youth ministry: getting people to fiddle with God

Are you a teacher, parent, youth mentore? Watch this TED talk. Yes go on, watch it now:

You can download it from here.

We struggle with youth ministry. And I say this not because of all the youth who are leaving the church. I say this because when I look at young adults, I see people who have been drenched with theology which are really harmful, in my humble opinion. We’ve sent our kids to 11 years of Sunday school, and if you’re in a super congregation, 11 years of whichever other youth activities, sometimes amounting to 3 events a week, and after 11 years they are stuck with theology which are really harmful. And here we are, me and you, and probably we’ve been through this process as well.

I get my confirmation class last year, and they are somewhat terrified of challenging God. But then they dig into Genesis since they have to make a sermon from it, they struggle with the narrative of Jacob fighting the man and then being told that he has fought with God (Gen 32). The theme of there sermon by the end of the year was that people may challenge God and ask God questions. And this isn’t some wild and wonderful insight. This is the tradition we’ve been in, but which we seem to be suppressing through the models we present to kids in youth ministry.

This year they get into the confirmation class, absolutely sure that God is on our side and not to be found with anyone whom ain’t a Christian. So we were reading 1 John 4. And we read it again. And we are still reading it, and then sharing what we see. And it’s challenging the popular theology that we were fed for so long in school openings, classrooms, CSA meetings, Sunday schools, and also church.

The task of youth ministry should then be to get youth to play, to fiddle, with God, or at least ideas about God, in such a way that they can grow up to have useful skills in doing theology in their daily lives – this meaning that they can bring the resources concerning God into conversation with that which face them in their lives.

the creation of the Afrikaner myth

Going on to three years ago I wrote a post titles “my Afrikaner myth of meaning“. It was births from an experience in explaining the wall images from the Voortrekker monument to a visiting lecturer. This paragraph says something of what happened:

But something happened while I was explaining this to this international theologian. I got to see the story anew. Everything I ever learned about myth suddenly seemed to fit my own history, even though it only happened 150 years ago. This was the Afrikaner myth of origin. This was how we became the Afrikaner volk, how we differentiated ourselves from the Netherlands, also from France, Germany, and especially from Britian. It was by moving.

In the above mentioned post I tried to find positive implications from the Afrikaner myth which I could use in my own self-understanding. In the months and years after this post, my talk about the Afrikaner myth and the vow focused more on how the vow was part of the myth which explained why Apartheid was to be accepted, since God chose the white people over-and-above the black people of South Africa. I became less positive about this Afrikaner myth of meaning. Although I have continued my talk of being Afrikaner, maybe bet summarized in a recent post titled “I’ll just be that other white African, an Afrikaner“.

My reason for writing this post, however, is simply to point you to words by Christi van der Westhuizen concerning Afrikaner Mythology. In White Power she writes:

Malan, the first NP leader to become prime minister under apartheid, leaned strongly on his background as a dominee (clergyman) to alchemise Afrikaner nationalism into a civil religion. This was encapsulated in his slogan ‘Believe in your God, Believe in your Country, Believe in Yourself’, compelling enough for Afrikaner nationalists for it to remain the NP’s motto until the 1960s. Malan was a consummate ideologue who conjured up heady visions of the future in his rhetorical mix of religion, history and nationalism. Afrikaner nationalist mythology reinterpreted the motley groups of families that had left the Cape colony as a coherent nationalist action, the Great Trek, by ethnically similar people. Figures such as Piet Retief, Andries Pretorius and Sarel Cilliers were exhumed from the depths of history and paraded as leaders inspired by Afrikaner nationalism. To them, the Great Trek was more than a conquest of territory, proselytised Malan – it was ‘an act of faith, and the acceptance of a God-given task’. The Voortrekker victory over Zulu forces at the Battle of Blood River was immortalised in the Day of the Vow on 16 December, when Afrikaners were called upon to remember their promise to God to remain Afrikaner nationalists. The Afrikaner were ‘a volk with a calling … behind our South African volk existence and history sits a purpose. We as volk should be aware of it, and live it to the best of our ability.

White power & the Rise and Fall of the National Party page 23-24

concerning death. or: thoughts from a gruesome sidewalk

Driving back from church last night, just as I was reaching about 120 km/h after getting on the highway, I caught a glimpse of a guy waving his hands to the left, and the something red lying in the road right in front of me. I swerved, speeding between the waving guy and the something red, and immediately me and Maryke shared the thought that what we saw was someone lying in the road. About 250/300m further a truck and a car was stopping, and so did we.

I stopped (and at this point of the story I can write a whole post about the thoughts we were trained to think when doing this, even when on a highway with a body lying in the road), and jumped out of the car (leaving my wife, but we talked through this by now). Together with people from the other car we walked back to the scene. Just within the first lane of the offramp someone was lying. Bones broken and twisted into positions they were never intended to be. Intestines on the outside of the body. Apparently after first being run over, this person was hit by a number of other cars again and again before they could be waved of in time.

I called the emergency services, told them they could just as well send the police, the ambulance weren’t going to be able to do anything at this scene anymore. And so we stood at the scene. A tow-in truck stopped while I was on the phone. The driver was there with us, together with a few other people.

I guess people handle things differently when in shock. But some of them started talking. “It was a hijacker, they always run over the road”, the tow-in driver said. Lots of talk about the fact that none of the cars that hit this person stopped, and a reference to “karma”. I’m not sure whether karma was supposed to explain why this person was run over, or respond to those who just drove of after hitting someone on the highway.

I guess what got me was that we had to neutralize death. The person who died had to deserve it. There had to be some equalizing force at work which will balance what happened out, or where what happened was needed to balance something out. I guess we do it in church as well, when we tell people that there was a bigger plan to death, a reason.

And for me? Well, I guess I had to contend with the thought: “this shouldn’t have happened. God. This shouldn’t have happened”. No balance. No explanation. Nothing to soften it up.

(I remember this podcast helped we work through the idea of death some years ago, can’t remember all of it, but worth a listen)