Religious Lives of Young People - “Faithful Authenticity” with Dr. Andrew Root
Shownotes:
We all have a deep desire to belong and to be understood. As we move through different stages of life and different cultural realities, we are constantly navigating what it looks like to live into our most authentic selves. For teenagers, this process carries a lot of insecurity and awkwardness, which can stir up anxiety in pastors, youth ministers, and church leaders. How can we faithfully equip young people with a strong sense of identity and purpose, given to them by God? How can we help young people gain a better understanding of their unique stories?
In this episode, Chris and Eddie are joined by Dr. Andrew Root, professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary. Dr. Root has written a series of books revolving around Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, and his book Faith Formation in a Secular Agespecifically examines the church’s hopeful attitude that a “youthful spirit” will save the church. Root speaks to the power of testimony, confession, and storytelling to help teenagers and young adults navigate their own complicated stories. Root challenges us to greater curiosity and stronger questions that will benefit not only the lives of young people, but the church as a whole.
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:
Follow Dr. Andrew Root on the web:
Check out Dr. Andrew Root’s books here:
Follow Dr. Andrew Root on social media:
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. Andrew Root, who is a Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary, and he's continuing a conversation that we're having about the religious lives of young people.
Chris McAlilly 0:15
It turns out that the religious lives of young people are like the religious lives of older people. They're complex.
Eddie Rester 0:23
Complex. Difficult.
Chris McAlilly 0:24
Yeah. So the way that Andrew approaches the questions is slightly different from Christian Smith, who is a sociologist. Andrew is asking these questions in terms of larger kind of cultural, philosophical, theological perspectives. And he utilizes the work of a guy named Charles Taylor, who wrote a book called "A Secular Age." He fleshes out some of Charles Taylor's work as kind of the backdrop in the world and I guess the environment or the the atmosphere in which the church needs to be thinking about faith formation today.
Eddie Rester 0:58
And it's an important conversation. Every pastor I talk to: "How do we get more young people in our church? How do we reach youth? How do we reach children?" Part of it, I think the conversation is that we know the church in the West is dying and declining. And so we think if we could find the magic bullet to reach teenagers, somehow, things would be okay. And I think what Andrew does for us is really begin to kind of push us back from that question, to maybe some bigger questions, because we've miss-answered that question in the past. I did youth ministry for a long time and knew back then that something wasn't quite right. And he helps us, I think, see maybe what wasn't right and maybe a path forward.
Chris McAlilly 1:47
I also think if you lost your faith when you were a teenager, and you're still struggling with questions, and are kind of haunted by questions of spirituality or religion, Andrew gives, I think, a framework for thinking about why it is so difficult to have faith in a secular age. And why it is that we moved from a world, maybe 500 years ago, where you could just assume that everybody was pretty much going to be religious. Assuming...
Eddie Rester 2:20
Belief in God.
Chris McAlilly 2:21
Yeah, and spirits and devils and angels and all the rest to a world that seems pretty flattened, and without kind of a transcendent or spiritual dimension. And he kind of charts a way back and I appreciated the conversations around authenticity and narrative, and...
Eddie Rester 2:38
Story.
Chris McAlilly 2:39
Story, memoir and searching and big questions. We do talk also about Germany in kind of the 1930s, a guy named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was an incredible theologian during the Nazi regime, but also a youth worker. And we kind of end in with him. So we're glad that you're here today for the conversation. If you like it, share it with your people. And leave us a review. We're so glad to have you on The Weight.
Eddie Rester 3:06
Enjoy the episode.
Chris McAlilly 3:07
[INTRO] We started this podcast out of frustration with the tone of American Christianity.
Eddie Rester 3:14
There are some topics too heavy for sermons and sound bites.
Chris McAlilly 3:17
We wanted to create a space with a bit more recognition of the difficulty, nuance, and complexity of cultural issues.
Eddie Rester 3:24
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 3:37
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 3:52
Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
Chris McAlilly 3:54
We're here today with Dr. Andrew Root and really looking forward to this conversation. Andrew, thanks for taking the time.
Andrew Root 4:01
Yes, it's great to be with you.
Chris McAlilly 4:04
We recently had a really good conversation with Christian Smith kind of about the big picture and what's going on with youth and religion and spirituality in American life. And we have been excited to talk to you as well. Just, it's your world. And I wonder you've written a range of different books about youth ministry and about faith formation in the secular age. I wonder if you could just kind of go back and talk about how you got started and what motivates your research and your writing?
Andrew Root 4:37
Yeah, well, yeah, it's a great question. And yeah, this is as you said, it's kind of my world, kind of thinking about young people and thinking about youth ministry has been, you know, the center of my, I guess, my thought world at least for a long time. And now I have a 16-year-old and a 14-year-old, and sure I have no idea what I'm talking about now that I'm in the trenches with a 16-year-old and a 14-year-old, so.
Eddie Rester 5:02
It gets worse before it gets better.
Andrew Root 5:04
I bet it does. So yeah, I mean, I got into thinking about this. You know, my first book was 2007, I think, which, you know, you just wonder where the heck do all the years ago? But I still imagine myself as young, just at it, trying to trying to get my ideas out. But it's been a been a minute now. But it really was experience in ministry, of doing ministry within a congregation that was trying to reach out to young people and really wrestling and struggling with that. And I thought, you know, à la Christian Smith, I thought I'd be a sociologist maybe or something that, you know, the kind of descriptive side of trying to explain what's going on with society would be important.
Andrew Root 5:48
But in the context of ministry, and particularly this ministry that I was part of in Southern California, theological questions became really important. Like, whose church is this? You know, like a church that welcomed young people, and then things had gone, not so great with them. And the building was spray painted and certain behaviors and, you know, drug deals, going outside of youth group and things like that from these kids in the neighborhood and stumbled upon the church youth ministry. And all of a sudden, the inviting, "we want young people from the neighborhood here in our church, and we want to want to witness to them and care about them" turned into, you know, "they have to earn the right to be here," and sort of raised all sorts of big questions about what's the church and how is God active in these young people's lives. What does it mean to do faithful ministry when it is anything but easy and exciting?
Andrew Root 6:40
And so it was that experience that led me down this road. I've always thought about youth ministry and young people just because that's the world of ministry that I was in. And I think it's a really interesting environment to ask larger questions about the church and larger theological questions. So really, at the core, I think, my thought has been trying to really wrestle with, how is it in our kind of cultural context and our cultural situation? Do people come up against the presence of a living God? How do we talk about a living God? How do we help people in to that experience? And so that I think has been a kind of central focus that I've tried to really wrestle with throughout all my work, whether it's focused on youth ministry, or more broadly focused on ministry.
Eddie Rester 6:53
I think that's one of the things that every generation has to focus on. Scripture, I think early on, thinking of Deuteronomy 6 calls us to tell the stories to our children, to pass the faith on down to our children. And the church, particularly I think over the last 70 years has really focused a lot on youth ministry, on trying to figure out ways to pass it down to the next generation. I was in youth ministry for about 10 years from 1990 to about 2000, and so really kind of at the height of one model of youth ministry, but you've spent some time thinking about this, looking at this, could you kind of give us just kind of a sweeping review of what youth ministry maybe has looked like in the church over the last few generations?
Andrew Root 8:20
Yeah, so I'll give you my kind of thumbnail sketch of this. And I know it's probably contested, and other people have a different perspective. But at least within Protestantism, I really see youth ministry, particularly the kind of shape we have of it now, which is kind of congregational-based youth ministry is something that happens after World War Two, particularly, but really, after the counterculture movement of the late 1960s. You know, it's like social theorists say, you know, every election really is a referendum on 1968. I think the church really has--Protestantism is probably a better way to say it--has really never escaped kind of the cultural realities of the 1960s. And we're still fighting those out, you know, here coming on 40 years. And I think that's not unusual. There's been other societies that have had major youth movements occur that, you know, it's been 40 years, they really wrestled with the ideas and what it meant for their society for a huge youth movement to occur.
Andrew Root 9:15
But inside of our youth movement, there was, I think, this major transition of the sense that our young people, our own children, were aliens to us, and we really didn't understand them. And there was a really huge, I think, a really huge generation gap where a whole kind of moral code of what it meant to live well, what it meant to kind of have a trajectory to your life really was about duty. I think, for that World War Two generation was the kind of last generation to really build their lives around a kind of deep sense of duty, where, after 1968, we have what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls the birth of the age of authenticity, where the kind of driving question is, "how do I be my most authentic self?"
Andrew Root 9:56
And I think that reality in households, in new suburban households, new upwardly mobile households in the 60s and early 70s, was just a really shocking reality of how we come to grips with that. And that found its way into our congregations. And there was a deep sense that we didn't understand our own children, and therefore, we needed someone to kind of bridge the gap who could go into this alien land and help these young people. Help, just help us make sense of them, but also help kind of pass on a faith to them and the importance of reading scripture and things like that. And so you do get the birth of the kind of congregational based youth ministry where before that youth ministry, for the most part was that kind of denominational reality. So there were church camps and maybe at the, you know, the local judicatory level, there was a youth ministry person, but now there's this kind of movement into the congregation and it became a youth pastor or youth director was the person who was doing youth ministry within the congregation itself.
Andrew Root 10:58
And like you said, that was a heyday. I mean, from the mid 1970s, really till the late 90s, it was quite a thing. And it built and it impacted the church in significant ways. And you even think of kind of movements that happened through the 80s and the 90s. Things like, you know, Bill Hybels, you know, Seeker Sensitive movement, was all born out of kind of that youth ministry reality, even the Emergent Church reality that happened in the late, late 90s and early 2000s. Those are all youth ministry people rethinking the church. So that had just a huge impact.
Andrew Root 11:34
But I'm wondering if we haven't come to grips with the fact that we've had a great kind of transition happen into the first decade, second decade now, of the 21st century, where some of those cultural realities that we presumed, or that made it possible for this kind of congregational-based youth ministry, where each church if you had the budget, had to hire a youth worker to minister to its own children, if some of those things haven't changed. And, you know, I think one of the main staples of that, and it's still with us was that the youth group became such a huge, important thing. And now, I think a lot of youth workers feel like, "Well, yeah, we're still supposed to, and I still have the expectations to have a youth group," but there's not kids just wandering neighborhoods without anything to do anymore. Their lives are incredibly busy and their parents aren't just sitting at home, drinking Bud Light, and watching, you know, Monday Night Football. They're driving them across the state for choir concerts, and for you know, a baseball hitting coach. And it's a very kind of different cultural reality. And I think we're starting to see that some of the paradigms of youth ministry that were born out of Protestantism's coming to grips with the counterculture and the post-1968 culture is starting to shift and to change.
Eddie Rester 12:55
And I feel a lot of pressure at times when I talk to people, not just here at our church, but other pastors and parents at other churches, when they talk about affording a youth minister or they talk about the youth group in the terms of what they had when they were growing up in the 80s and early 90s, and why can't it be that. And that expectation, I feel like we're kind of stuck in a moment. But people don't know where to go from here, what really is moving in the culture underneath, other than they know something's different. But they don't know how to put their finger on it, what's different, and how to rethink maybe what's possible in shaping the lives of kids and their faith.
Chris McAlilly 13:45
Yeah, I think one of the things I would... I think a lot of your work I see is, in some ways, like helping us come to terms with describing kind of what has happened. And I want to get, you know, I want us to move towards kind of what can be. But you mentioned Charles Taylor, and I feel like that might be a good next step in the conversation is Charles Taylor. For those who don't know, he wrote a book called "A Secular Age." And I've heard you say, Andrew, that sometimes you tell your students that that will be the first book written in this century to be read in the next. And I wonder if you could tell us why you think that's so important. And it's become kind of a central kind of backdrop to the way you think about faith formation.
Andrew Root 14:31
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's become the book that has implanted itself in my brain, probably for the last, you know, eight or so years, which is it's a big book and it's a it's a great book to keep your door open on a windy day or something. It's a brick of a book And what's a little intimidating about it is it's only really trying to answer one question. And the one question it's trying to ask is why, if you just go back 500 years, a nice, just round number, and he's just looking at the Western world. If you just go back 500 years, why was it nearly impossible, say, if you're walking the streets of Paris or in Amsterdam, or in London or something, why was it impossible, really, for the most part, not to believe in God? Like, it just wasn't an option, everyone believed in God.
Andrew Root 15:16
And in a relatively short 500 years, that whole thing is flipped. And now, in most of our societies, even for very committed people, it's really easy to forget about God. It's really easy to live where God just kind of fades into the background. So he tries to tell that story of how that happened in 500 years. And it is long, and it's difficult. But there's something really genius about it. And so what Taylor really wants to articulate, which I think is really central for people who want to pass on faith to the next generation of people, is that our issue isn't just decline. Our issue isn't just that fewer and fewer people are going to church or that young people are uninterested in church or in religion or whatever, which is usually been kind of the justification on why every congregation needs its own youth minister is that we need to. We're losing them. We're losing this generation.
Andrew Root 16:09
I mean, there's been that kind of anxiety that's been there since the youth movement. And what Taylor wants to argue is, well, of course, that's an issue. I mean, you can just look at the statistics and see that that's an issue, but that there's a bigger issue. And the bigger issue is what he wants to call secular three. He goes through these different kind of layers of the secular. But when you get to this third layer of the secular, it's that all belief becomes contested, that all our beliefs even become what he calls fragilized, where we live with these kind of fragile senses that even when we believe and even when we believe deeply, we're really aware that the person across the street who seems to be living a fairly good life, doesn't believe.
Andrew Root 16:47
Or we start to wonder ourselves, do we really believe this? Or is this just a family we were raised in? Or if we, you know, grew up in a different country, in a different context, would we believe this? And so we all have to kind of confront that reality. And he says, that kind of fragilization can exist, because what we inherit, and this gets a little philosophically jargony, is because we inherit what he calls an imminent frame, where we tend to see our world unlike our ancestors 500 years ago, where they would presume a supernatural world like something weird happened, something uncanny happens, and they think, well,
Chris McAlilly 17:19
Ghosts, spirits.
Andrew Root 17:20
devil, demons, yeah, there's a spirit around the corner. Now we live in our kind of default setting--you know, the default setting like off your phone, when you take it out of the box--for most of us, modern, late-modern people, our default setting is to assume things are natural material before they're supernatural. So it makes it really hard for us to hold on to these deep senses--now to put this in my language--that there still is a God who acts and moves and speaks in the world. And to me, that becomes the real crux of faith formation. It's not just how do we build loyalty to kind of a religious brand? How do we even win religious participation? Which, you know, I mean, I'm not completely poo pooing that, that there's some importance to that. We confront is how do we help people encounter and have a vision for God, who still speaks and who still lives and who still does things in the world? Who still moves like God moved in Egypt, rescuing Israel from Egypt and slavery and raises Jesus from the dead? Like, how do we still point to a God who does such things when we inherit this framework that's harder and harder for us to conceive of or to hold on to and have frame the way we live our lives?
Eddie Rester 18:33
You know, when we talk about secular three, it really relates back to
Chris McAlilly 18:38
Suckular?
Eddie Rester 18:39
Suckular three. I choked on that word there, so, secular. One of the things that Christian Smith talked about was kind of the spirituality now is kind of flattened out. And you mentioned it as well. And to just this moralistic idea, that somehow religion is supposed to make us better people. And it doesn't relate as well to what you were just talking about, this God who moves and acts and does amazing things in the world. And some people would say, well, that that's a good first step that God makes us better people. Why is that? I don't want to call it dangerous. But why is that maybe seducing us into the wrong direction with our understanding of faith and God?
Andrew Root 19:28
Yeah, well, that's just gonna show us how old I am, 'cause back in my doctoral student days was when Chris Smith's work, the first wave of the national study of youth religion was just coming out and I remember vividly him presenting on it before it was even in a book at a seminar at Princeton seminary. And I remember when he talked about the moralistic, he had a slide, and it came up--and I hope this isn't too crass for your podcast--but it just came up and said what this means... Well, I won't be as crass as he was, but it came up and said, "Don't be in a-hole." Like that was the point. Like, the whole takeaway of the moralistic was just don't be a jerk, you know. Don't be an a-hole.
Andrew Root 20:12
And, you know, like you said, well, we could probably use a world with less jerks in it, somebody that isn't all bad, you know. But the downside of that, or the thing that's lost, that Taylor does a good job articulating, is that we've lost the sense of what he calls it is the eclipse of sin, and therefore the eclipse of grace. So at its core, we do lose this sense that there's fundamentally something not quite right with us, with our society, that we need something from outside of us to actually save us. And when religion gets pretty, I think, in moral therapeutic deism, one of the ways that religion gets kind of whittled down or flattened out is it's presumed to be another element in your own project of yourself, not something that's much greater outside of you that judges you and brings a new way into life and brings grace through its conviction. That there is this kind of sense that something is not right, that we need to be saved from something. We need something from outside of us to save us.
Andrew Root 21:17
And that has kind of been lost in this secular three, this kind of age of hyper authenticity, where we feel like, the only thing that can really save us is by us finding our most authentic self. And it's not that something's wrong with us, it's just that we haven't figured out how to optimize and find our most creative self yet. And that does really flatten out what spirituality, what the kind of confessions of all of classic religious forms are really for, and particularly the depth of Christianity, which makes this assertion that we really do need a reality from outside of us that can save us and that the first step of discipleship is really to cry out or to be aware that there's something not right and to make that what's not right, right. It can't happen from within the resources of your, with your own self. You need something that's beyond you to save you.
Eddie Rester 22:15
It would just be the idea of God will give us enough wisdom that we can solve the complex problems. We can be who were created to be, rather than the deep power of grace to shatter who we thought we were and to recreate us.
Chris McAlilly 22:30
Yeah, the secular age. And Taylor's work is really helpful in kind of tracking this shift into this materialistic frame. We're living in an imminent frame. It's a closed system. There's no connection to the transcendent. There's no connection to anything beyond the self. And so, you know, the whole project is to become the most true or the most authentic self that you can be. And I think it's interesting, the way in which you kind of toy around with kind of the way Taylor talks about the age of authenticity. And he put that in conversation with this move in American youth culture that really accentuates or heightens the need for usefulness as almost like a pseudo-authenticity, you know, or a, I don't know. I don't want to equate kind of usefulness and authenticity. But I wonder if you could... There's this strategy of youthfulness, it's not just like youth ministry, but there's a strategy of youthfulness that you see in American Protestantism that you kind of tease out. I mean, you're pretty critical of it as well. And I wonder if you could maybe just open up a little bit of that dimension of your work?
Andrew Root 23:44
Yes, it's a great question. So, yeah, like the little history, the thumbnail history that I tried to sketch out of youth ministry comes about because of just this generation gap, and us feeling like our kids are aliens. Well, another piece of that, I think, really what funds, both, you know, literally with dollars and cents, but also reason to have congregational-based youth ministry is this transition towards the age of authenticity and this necessity to have youthfulness. And I do see it quite critically. I think that authenticity itself doesn't need to be seen as completely critical. And Taylor, in his very kind of ironic self, who you know, says he's not a hater and he's not a booster. You know, he thinks there's some good things about authenticity and this turn towards authenticity that we should affirm. But there also are some problems.
Andrew Root 24:39
And I guess my contribution is to say, well, this kind of glorification of youthfulness could be a problem. And I was inspired by this by reading Bonhoeffer. So Bonhoeffer has these really unknown, they've bounced around, but they didn't really kind of come into people's frame of reference until these big Bonhoeffer books in English, at least were translated these Bonhoeffer works, books. But he wrote, we don't even know when he wrote it, 1935 or something, wrote these eight theses on youthwork. And he makes this really strong statement in thesis one or two, where he says that, since the days of the youth movement, and he's talking about the German youth movement that happened in 1900, he says, since the days of the youth movement, the churches thought that the youthful spirit, not the Holy Spirit can save it.
Andrew Root 25:25
And I just found that to be an incredibly prophetic statement for, you know, the American church at the beginning of the 21st century that so much of what we feel like our churches need, up against the losses of that secular to or up against the kind of sense of decline is that well, what will save us is if we can, we don't really care about the--I'm being a little crass here--but we don't really care about the concrete humanity of young people. We don't really want to hear their stories or be in conversation with them. But we do want to have a big youth group in the basement. Because if we have a youth group, we have, you know, high school kids and young adults around our churches, it gives off this kind of aura of youthfulness. And youthfulness says culturally that this is an institutional structure, an institutional collective to be connected to. So youthfulness becomes a way of kind of, I don't know, positioning yourself inside of an age of authenticity.
Andrew Root 26:19
And I do worry about that. I do have a kind of fear that Protestantism as supportive youth ministry, or thought youth ministry is really important. I think, you know, there's some good reasons for that. But I think there's the danger is that, well, we're facing decline across the church, and we have no hope of actually making inroads within the religious marketplace unless we have a sense of youthfulness. So we want to a youth pastor who brings youthfulness to our church more than really ministering to the concrete humanity of young people. So there's just a kind of prophetic assertion there. And I try to develop that, and like you said, embed youthfulness inside of this age of authenticity, and try to kind of name that as a problem. And I just do see this still with a lot of youth ministry literature where there is the big existential crisis is that young people may not participate, as opposed to the big existential crisis being how do we testify to the revelation of a living God in people's lives? So yeah, I guess that the youthfulness becomes the kind of problematic to confront there.
Eddie Rester 27:33
Yeah, it becomes the thing we can easily do instead of the thing that we may, may be harder, but need to do. And I wonder, as you talk about the marketplace, the religious marketplace, I was thinking about the larger marketplace as well, where everything in our culture in these early decades of the 21st century is about youthfulness, you know. Everybody wants to drive to the 18 to 25 or 16 to 25 age group. You know, you think about even the social media giants are terribly concerned about who is signing up and using them. It's Facebook's not cool, it's Tick Tock or it's Snapchat. And I wonder if maybe some of our drive towards youthfulness, in that way that you describe it, isn't just another way that the church is really just being pulled in by cultural forces, that we don't want to talk about.
Chris McAlilly 28:32
Yeah, I think it's authenticity as a kind of consumer experience. You know, and I feel like you're pretty critical of that, Andrew, in the way that you think about it. But I heard in your kind of teasing out of Taylor, that there is, you do, it sounds to me, like you do still think that there is a way in which you can critique usefulness as a kind of a malformation of authenticity, and you can critique the consumer experiences that kind of purport themselves to be authentic. But there's also, it sounds to me, like you still would retain something of the content of authenticity in conversations about faith formation with young people, am I right there or wrong? Or how, what do you think about that?
Andrew Root 29:24
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think if we're fair to Taylor, and I know this isn't a podcast to justify Taylor, but and I think I agree with him completely, that there are elements that are advances, that we've raised authenticity up. I mean, the just the willingness to hear and to allow other people to speak and maybe voices who didn't have an option to speak before, now their experience matters, that the articulation of that experience matters, I think is important. So I think there are gains. For me the bigger thing is I don't know you any way you could erase just the age of authenticity. You know what I mean? I just don't think there's any way we could say, well, it's completely bad. I mean, you would have to just kind of return to forms of monastic life or something like that, which, you know, obviously some people have made pitches for.
Andrew Root 30:16
I don't really know how you could do away with it, so the big question is are there openings inside an age of authenticity to have narrative be really important and have people articulating the depth of the Christian story and really wrestling with the importance of that. And I think faith formation becomes much more about a community of people sharing their narratives, their testimonies, if you will, of wrestling with fear and doubt, and really searching. I mean, Taylor really thinks that even inside of an age of authenticity, the beauty of it is that there is an invitation to search, to yearn, to seek for something bigger than you, to try it out, to go after it.
Andrew Root 31:14
And I think that's part of what faith formation becomes. As opposed to trying to kind of implant knowledge or implant behavior in young people's heads, it's really about journeying with them around some of the biggest questions and really wrestling with them around those and bringing the depth of the Christian tradition to bear as other historical experiences that have wrestled with the depth of the human experience. And so I do think there's an opening. I try in the second half of that "Faith Formation in a Secular Age" book that you say, okay, if this is just the playing field, I mean, this is just the pitch in which we're playing, is inside of an age of authenticity, then how might we kind of faithfully respond to it? And I do think it opens up for communities of people to testify to their real lived experience with the with the presence and absence of God.
Chris McAlilly 32:06
Yeah, man, I think that that that's really helpful. Because I think that what I hear in that is that you have to honor a young person's search. You have to honor a young person's journey through an attempt to become authentic, you know, to take on an authentic self. And that's going to look like narrative. It's going to look like testimony. It's going to look like a lot of searching of big questions.
Eddie Rester 32:40
A lot of hard questions.
Chris McAlilly 32:53
Yeah, I mean there are so many different threads. I mean, one would be, kind of the AA thread comes to mind, places where you see testimony and authenticity being searched for. I think the one that I want to draw out of your works is the honky-tonks in downtown Nashville. I can't remember exactly where this is. If you're from Mississippi and you graduated from college, a good cultural script to live into is to move to Nashville.
Eddie Rester 33:03
Right.
Chris McAlilly 33:04
And so I spent a lot of time down there at Tootsie's and in Robert's Western World and, uh,
Eddie Rester 33:11
Losers.
Chris McAlilly 33:12
Yeah, again, you know, it's interesting, I mean, so you talk about how you were at a conference in Nashville exploring these questions with a group of folks interested in faith formation. And then you guys went down to downtown to the the honky-tonks. And the question of, is this simply a tourist consumer experience, or is there an authentic, you know, Nashville music scene to be had, or is that just an empty category? Those are things that were... That was my lived experience. And I think, in the midst of that, you know, I found myself wondering, even then, and even more so when I was reading some of these passages in your work, if there was almost, like, an authenticity on the other side. A false authenticity or something. I don't know. I wonder how you think about that?
Andrew Root 34:02
Yeah, I mean, I do think there is, you know, yeah. To me, and so this is just my own kind of theological perspective and what I've tried to kind of constructively, theologically kind of think about this is, I think, within at least one stream in the Protestant Christian life, that authenticity can become a kind of legitimate form of authenticity comes through the cross. So it actually comes through finding this God of Israel who takes what's dead and makes it alive. So the authenticity isn't that wow, I have in this very creative, entrepreneurial, very curated self way, look at me. Look at how many likes I get or whatever you do. You can see how uncool I am. Whatever you do on TikTok, how many... I don't know what do you get on TikTok? You get, uh, you don't get rates. You see how old I am. You don't get it retweeted or whatever.
Eddie Rester 34:54
How many shares or how many watches, I think.
Andrew Root 34:58
There you go. How many watches.
Eddie Rester 34:59
Our person at the end of the table, Emily, is nodding her head, "Yeah, idiots." She knows.
Andrew Root 35:05
It's embarrassing, isn't it? We have just failed the youthfulness.
Eddie Rester 35:09
The test.
Andrew Root 35:10
The test here, haven't we? But I do think that there is this kind of sense where there is an authenticity that has gone through death and found in life. And it's one thing to say, well, that person is authentic because they essentially curate a kind of self that's an authentic project. And it's another way to say, one is authentic because they have found something from outside of them that has given them hope or given them new life. And so, for me, what's been really central like that throughout my work as much as trying to do some of this cultural analysis has been thinking about kind of Luther's theology of the cross. And that this idea that the way we start articulate where we find concretely the living presence of God is often in these experiences where we find ourself minister to an inexperiences of death or loss, where we find ourselves, again, searching for something and find our hands empty, or find our hearts broken, that in those experiences, particularly that are deeply relational. And we find someone who both gives and receives ministry to us in those moments, that something profound happens.
Andrew Root 36:19
And, so I do think that that becomes a kind of cruciform and resurrected kind of form of authenticity, where we do feel this way with the saints and the mystics of our historical faith that they have something authentic. And the authenticity isn't, well, they branded themselves, the authenticity is that they have lived through the dark, dark night of the soul and found humility in receiving the ministry and nature of God through the church, or through the neighbor, or through the quiet of prayer. And so to me that becomes this redeemed form of authenticity, if you will.
Andrew Root 37:00
I think there's other ways in the theological tradition to think about that. But that's been one way that's been been really clear for me, which then frames youth ministry, that youth ministry really is about creating space for these kind of moments of confession, if you will, of searching and longing, those big questions like you were saying. And those big questions aren't just ways to somehow create sticky moments that keep people participating, but they actually become potential locales, very events of God's presence, of God showing up in these moments where human beings share in each other's humanity and find life out of death. That comes from this God who was made known in Jesus Christ.
Eddie Rester 37:42
And to think about just the growth process. I mean, you've got teenagers right now, they experience moments of life and death, of darkness and light, at a real deep level, as they move through, as they begin to discover what is my independence from parents look like? What does it mean to have a broken heart? What does it mean to be vulnerable in moments where everyone else is showing strength or pseudo-strength.
Eddie Rester 38:16
And so it's not that we don't need, what I'm hearing from you is not that we don't need to pay attention to this time, we don't need to pull back from it. We just need to invest and rethink in a more healing, faithful way, how we are engaging our youth ministry. So, I'm sure we've got pastors and church members who are listening. And what are some questions or what are some places of beginning that you would offer to say, if you want to build youth ministry or ministry within church that ministers folks in this age range, this this is a good place to start. Here's a conversation to start with.
Andrew Root 39:03
Yeah, I mean, I think the place that I always tell my own students to start, and I would encourage anyone listening to start, is that if you're the person who's responsible for the youth ministry, whether you're the associate pastor, or you're the you're the youth pastor, that youth director at the church, it starts I think, a little bit of a counter-intuitive way. I think it starts with you becoming very aware of particularly the other adults in your congregation and particularly aware of the stories that are going on there. And then I think it's a part of our job, the person who's has a youth ministry responsibility, is to go to those kind of people and say, "Hey, I think there's something really interesting that God's doing in your life right now," or that "you're really wrestling with God's presence in your life right now. Can I help you tell this story to our middle schoolers?" Or, "Can I help you tell the story to our to our 10th graders?" And to help them think about how they tell that story. Then to really call them into that. I think to see that in a deeply spiritual way to be called in to that, to almost be ordained to the ministry of sharing this story that you think is there.
Andrew Root 40:14
And I think we should be afraid of those stories being processed, too. I mean, I think we often think of the only stories we should expose our young people to are, you know, that have that clear three point arc. You know, like, "Things were bad. I was doing drugs. I found Jesus. Now everything's great." But I think there's also the stories that are in process. Like invite someone to come and to share with a group of 10th graders or high school kids about how they feel God's absence deeply right now, as they go through the cancer treatments of their nine year old. They're not sure where God is. And they believed in God, their whole life, and they've been part of a church, but this moment, right now, they feel like God has never been farther from them. And those kind of stories put before a group of young people, I think, are really important.
Andrew Root 41:03
And then the next step, I think, once those stories are shared, is really to ask young people, "What do you make of that?" What do you think of that? What does that actually mean?" One of the things I take from Taylor that I think is really quite true is that our own identities really are built around what he calls strong evaluation, that we have a kind of evaluation of what we think is good, and what makes life good. And we have those evaluations through stories. So we only have an identity because we're in dialogue with others. And we have stories that we hold on to, that give us an evaluation of what life is for, what makes life meaningful.
Andrew Root 41:39
And to me, that's really what youth ministry is about is creating those spaces where those stories are shared and then, and I think this is the real leadership piece, is turn over to young people to ask them to interpret those stories: What does this actually mean for you? What do you you think? What is a lifetime and why do we live it if this happens? Who is God, if people get sick? Who is God, if people pray, and they're healed in the midst of this? And really wrestling with that, I think is the place to start.
Andrew Root 42:09
And it is a kind of move away from where I started, where you have a professional expert who comes in and kind of bridges this generation gap, to really seeing the congregation and community has these stories that its young people need to feed on and wrestle with and try to interpret. And that's where faith will be passed on. That faith will be passed on through the relationships and the stories of these people, of these adults in this community, more than it will be through kind of propositions that people consent to or that young people consent to and believe.
Eddie Rester 42:40
Yeah, I mean, you point out in one of your books, that youth ministry, we just can't compete with sports, test prep, and other activities. And I think when we begin to move it into stories, and how do we make sense of that and then how do we understand God in the middle of that story, it begins to re-create an understanding of formation that's not based on an activity, a proposition, or an idea that we have to be better than another youth group or another activity. It removes it from competition, which is a healthy thing. It needs to. Its distinctiveness is in helping young adults bear the stories.
Chris McAlilly 43:26
I have a last question for you, as we kind of close this thing down. You mentioned Bonhoeffer. I know that Bonhoeffer is, you know, someone who you come back to again and again for thinking through these questions. If Bonhoeffer was a youth leader in 2021, what would the distinctives be of his ministry with kids? What do you think?
Andrew Root 43:49
Yeah, that's a great question. Well, at its core, what would be an ultimate distinctive for Bonhoeffer would be tending to the relationships within the community, within the youth group that it would be I mean, this is such a kind of passe phrase or a phrase we throw around so much about the the need for ministry to be relational. But for Bahnhoeffer, relationships really do bear the concrete revelation of Jesus Christ, that Jesus Christ is present in these relationships. But those relationships have to be free from any instrumental purpose, you know, for that relationship being for getting kids committed or relationships being for getting the lesson in kids' heads, that there would be this real call to just embrace the humanity of young people. And then there would be, I think, deep kind of sense of stories which is how Bonhoeffer taught his own confirmation class was to to tell them stories where he weaved in realities of his own life in the biblical text and wrestled with those. So the dynamics of relationship in narrative and storytelling, I think would be central for Bonhoeffer. I think that reflects the way he did ministry, and I think that would continue for us.
Chris McAlilly 45:07
You've given us a lot to chew on. And I think some things to think about as we move forward, I hope. Yeah. What are you working on next? What are you writing right now?
Andrew Root 45:19
Yeah, I'm kind of just, I'm stumbling around right now. I have a couple projects that are coming out, an ecclesiology project that will be out next year. And I'm also trying to write a little bit more on thinking about transformation, like how we talked about needing something outside of you to change, and kind of thinking about that. And I've been reading a lot of memoirs and trying to think of what are the kind of cultural ways we think about how conversion or transformation happens in people's lives? And how might we think about that kind of culturally, but then move into a kind of deeper sense of that theologically and biblically. So we'll see where it's going. It's early on in that but that's kind of what my mind is in right now.
Eddie Rester 46:02
Well, thank you for your time today. And thank you for your work and the ways I think, I hope that it will challenge people to think about the stories that we're offering to our students and how those can transform them.
Andrew Root 46:16
Thank you guys. It's been great stuff.
Eddie Rester 46:19
[OUTRO] Thank you for listening to this episode of The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 46:21
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 46:33
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]