Social Innovation | “1000 Small Experiments” with Kenda Dean

 
 

Show Notes:

The latest research about youth ministry and its actual effect on the lives and faith of young people can seem disheartening, and the data tells us that something has to change. Kenda Creasy Dean, the Mary D. Synnott Professor of Youth, Church, and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary and an ordained United Methodist pastor in the Greater New Jersey Annual Conference, has a few ideas on what we can learn and what we should remember about our Christian roots: that the Church itself started as a social innovation movement. 

In addition to teaching in practical theology, education, and formation (specifically youth and young adult ministry, Christian social innovation, and theories of teaching), Dean works closely with Princeton’s Institute for Youth Ministry and the Farminary. Dean is the author of numerous books on youth, church, and culture, the best known of which include Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church (Oxford, 2010), Practicing Passion: Youth and the Quest for a Passionate Church (Eerdmans, 2004), and The Godbearing Life: The Art of Soul Tending for Youth Ministry with Ron Foster (Upper Room, 1998).

She has directed numerous grants on youth, innovation, and the church, including The Zoe Project (2017-2021), and was co-director with Harold Masback of The Joy and Adolescent Faith and Flourishing Project through Yale’s Center for Faith and Culture. In 2013, she co-founded Ministry Incubators, Inc., an educational and consulting group that supports Christian social innovation and entrepreneurial ministries. A graduate of Wesley Theological Seminary, she served as a pastor in Virginia, Maryland, and New Jersey and as a campus minister in suburban Washington, D.C. before receiving her PhD from Princeton Seminary in 1997.

Resources: 

Princeton Seminary

https://www.ptsem.edu/people/kenda-creasy-dean

Ministry Incubators

https://ministryincubators.com/about/who-are-we/kenda-dean/

instagram.com/mincubators


Zoe Project

https://zoeproject.ptsem.edu/


Fuller Studio

Re-imagining Church as a Missional Incubator

https://fullerstudio.fuller.edu/re-imagining-church-as-a-missional-incubator-kenda-creasy-dean/


Transcript:

Eddie Rester 00:00 I'm Eddie Rester.

Chris McAlilly 00:01
I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight.

Eddie Rester 00:03

Today we're welcoming Kenda Dean with us. Kenda Dean is an ordained United Methodist pastor. She's worked in youth ministry. She now teaches at Princeton Seminary is doing a lot of amazing work and research and writing about youth and young adults and Christian social innovation.

Chris McAlilly 00:22

I think a lot of people, parents, pastors, folks who care about young people in the community want to know, what can we do to create an environment where youth and young adults flourish and thrive. And Kinda's angle on this is really kind of paying attention closely to where young people's hearts are coming alive and how they want to change the world, paying attention to that, but also giving them a larger story to think about it through.

Eddie Rester 00:50

Right. I think one of the things that I'm thinking about is it just was such a great and inspiring, motivating--those aren't the right words--conversation. But it really helped me think about "how do we go where," not "how do we bring in" but "how do we go where young adults are finding the work of the Kingdom and doing the work of the Kingdom?" How can we come alongside them, cheer them on, and as you say, give them the larger story of what God's doing in the world?

Chris McAlilly 01:21

Kenda has done several different things. Lots of different initiatives. One's called the Zoe Project, we talked about that. One's called Ministry Incubators, and we talked about that as well. She's a delightful person, and...

Eddie Rester 01:32
Except when she's picking on me. When the two of you team up on me a couple of times.

Chris McAlilly 01:36
Well, we only pick on you when you deserve it or need it. And so we just had to.

Eddie Rester 01:41 I just felt like... yeah.

Chris McAlilly 01:44 Well, are you okay?

Eddie Rester 01:45 I'm okay, now. Yeah.

Chris McAlilly 01:45

Okay. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed the episode. Glad that you're with us on The Weight. We are excited about this new series. If you missed the first episode, you can go back and listen to it with Becca Stevens. And we have a great season ahead, so go ahead and like it, subscribe so that you can be following along in the journey. Leave a review as well. Your reviews can help other people find the podcast.

Eddie Rester 02:08
[INTRO] Life can be heavy. We carry around with us the weight of our doubt, our pain, our suffering, our mental health, our family system, our politics. This is a podcast that creates space for all of that.

Chris McAlilly 02:20

We want to talk about these things with humility, charity, and intellectual honesty. But more than that, we want to listen. It's time to open up our echo chamber. Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]

Chris McAlilly 02:35
Well, we're here today with Kenda Dean, and we're delighted to have a conversation with you.

Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, Kenda.

Kenda Dean 02:44
I love getting to be with you again.

Chris McAlilly 02:46

Yeah, it's been several years since we've been together in person. But you've continued to rock and roll in your work. And you were saying before we got on, that you guys are starting classes today.

Kenda Dean 03:00
I have a few things going on today. This is true. This is true.

Chris McAlilly 03:02

Well, we appreciate your time. I think I came across the first, maybe the first book of yours that I came across was your book, "Almost Christian," which kind of is a deep dive into what's going on with our kids and how they transition from adolescence into adulthood or emerging adulthood, as the literature talks about it. And I wonder kind of, could you give folks maybe who don't know your work a bit of context in kind of how you got interested in those questions around youth and young people and young adults?

Kenda Dean 03:41

Yeah. Well, I mean, the way I got interested in it is probably the way everybody gets interested in it. You know, I had kids, also, I had been a youth pastor for a lot of years. And I teach youth ministry at Princeton seminary now. So it's an ongoing, you know, conversation about how young people are experiencing the church and how they're experiencing faith, and whether or not the kinds of work that we're doing in the Christian education/youth ministry world is making a difference or not.

Kenda Dean 04:15

And the thing that we have that we didn't have when I started in youth ministry, like 30 years ago, we have data now. And the data is distressing in a lot of ways in that basically it says that an awful lot of what we do, in the name of faith formation, forms a lot of good things with young people. But what it doesn't do is form faith. Faith is something that tends to happen in the context of congregations and adult mentors, but to the extent that formal youth ministry makes those things possible, then it's useful, but by and large, we're forming young people who get a lot of good relationships with adults and get a lot of good moral background and so on in congregational ministry, but an awful lot of it misses the mark when it comes to being the source of faith formation.

Kenda Dean 05:14

So what we're doing now is trying to figure out what it is that we ought to be investing our time in with young people, given the fact that there are models of youth ministry that we have relied on for 100 years that turn out not to be as useful as we thought they might have been.

Eddie Rester 05:32
I was a youth minister for 10 years, so we should be in some sort of post traumatic group together.

Kenda Dean 05:41 Yeah!

Eddie Rester 05:41
I'm sure. But as I look back on my 10 years of youth ministry, and most folks looking at it would say it was a successful run at youth ministry.

Kenda Dean 05:51 Yeah.

Eddie Rester 05:52
But now all these years later, some 20 years later, I look back and I still have relationships with these kids, but the vast majority of them don't have a relationship with Jesus or the church. And what that tells me is that as much fun as we had, and the great trips and the great moments that we had...

Chris McAlilly 06:10 You sucked.

Eddie Rester 06:14
You're just coming right at me today, right at me. It's early. We're recording this one kind of early morning for us, so.

Chris McAlilly 06:20
I mean, we just have to call it straight, right Kenda?

Eddie Rester 06:23 I think, well...

Kenda Dean 06:24
I mean, call a thing, a thing, right?

Eddie Rester 06:26

Call a thing, a thing. Wow, now Kenda is on board, too. Well, I think, you talk about it in the book, that what we do--and you said it just second ago--we do a lot of good moral formation, but not a lot of Christ formation. There's a lot of, I think the term "moral therapeutic deism." So say a little bit about kind of that and why that was part of the missing of the mark that I did, and maybe a lot of other youth ministers did over time.

Kenda Dean 06:53
Well, first of all, I'm not sure that we can attribute it to what youth ministers do or don't do directly. There are a lot of cultural forces that are creating our religious sensibilities. Right?

Eddie Rester 07:04 Right.

Kenda Dean 07:05

So moralistic therapeutic deism turns out it's shared not just by... it's a problem in all faith communities, Christian and non-Christian. And it's kind of a flattened, homogenized, be nice. It's, you know, moralistic, feel happy, feel good about yourself. It's therapeutic. And it's deist, in the sense that God is sort of hovering out there, but is not an actively engaged force in our lives. So that's the default religious position that was discovered by the National Study of Youth and Religion, more than 10 years ago now. That's the default religious position of American teenagers.

Kenda Dean 07:47

But what we found out, it's even more diabolical than that. It's not because kids are misunderstanding what they've been taught in church or what they've been taught by their parents. It's basically because this is what we teach them. And, in fact, the kind of flattened, homogenized, lowest common denominator, that helps us all get along---I mean, that's a good thing that we can all get along. But it shows a profound lack of deep understanding of the theological truths of our traditions. Because in fact, the deeper you go in your tradition, the more we appreciate each other in our difference, not the more we get divided. We misunderstand how that works. But really, truly understanding a religious tradition helps you become more accepting of others, helps you become more prone to appreciate people no matter who they are, as opposed to setting up walls between people.

Kenda Dean 08:58

So it's a cultural reality. It's not just something that's happening with young people. Young people, of course, are always the canaries in the mines, right? So they are the ones that we kind of see it in front of us in a very unvarnished way. And what they're doing, though, is holding up the mirror to ourselves. So this is something we share as a culture. It's a form of acculturated faith, that is an old sin, you know, that goes back to the beginning of time. And, you know, we just confuse our gods is what it boils down to. And we're a little afraid to claim the God that we say that we claim, because a lot of what we have been taught about religion is actually not true in terms of the religious teachings themselves, but are the way we have come to interpret religion as a culture. And that is something that divides us rather than could bring us in, not unite us in the sense of homogenizing us but unite us in the sense of of being able to genuinely appreciate others.

Chris McAlilly 10:02

Right. Yeah, if you're a parent and you're struggling with some of these questions, or if you're, you know, a pastor, youth pastor, whatever, the book that I'm referring to, of Kenda's is called "Almost Christian," and in the background is a bunch of research. And the person at the center of that research is Christian Smith, and we did an episode last season with Christian Smith. You can go back and find that one and you can take a deep dive on all of that if you want to. But yeah, we want to kind of push forward. I know that Eddie maybe had another question.

Eddie Rester 10:34

I think that begins to branch us into what we want to talk about today is that I listened to a great lecture you gave at Fuller, and in it, you said something along the lines of "Christianity has not made enough of a dent in the world for people to notice." And I think, as we talk about some of that research, what you discovered, is that we've become so homogenized, so flattened, that the distinctive of who we are and how we're called to live can't be seen. We're not living that in such a way. And so what you begin to call the church to in a lot of your work in the last five years or so, is really a lot of innovation that we can't continue to do and think about church and faith formation in the same way we have in the past. So tell us a little bit about that journey for you, where you've moved from the writing and the research of "Almost Christian" to kind of this new call to the life of the church.

Kenda Dean 11:33

Yeah, a lot of people who know me are like, "Wait, did you leave youth ministry?" And to me, no, that's the reason why I got interested in social innovation. It's because if young people we're not going to--as you noted, you know, we work with these kids, and they are great, lovely humans and 20 years later, the church is nowhere in their lives. So my question was, okay, if they're not in churches, where are they? And it turns out, that they're not necessarily abandon... They're not abandoning God, necessarily. They're not even abandoning their good feelings for the church they grew up with. What they are, is abandoning an institution that feels like it doesn't matter.

Kenda Dean 12:21

And so they're taking, either with or without some form of faith--some do, and some don't--into the world in a way that they deeply want to make a difference in. They want to matter. They want to have a purpose. The Church calls that a vocation. But for some reason, even kids who grew up in congregations and faith communities often do not make the link between this impulse they have to make change happen. And we're in a world where that is an absolute guiding principle for Gen Z, and even some millennials. We began to see these trends towards a deep commitment, not just to social justice, but to actually taking the world and trying to change it. There's a kind of a balance between despair in terms of hope for the future, because I don't see a lot of hope. And that's a direct result of... There's a link between a lack of having a faith perspective and the amount of hope you have. But it's also a result of this youthful idealism they have that, you know, maybe there's time, maybe we can be the ones that make it better. And it's a very pronounced impulse in most young generations, but it has become a defining mark of millennials and Gen Zers.

Kenda Dean 13:43

So, what are they doing, they're trying to figure out ways to make the world and life together better for people, which, you know, once upon a time was the job of the church.

Eddie Rester 13:54 Right.

Kenda Dean 13:55

And that is a part of our history that we easily overlook. One of the things that I do in a book that is coming out, it's called "Innovating for Love", but we trace how the church got so insular, and how we move from being an enclave of people who are ready to be mobilized for the common good to becoming a very insulated, quote, unquote, holy community. And that's a sociological trend. It's not a theological one. In fact, that it is counter to most of our theologies. So we're trying to break out of that as churches, but we're going to learn that from young people who have been quite honest in saying, "You know that thing that you're doing that you call church? That's not moving the needle. I'm going to go someplace that moves the needle."

Kenda Dean 14:49

So they were in this thing that didn't have a name back then, you know. We now call it social innovation or social entrepreneurship sometimes or a bunch of other things like that. But they're trying to find ways that they can create a pocket of the world that makes a difference. So they're deeply involved in placemaking and sustainability movements. And you've seen all of justice movements. These have religious significance for young people, even though they would not call them religious significance. Those movements and those domains provide young people with a lot of the same things that churches have wanted to provide young people with for a long time: meaning, belonging, purpose. Those are three things the church ought to be really good at. But in fact, young people are less apt to find those things within congregations than they are in these other domains, where social innovation really flourishes.

Chris McAlilly 15:48

Isn't it the case that this isn't just a matter of the church screwing it up? I mean, I think it's also a part of the issue is that corporations and brands know this about us and are creating not just products for us to purchase, but they're creating all kinds of ways that we can onboard, you know, and construct meaning, belonging, and purpose through their brand. You know what I mean? And so, I feel like... You know, the other day I got some, you know, I followed a number of papers, have subscribed to some, and then I did this did this thing where I stopped subscribing to all kinds of stuff, but people still send me emails. And so, the New York Times is one of those I subscribed to when I was a student, but I don't subscribe anymore. And they keep sending me emails, and it was like, "you can send us money, and we'll do this thing in the world that's gonna make the world better." It's like, you're doing the same thing we're trying to do through missions. And it's like, I see what you're doing. You know, you want my whole life to be built on your brand? And it's like, um, I don't know. I feel like that's part of the story.

Kenda Dean 17:07

Well, yeah, and I mean, it's when you do the work of the church without or--I think this is probably true of other religious communities, too, but I'll talk in terms of Christian communities - when you do the work of the church without the story that the church is built on, it becomes kind of a free-for-all, right? It becomes unmoored from the center-- that we claim, as Christians, being Jesus Christ in the center--becomes the product, or the process. This is the problem even with the innovation conversation. And one of the things that I'm trying to figure out, I mean, the way we throw around the word "innovation," it's both meaningless and dangerous. Because it becomes the idol, right? We become so interested in innovating, that we forget who we're innovating for. And so, you know, you need a story that you belong to when doing this. And when the story centers around something other than God, then we have an idol factory going on. That is, it's just true across the board. It's not just true of youth and youth ministry, for sure.

Chris McAlilly 18:25
Have you seen this book "Dominion" by Tom Holland, "How the Christian Revolution Remade the World?" Have you seen that one?

Kenda Dean 18:31
I haven't. No. Tell me about it.

Chris McAlilly 18:33
So it's this guy. Have you seen it?

Eddie Rester 18:34 I haven't seen it.

Chris McAlilly 18:35

So I came across it before Christmas. I haven't read the book, but I want to. It's this guy. He's British. And he grew up in a cultural Christianity and through time, became a journalist, and has written a number of books about the ancient world, particularly like Greece, Sparta, etc. And, you know, he has written this book kind of tracing... I guess, he's very interested in the classical world. But the more he gets to know about it, he sees how foreign and kind of barbaric it is. And what this book, "Dominion," it traces the ways in which Christianity as a religion, as a culture, as an ideology, how it really remade the Western world. And so a lot of the things that we think of as just general and universal ideals of, you know, any number of things: equality...

Eddie Rester 19:27 Charity.

Chris McAlilly 19:27

Charity, justice, etc, that we think of as just like "this is what it means to be human," they actually have deep Christian roots. And in fact, without Christianity remaking the Western world, the Western world would have been far more barbaric is kind of the basic thesis.

Kenda Dean 19:43

And that... I think that's a really important point because this whole innovation conversation, which is scary for a lot of people. The church started as a social innovation movement. You know, this was the way you lived out, this was the way you showed that you were a follower of Jesus. You did life differently, and you did life differently with others. The Christians were the ones taking care of people during the bubonic plague. And we have all sorts of resources that talk about how the emperors of the time--Emperor Julian was humiliated by the fact that the Christians took care of people better than the pagans did. And that people saw that and that made a difference. And it's that difference, it's that upside-down nature from the society as a whole, the barbaric society as a whole, that I hope the innovation movement can help us reclaim.

Eddie Rester 20:35

I think about, as you talk about how the Christians upstage the emperor, Emperor Julian, in particular, I start thinking about, you know, the Christian colonies that went to England to try to convert the Celts. And one of the threads that I think that we see in this is that there's a lot of risk, and there's a high tolerance for failure at a time when failure often meant death, and loss of family, loss of social capital, loss of place in the social structure of the day.

Eddie Rester 21:15

I'm just thinking a lot of things right now. And one of the books that I read a long time ago, was "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen. And what he says is that as groups get successful, they fail to innovate, simply because they don't want to risk too much. They don't want to fail, but already they are undercutting their future because they're failing to innovate. And I a feel like, maybe as an institution, Christianity somehow reached that place, post World War II, and became too, we became so risk-averse and wanting to be free of perceived failures. And I think about your work with the Zoe Project. And one of the things folks want to look at this... Well, before I try to mess up telling them about the Zoe Project, why don't you, since you're a part of the Zoe Project. It would make much more sense for you to do that.

Kenda Dean 22:15
But we're now getting into a phase of that, where we're trying to distribute our findings a little more broadly, so.

Eddie Rester 22:23
Yeah, so tell us a little about the Zoe Project and what y'all have found and how it relates to

Kenda Dean 22:30

Yeah, well, the Zoe Project was one of a number of innovation hubs that the Lilly Endowment funded over the last five years that was specifically geared towards looking at how congregations could innovate with young adults. And picking up on this idea that young adults are the absent demographic from congregations most of the time. And congregations by and large, you know, view them as an exotic species that they spot from time to time. There was one United Methodist conference that actually, at one point, the clergy had what they call the spotted owl society, which was all their young clergy, because they were so rare. They were an endangered species.

Kenda Dean 23:12

So we tend to view young adults in that capacity rather than as collaborators or as instigators of ministry. And so the these innovation hubs were all over the country. And they all tried various ways to do that. And ours was focused on looking at how young adults are finding meaning and purpose and belonging in these domains that they assign sacred worth to, but they're not churches. So sometimes they are very explicit about, you know, "This space is sacred to me." Sometimes they're little mini churches, or they have some congregational connection, but most of the time, they were kind of the adjacent communities to the church. They were the farms down the road. They were the maker spaces in the community. They were places that young adults found community. They often found deep meaning. They found their gifts were validated in ways that they didn't.

Kenda Dean 24:18

And what they didn't have was a story that that all belonged within, right, the way Christian communities would put that all in a story. But they experienced those as profoundly important spaces, because they were getting this building blocks of identity from them. Those were things that churches should do, but what churches do is they wrap it up in a story where all of those things make sense, and they kind of are decentered so that you're focused on God and others rather than on yourself. But the building blocks are out there in other places.

Kenda Dean 24:52

And so what we found in the Zoe Project was, I guess our hunch was that God's not waiting around on churches to make a difference with young adults and communities. But churches are necessary to become the people who can put the building blocks together into a story that makes sense. And that takes some of the pressure off by focusing on what God's doing rather than what we're doing.

Kenda Dean 25:19

what I was just talking about? I'm so sorry.

So we looked at young adults in all sorts of different places. And we had one event we called Cultivate, where it was a camp for young adults, right? We had it at a farm that's part of our campus. And we got... There were, like, eight spots for young adults to come and do a week of vocational discernment on a farm. And we got more than 200 applications for that.

Eddie Rester 25:49 Wow.

Kenda Dean 25:50

So there's a hunger out there. And that's one of the things the Zoe Project confirmed, as did the other projects that were part of this innovation initiative. What we learned was, and the other thing that we learned is young adults are far readier are to lead in faith communities than churches are to give them the keys. And we treat them as people in the waiting room, to our own peril. These are people with great capacity for ministry, great interest in making a difference in the world, great interest in a lot of the things that church has to offer. They may or may not be familiar with all of the theological ins and outs of churches, but they're not enemies of the church. They just are looking for one that makes a difference.

Eddie Rester 26:42
They have the ability to communicate into the world in a way that the church--they've got that bridge that the church doesn't have, as well.

Kenda Dean 26:49

Yeah, yeah. And we're gonna learn from young adults on this. That's what we did was we set ourselves at the feet of a bunch of young adults leading in these other spaces. Some of them were very blunt about what the church did and didn't mean to them. But all of them were involved in things that the Church wants to be involved in. So we have to figure out how to champion what God is doing outside of churches with young adults as well, not just expect them to come to us.

Chris McAlilly 27:18

Yeah, I see dangers kind of on--I see opportunities on both sides, but I also see some dangers on both sides. So, like, one of the issues that Christian communities can get themselves into is kind of an insularity or a kind of a bent towards, let's say, a bent towards preservation. And, you know, clearly, the world is broken in all kinds of ways, and we need to maintain our posture of purity or holiness or kind of however, that gets framed up. And so that would be one problem, like the problem of insularity. On the other end, it's like, alright, so now we need to engage the world. We need to engage these kids. They haven't been properly discipled, catechized, whatever the thing is, but they have an intuition about how to engage the world that we need to pay attention to.

Chris McAlilly 28:10

You know, I think remembering, at the point in my life where I grew up in the church, and then kind of was like, well, maybe I need to do something outside the church. I started looking at NGOs, nonprofits, all these different kinds of spaces where that stuff was happening. And I was in Atlanta at the time. So the Jimmy Carter Center was kind of a big cultural reality for young people. You know, here's former President Jimmy Carter, who's doing global truth and reconciliation work, you know, building houses all over the world. He's just doing a lot of great stuff. So there were these people coming from all over the country to be there. But they were coming out of secular context, you know. They weren't coming out of kind of a deep faith tradition. Some of them were, but not not all of them.

Chris McAlilly 28:56
And one of the things I noticed in that environment is just the danger of despair and burnout.

Kenda Dean 29:02 Yeah.

Chris McAlilly 29:02
You run up against the kind of problems that the Jimmy Carter Center--I say, the Jimmy Carter Center. It's just the Carter Center, but I always called it the Jimmy Carter Center.

Eddie Rester 29:10
We know who you're talking about. Yeah.

Chris McAlilly 29:11

Yeah. It's these massive global issues. They're complex, they're deep, they're historic, and a lot of them feel intractable for a young person who doesn't know exactly how to... You know, your desire to to make a difference bumps up against the reality.

Kenda Dean 29:31 Right, right.

Chris McAlilly 29:32

And so what ends up happening, without a story, without some kind of a eschatological vision of how there's another actor that's going to make this all turn out right, you know, you end up without hope, and it's the danger of just not having hope. And I feel like how to navigate this, like, not insularity but also not kind of engaging in such a way that you lose hope. I feel like that those, you know, there's dangers on both ends. How do you navigate that as a leader, and then how do you create spaces where young people can kind of think through that stuff?

Kenda Dean 30:06

That is, that's so important, Chris. I don't... There's no magic bullet I don't think that we know of on this part. But I think that leads us to the place we start, which is humility. Because yes, the problem with all of this innovation is we actually can't fix these problems by ourselves, by ourselves as humans. We can move the needle some, but we, you know, as soon as we help one family get on their feet, who might be, I don't know, an immigrant family who maybe we're helping to give them housing or whatever, there's another one.

Kenda Dean 30:48

I mean, the ongoing need is a relentless part of the human condition. And so coming to terms with that is one of the tasks of young adulthood, right, and you're right, the relationship between hope and faith is one of the key themes that came up in the National Study of Youth and Religion. The kids who were highly devoted had markedly more levels of hope than kids who did not, the moralistic therapeutic deist kids. And it was a stark finding, and what we know now, after years of watching these kids grow up, we know that those inclinations they have as teenagers only become more pronounced as they get older. So the problem of despair is a real problem with the generation of people who are coming of age right now.

Kenda Dean 31:43

So you know what, first of all, here's what I think we don't do, which is what we all are inclined to want to do. We can't fix them. We're not supposed to. They come to us as whole human beings, right. It's not the church's job to take them by the collar and make them look like us. But what I think we can do a better job of doing that we haven't done, which is profoundly life- giving, is to be able to say to a young person, "Look, you know that thing that you're doing when you go to the farm, for example. And when you are out there, and I see you singing as you're in the garden, or whatever," to be able to say to them, when you are doing that, when you are dancing, if you're a dancer, when you are doing this thing that you kind of lose yourself, you get in a flow zone, what the church can say is, "I see God in you when that happens. Now, you might not see God in you. But I do."

Kenda Dean 32:55

Because, as a Christian, what I do is I look for places I think God's at work. And I think God's at work when you do that. So what that tells me is I'm supposed to help you. I'm supposed to champion you. I'm supposed to come alongside you in some way. So, how can I, how can we, as a faith community, help with this garden? How can we help make you a better dancer? How can we give you opportunities to share this gift? What we're doing then is we're in confession mode more than converting mode, which is a really important change that all all missionaries have to learn, but we're not very good at it when it comes to working with young people. We want to say, "Oh, we know the answer, and that is to have faith like we do, and to do the things that we do as faithful people, and then your life will be full and whole." A) that's not true. And B) it's really annoying. Nobody wants to be reached. They do want to be neighbored. They do want to be loved.

Eddie Rester 34:01

I think that's a shift that the church, we, struggle with. Change is just hard, but it's a shift the church hasn't had to make for generations, you know. Through the 50s, 60s, 70s, even into the 80s and early 90s, you throw open a church somewhere, people will show up and they'll do the same church thing, maybe a little different music, but do the same church thing that their grandparents did. And things shifted. And COVID I think has really shifted things for us in the life of the church. I have quit calling it the post-COVID world.

Kenda Dean 34:37 I know.

Eddie Rester 34:38
Because I don't think that's the reality. But I think the reality is that the world created by COVID.

Kenda Dean 34:44
Yeah, that's better. I like that.

Eddie Rester 34:45

The world created by COVID is significantly different for the church. And if we think that we're going to go back to the way it was in February of 2020, and if that's our hope and that's our mark, I feel like the church is going to, well, the mission is going to suffer. And so this shift of converting to confession, I think, is significant. What does that look like for the church in this COVID-created world? What might it look like? What are you seeing?

Kenda Dean 35:21

Well, one thing I'm seeing is something that really... Look, there were a lot of ways that COVID may have been--I mean, it was a shipwreck for sure--but it may have gotten us on a new shore that we were heading for, anyway. But we got there fast. And now we have to figure that out. And I think on balance, it could be really good news for the church.

Kenda Dean 35:50
Yeah, so I mean, I think one of the things that happened during COVID was that we got stripped of all our programs.

Eddie Rester 35:58 Right.

Kenda Dean 35:58

Let me talk about youth ministry in particular, right? Everybody knows that youth ministry is about relationships. But almost all of us who do professional youth ministry, and even a lot of volunteers spend most of our times developing programs, and then we spend the rest of our time convincing young people that they want to come to our programs. Now, when COVID hit, you couldn't have the programs. We tried online for a little bit, didn't work real well. Some did better than others. But everything we got, we had to kind of go down to the baseline. The only thing we had left to us was building relationships, nurturing relationships, coming alongside each other, finding ways to be for one another in a time, that was really hard for many people.

Kenda Dean 36:51

That is an absolute return to fundamentals when it comes to ministry. We had to learn how to do ministry again. And I think that's a good thing. We will have to come back, but more than half [CLEARS THROAT], pardon me. 58%, I think, of churches, after the reopening last year, had shut down a number of fellowship programs, a number of their gatherings, for obvious reasons. But if you talk to a bunch of pastors, if you talk to a bunch of lay people, it was a relief. I don't have to keep all of these balls in the air now. I can focus on what it means to actually live my faith in a different way. And it became kind of a laboratory for that. So I think that's a good thing. And we might find some new and possibly streamlined, possibly more fundamental forms of ministry coming out of that.

Eddie Rester 38:01

I think part of what I hear, as a church leader, is just building up some resistance to return to the "73 things on the calendar" approach to ministry each day. I think one of the things we've discovered here is that the amount of time that, in this COVID-created world, that people will give to the church each week has shrunk, and the space that our culture--even in the South-- will give away to the church has shrunk. Wednesday used to be high holy night for church stuff. There are mandatory events for our youth and kids on Wednesday nights now, outside the church and so I think, you know, how can we laser focus who we're called to be and how we're called to provide meaning and change in the world?

Chris McAlilly 38:56

I want to ask you, I think it's easy in at this point in the conversation to then say, "Alright, so what are we supposed to do?" Right? And I don't want to. I want to resist that and instead ask, Kenda, if you could help us think about what are some key questions that you think are important to continue asking? And one of them is what needs to be killed? You know, what program needs to die? And I think that's an important one. What's something that we just have made assumptions that's gonna be part of it, that that we might need to...

Eddie Rester 39:31
A kinder way might be to say, "to not pick back up" rather than...

Chris McAlilly 39:35
Yeah, that would be a kinder way I'm gonna stick my...

Kenda Dean 39:38
You know, we're in a dying and rising kind of business here. Right?

Chris McAlilly 39:42
Thank you, Kenda. Thank you.

Kenda Dean 39:44
So I'm okay with the dying language.

Eddie Rester 39:45
Twice. Twice now you've ganged up.

Chris McAlilly 39:47

Here we go. So I guess what are some other questions? If you're trying to get into the mindset of doing a form of missional innovation and you want to try to reimagine kind of what a church should look like, what are some of the questions that you think are important?

Kenda Dean 40:05
Well, I think the question that we always have to start with in any kind of ministry, right, is who. Who are we doing this for? First of all? Are we doing this for God? Are we doing this for us? Are we doing this for us? Are we doing this because we want to grow or survive, or any of those things? Or are we doing it because this is the call that God has put before us? The other way of talking about who is, who out there has God put on our path that is someone we can bless? Not someone that we can get to come to church, someone we can bless, and to start with a particular human in mind.

Kenda Dean 40:53

I know one church that they decided to really take their neighborhood a lot more seriously. And there was a, I think it was a hair salon, a little mom-and-pop place on the corner of the block where the church was, and the church had, like, a thousand bucks in the budget they were going to devote to some of their mission work. They decided to just give this hair salon a thousand dollars. Now, that was a very simple act, right? They could have done a million things with that money, but they decided to give it to this little business on their block. It transformed their relationship in that neighborhood.

Kenda Dean 41:32

Because now, this church, for no good reason, just thought they saw God in the people who were in that shop, coming into that place, and they're like, "We want to champion what you're doing. We think what you're doing is, you know, you're part of what we see as God's work. You might not frame it that way, but we do. And we want to support you. So just here's some money to do whatever you need to do with it. And also, you know, let us be your neighbor. Let us figure out how we can neighbor you well." And, you know, it transformed a lot of relationships, because nobody expected a church to be for a hair salon. And yet it was a great example of the church being for a community, being for others. "God for us" is the way Catherine Mowry LaCugna put it, a theologian, and I think that God for us, God for communities, God for humans, is a pretty good path to be on.

Chris McAlilly 42:40

I love that. So who are we doing this for? Who out there has God put on our path that we can not just ask come to church, but who can we bless? How can we take our neighborhood more seriously? And how can we demonstrate in a tangible way that we are for people so that they see that God is for them as well. Any other questions come to mind? Those I think are really great.

Kenda Dean 43:08
I'm okay with starting with those.

Chris McAlilly 43:10

Me too. Me too. That's what I thought, too. Where do you see hope? Where do you find a sense of, you know, what keeps you from despair? There's a lot of bad news out there. What do you see that makes you hopeful?

Kenda Dean 43:29

Well, you know, this is a standard youth ministry response. But you know, anytime you work with young people--I work with students all the time--they give me hope every day. But I also I've come to use this image, because a lot of people ask me, you know, what do I see in the future? Particularly when it comes to youth ministry? What do I see? What next big thing is on the horizon? And, you know, I've learned to scan the horizon for that kind of thing. I don't see a single big thing coming. But I've come to think about what I do see as Dunkirk. I don't know if you saw that movie, or you remember your history.

Eddie Rester 44:06
I remember the history, yeah.

Kenda Dean 44:07

But you know, there's the scene in Dunkirk, you've got all of these soldiers trapped on the beach. And if young people are trapped in this place, on this shore, that they just need to get home. They just need to get home. There are a thousand little, tiny experiments coming over the horizon, and not one of them is going to do the trick. But all of them together can help get those kids home. It doesn't matter what boat they get on, right? What matters is that they get on a boat. And they're all heading in the same direction. And they're all ultimately trying to get people home. So I think we're in an era of small experiments. That's pretty typical for an era of innovation. And I think those small experiments are going to lead us to a good place.

Eddie Rester 44:58

That's a great image I think for us to end with today. Kenda, thank you so much for all your work and your hopefulness for the church, and your love of the church and your work with students today. So, thanks for spending some time with us.

Eddie Rester 45:13
[OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like,

subscribe, or leave a review.

Kenda Dean 45:13 You bet.

Chris McAlilly 45:22

If you would like to support this work financially or if you have an idea for a future guest, you can go to theweightpodcast.com [END OUTRO]

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