer, doesn't bring to the table for our adolescents?
Amanda Drury 33:40
Well, sometimes when you have testimonies emerging, there can be a really dangerous spirit that almost permeates the group, where... You know how sometimes you can feel anonymous when you're in a group? So you're more comfortable saying something in a crowd than perhaps you would in a one-on-one conversation with someone? I'm not sure if I'm explaining that phenomenon enough. But it can be really easy for, if a teenager is in a testimony setting, for one person to stand up and start talking about their experience perhaps with sexual abuse. And then there almost seems to be then this uptick of other teenagers wanting to talk about that as well. Sometimes even in the form of "I'm not being authentic, I'm not being genuine if I don't jump in and share my story as well."
Amanda Drury 34:30
And those are the times I think when I get the most anxious and probably jump in and curate and shepherd the most to make sure that teenagers aren't saying something that's inappropriate in this particular context, or that they'll regret later on. But um, oh, yeah. Also to make sure that there's not a... Well here, I'll share this. One youth pastor, Charlie Allcock, that I loved interviewing. He was at a church where they would regularly have teenagers testify on Sunday nights. And he would meet with these teenagers ahead of time. And the thing that he kept stressing to me was "Mandy, these are kids. These are kids. You can't. You gotta shepherd them. You can't just throw them up there."
Amanda Drury 35:13
And so he would meet with these teenagers ahead of time, and each teenager that stood up to share their story, they had been told by Charlie, "hey, at some point, if I'm listening to your story, and I think, and I'm somehow compelled to go up there. There's a chance I might stand next to you. I might interrupt with a prayer. I might come up and start asking you questions." And so these teenagers knew that at any point, Charlie might, join them on stage. And it wasn't a sign of failure. It was a "Hey, we're planning on this happening sometimes."
Amanda Drury 35:45
And I asked if he ever did have to intervene. And he said that at one point, there was a young man who stood up and he got to minute 26 of his testimony, which was very, very, very long, obviously, much longer than what they had been used to most everyone else was, you know, four or five minutes. And he starts to get into self mutilation, starts explaining the process in such a way that it wasn't helpful or appropriate for this context. And so Charlie stands up there, he puts his hands on the guy's shoulder and he simply says something like, you know, "Wow. You have been through a lot. And it's amazing that you can stand here before us, as you know, something, something." And then he'll say, "I want to just pause right now and simply say a short prayer over what it is you're sharing," you know, thanking the Lord for this person and whatnot. And then after he says, amen, he will stay there next to the kid with his hand on his shoulder and say, "Okay, wrap this up for us. What's the last sentence that you want this group to hear before we move on?" And so he's still allows this kid to kind of have the dignity of the last word, but he's clearly there shepherding where and how this plays out.
Chris McAlilly 36:58
I think that that is fascinating to think that, you know, one of the skills that has to be, I guess, acquired is the skill of curation, and...
Amanda Drury 37:08
Right.
Chris McAlilly 37:10
Almost learning the wisdom of being in a room where testimony is happening, learning what could go wrong. There's high risk. There's danger, but it also seems like there' a kind of wisdom that can redeem, even, you know, some of the places where things are going off the rails. I guess part of what I hear there is just, I think it's hard for adults to learn appropriate vulnerability. I think, you know, the desire to be seen and heard and known as a young person is so strong, and you're still just, you're just grasping and groping towards acceptance and belonging, and creating a context where that can be done. It requires, as you said, curation and shepherding. Are there other stories of, you know, I guess, good or bad, it sounds like you've interviewed a fair amount of people, and you've seen this done well and poorly. Are there other examples that you would point to, of spaces that have been created for adolescents to learn the practice of testimony and community?
Amanda Drury 38:17
Sure, I've seen some people do almost a telephone challenge testimony, where they will, you know, send the teenagers out for 10 minutes with cell phones, and come back in with one image, a picture that you've taken, that somehow reminds you of God or represents how you experienced God this week. And then they've got this picture then that they hold up that they then explained to other people. And so sometimes even having that, an object that they can refer to so it's not just you know, a kid looking at another kid in the eyes and talking, but they've got this third object that they've brought in, that they can talk around, that can be really powerful.
Amanda Drury 39:00
I haven't tried this, but I have heard of some youth pastors who have even tried very quiet meditation, where they'll just tell the teenagers "Okay, we're gonna sit here in this room for three minutes of silence. And we're just, we're gonna see if any of you have a thought that comes to mind or..." That seems that seems risky, as well, but I was curious to hear how some youth pastors have have done this. I've heard a lot of churches actually lean into the practice of testimony during announcements. So you know, someone stands up and is talking about the barn bash that's coming up and how they went last year, and this happened, and that happened, or, hey, we've got the retreat coming up this winter. And here's how I experienced it last year. And so they're almost sneaking testimonies in there. People almost don't even realize that they're sharing their stories. You know, "I'm just telling you about this event that's going to come."
Eddie Rester 39:55
Right.
Amanda Drury 39:55
So again, that would be another one of those places where you're looking to see where people are already talking and leaning into that, leaning into the practice of testimony within that moment.
Eddie Rester 40:06
I think that's a great idea, because nobody likes announcements to begin with. But if it's not... Pastors don't mean like 'em. But if it's tied to "this is what God has done through this moment," then it sacramentalizes the life of something within. It places something that might have been just a dry announcement and places it within really the life of faith, as well. You talked a little about image and spoken words, what's the role of music in testimony? Where does that fit? Or is that just a completely different conversation?
Amanda Drury 40:50
Sure, well, when you look at language acquisition, if we just start there, so often, when people are learning foreign languages, the people that really get it, they're immersed, and they tend to be listening to music from that particular language group. And so there's a sense in which the songs that we sing, the worship that we engage in, is shaping us without even realizing it. It's given us words, phrases, almost scripts that you might use for better or for worse. But there's something instructional there, whether or not we're able to make that connection or not. I think there is something there.
Chris McAlilly 41:31
Yeah, that makes me think about, there's an Old Testament scholar named Brent Strawn, who wrote a book called "The Old Testament Is Dying." Really, he talks about the Bible as kind of... He looks at language acquisition as a way of diagnosing the problem with how the church is engaging with the Bible and learning the language of the faith. And he talks a lot about like Creole languages and the way in which you know, Pidgin languages and kind of how we have to learn to speak the language of the culture and the language of the faith at the same time and be fluid and kind of moving in and out of those things.
Chris McAlilly 42:12
I think that, you know, as I think about this, for teenagers, teenagers are becoming fluent in the language of American culture. I mean, I think about, you know, my kids, they're becoming fluent in that language. And I think that, you know, part of my takeaway from this conversation is going to be what does it look like to equip young people to tell their own story, to kind of own their spiritual autobiography, giving them some of the context for what that looks like, or how that's been done in the past. And then also, I feel like there's a way in which adults can learn to tell their story in a way that it's not just kind of tied up in a pretty bow, but there's a kind of openness in an adult story that kids could hear and then kind of learn some of the forms and the models of how to do that well.
Amanda Drury 43:05
Yeah.
Eddie Rester 43:06
I know you're.
Amanda Drury 43:06
Yeah.
Eddie Rester 43:06
Go ahead. I'm sorry.
Amanda Drury 43:08
We've done some events where it's more family events. And I know, there's problems with the child that doesn't have a mom there, a dad there, or whatnot. But we've also tried curating experiences where the parents and the kids are sharing stories with one another. So, you know, a parent might not normally feel free to sit down with their 14-year-old and say, "Let me tell you about a time when I was a teenager, and God seemed real to me." Those conversations don't tend to happen naturally or organically. But if they're in a setting where, you know, there's small group families all over the room, and there's someone up there that's inviting them to ask that question. We've done that a few times. And both the parents and the teenagers have come away saying, "I never knew that about my parent," or the parent saying, "I didn't know my kid would even want to hear that story."
Chris McAlilly 43:56
Yeah, that's cool. That's really interesting.
Eddie Rester 43:59
And I know you're also doing a lot of other design work with churches right now and in thinking through, you know, just how churches are engaging the younger generations. Any resources, writings, or anything that you would point our listeners to if they want to maybe dig into this a little bit deeper.
Amanda Drury 44:21
Yeah, Kenda Dean has some work coming out here in the near future on almost design work and spiritual formation that I think is really good. I'm working on some curriculum right now. I don't know that curriculum is the right word. But we've just launched a product called Scripture Squared, that is used in small group settings that starts you off from the perspective of a particular biblical character, and really tries to help you do some empathy mapping and to understand the story from say, Simon Peter's perspective while someone else is looking at it from Andrew's perspective, and then it eventually leads you into then your own engagement with scripture.
Amanda Drury 45:00
So anytime that we can help teenagers see the Bible as a collection of testimonies--that these are people's stories that they're sharing, and to understand them that way--and to see the ability, then, to see their own story within the text. And it doesn't have to be a narrative story. It could be something like Psalm 77, which is pretty depressing about how it seems like God has forgotten to be kind. "He slammed the door on his compassion, I stay up all night crying," and to allow someone to read their story into Psalm 77. You know, boy, has it ever felt like this for you? Then you can take them through to the path unseen, through the sea, which is how Psalm 77 ends, but just those connections that we can make between the scripture story and our own stories.
Chris McAlilly 45:32
I think that's a good place to land for today. Scripture Squared, I think is interesting. Trying to find ways to read your story into the story of the Bible, into the long history of testimonies that have been told. And then also allowing those stories to, in some ways, revise or to...
Eddie Rester 46:15
Give you language.
Chris McAlilly 46:16
Give you language to tell your story with more richness and texture and depth.
Amanda Drury 46:20
Well, and I think, especially for pastors who have been theologically trained, theologically educated, you know, we don't want to read into the text. We don't want to make the text say something that it's not saying, and yet, then we can get so stuck. We leave our imagination completely out of it. And so one of the things that I think that the church needs to cultivate right now is how do I read scripture using my imagination, not just these these textual tools to help me understand it better?
Chris McAlilly 46:49
Well, you've definitely helped us understand our own stories and maybe some things that we can try as we seek to pass along the faith to the next generation. Amanda, thank you so much for being with us.
Amanda Drury 47:02
Great. Thanks so much for having me.
Eddie Rester 47:03
Have a great day.
Amanda Drury 47:05
Thanks, you too.
Eddie Rester 47:05
[OUTRO] Thank you for listening to this episode of The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 47:14
If you like what you heard today, feel free to share the podcast with other people that are in your network. Leave us a review. That's always really helpful. Subscribe, and you can follow us on our social media channels.
Eddie Rester 47:26
If you have any suggestions or guests you'd like us to interview or anything you'd like to share with us, you can send us an email at info@theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]