The nation’s youth are hurting. Research shows that in the past half century, anxiety has increased in youth by a significant degree. Many children and young adults feel that they don’t have a vocational calling or clear direction. Many suffer from depression, eating disorders, self-harm, bullying, thoughts of suicide, and other self-destructive behaviors. The numbers of depressed and suicidal children and young adults has increased at an alarming rate. What are the causes?
According to the National Commission on Children at Risk, “The crisis in adolescent mental suffering and maladjustment was caused by raising children in an unhealthy culture characterized by diminished social connectedness.” The commission concludes that children flourish to the greatest degree when they are included in and supported by what it calls ”authoritative communities,” which are social institutions that are multigenerational, warm, nurturing, and encouraging of spiritual and religious development. Authoritative communities are oriented philosophically to the dignity of all persons and love of neighbor. In other words, they are organizations that function like churches—or that actually are churches.
Youth are at their best when they are part of communities that treat them like ends in and of themselves and provide them guidance on what it means to be a good person. When ministry with and to youth is at its best, it creates a space where adults and youth journey together in meaningful relationship that allows for unconditional love and acceptance.
The difficult task of creating youth groups that function this way is the focus of the Youth Ministry Initiative (YMI), a non-profit organization with ties to the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at YDS. An ecumenical collaboration of ministers, youth leaders, and scholars, YMI approaches this goal through various means. The first of these is the YMI Fellows Program, which offers exceptional candidates exploring a call to youth ministry hands-on experience and theological reflection by placing them in youth groups at partner churches.
Additionally, YMI hosts monthly lectures on youth ministry at the divinity school featuring guest speakers who are leading experts in their field. These lectures have covered, among other topics, the church’s role in reaching disconnected black youth, ministering to youth at risk for substance abuse and depression, incorporating youth in the worship of the whole congregation, and the centrality of parental influence in passing on religious faith and practice to the next generation.
Three years ago, these lectures gave rise to what has become an annual summer-study course, called Planting Seeds of Hope and Joy, in which youth ministers and senior pastors, lay volunteers, current YDS students and alumni, and many others from the New Haven area and beyond come together to learn with and from one another about youth ministry.
When planning and organizing this year’s week-long summer study course, YMI took many things into consideration, especially when deciding the focus for the course. Youth ministry is most successful at fostering adolescent flourishing and joy when both adults and youth willingly participate in something larger than themselves, something in which they have a stake, and something that is characterized by commitment, community, and love.
Initially, this seems to present a few easy solutions to a range of very difficult problems: bring your kids to church, create a youth group where kids are unconditionally loved, embrace all kids with love and acceptance. However, it’s not as easy as it sounds. The resources and knowledge to build relational youth groups that nurture the foundations of joyful, flourishing lives aren’t always readily apparent and self-perpetuating. Allocating a few church funds to a youth group run by a series of inexperienced youth ministers who come and go will not solve this broader problem of adolescent suffering. An authoritative community that nurtures deep relational bonds among youth ministry participants cannot be fostered without careful planning, experience, attention to detail and some basic best practices
Toward this end, the Planting Seeds of Hope and Joy course focused on the “nuts and bolts” of how to start, nurture, and grow a transformative youth ministry program. From June 1 to June 5, YMI hosted more than 100 participants in the evening summer course at YDS, each night of which included dinner and three lectures with breakout sessions focusing on a different aspect of youth ministry. These lectures focused on everything from discerning and communicating mission and vision to ministering in a multi-ethnic context, and from leading experiential bible study to nurturing relational bonds and cultivating student leadership, as well as basics like how to write a budget and raise funds for the youth program.
In addition to the live lectures, YMI launched the idea of a “digital classroom” on social media, aligning its Twitter and Facebook accounts with the content being offered each night. The YMI team live-tweeted the event and posted each discussion question from the breakouts on the Facebook page, where participants at YDS and at home could answer and share input. YMI also inaugurated its Instagram account for the event, encouraging many participants to sign up for the photo app so that they could further engage in fellowship and community building via social media.
To pull all of the social media content to the same place, YMI used the hashtag #ymi15. On each social media platform, photo posts, tweets, statuses, breakout questions, and YouTube videos with relevant content were collected in the same place, making all of the self-generated content easily accessible. The digital classroom promoted further discussion and community building, with participants sharing their own ideas about things like fundraising and how to align mission and vision, inspiring others to join in the conversation about how to best help our youth.
The conversation was lively throughout the weeklong course, and it’s not over. YMI hopes you’ll join the dialogue and participate in this robust community of youth ministers, lay leaders, senior pastors and scholars as we learn with and from one another how to foster and grow transformative youth ministry programs that lead to adolescent flourishing and joy.
Taylor Bolton is a second-year M.A.R. in Women’s/Gender/Sexuality Studies. Originally from Connecticut, she graduated summa cum laude with a major in Italian language and culture from the Florence branch campus of Marist College. Before attending Yale, she interned at IBM, focusing on internal communications. She plans on pursuing a career in the corporate sphere.