I’m a student pastor director. Before that I was a student intern. Before that I was a student volunteer. Before that I was a member of a student ministry. Before that, I thought I wanted to be a student pastor because they took cool trips. 

But. I’ve always felt a healthy bit of ambivalence towards student ministry. On the one hand I think it is very important for the Church to invite students to be apart of its spiritual rhythm and to include them in the life of the Church. This is why I have dedicated much of my adult life to student ministries. On the other hand, the student ministry subculture has often been thoughtless, shallow, gimmicky at best and cultish at worst. One of the main ways this has manifested itself in student ministry for some time now has been through its awkward infatuation with all things “radical” or “extreme”. Everything from the name of the ministry to particular events/retreats/conferences have played on this rhetoric. Of course, this radical ideology is not exclusive to the student ministry world in particular. Churches, para-church organizations, christian conferences, et al have all used this as a way to inspire people to live a particular lifestyle. One that cuts against the grain of “worldly” or “secular” ideas and values. Who wants to be ordinary when one can live radically? Which really, at the end of the day, plays more on a desire to be on the inside of what’s really going on rather than on living an actual radical lifestyle. Whatever that even means.  

Be radical! Pray once a year around your flag pole. Be radical! Only listen to wholesome music and watch wholesome movies. Be radical! Save sex for marriage. And don’t kiss or touch each other either. Be radical! Invite all of your friends to church to be saved. Be radical! Go on a mission trip that will change your life. Be radical! Wear t-shirts/sweatshirts that play off of secular advertising but sell Jesus in place of whatever else was being sold. Be radical! Don’t use profanity. Be radical! Wear anti-abortion t-shirts and protest at clinics! Be radical! Be a leader. Be radical! Stand for heterosexual ideas and stand against homosexuality. Be a radical! Love the sinner, hate the sin! Be radical! Be radical! Be radical! 

Do all these things and man, you’ll be so subversive. 

Now, at first glance, these admonitions appear on the level. Prayer, a healthy sexual ethic, concern for the justice issues surrounding unborn babies, etc are all positive things students should be aware of and brought into dialogue with the Church concerning. But each of these moral or cultural admonitions mentioned above lacks significant nuance. Perhaps, there is more faithfulness to the gospel hidden in the call to be ordinary. Perhaps those who are indeed considered as uncommon or radical have been those who arrive at those positions in very ordinary and hidden ways. This is what I want to explore in this series of blog posts. Please hear me say, I am not attempting to play a blame game here. In fact, for those of us who have grown up in the church, if we are honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that we were, at some point (if not still), card carrying radicals. 

In challenging students towards radicalism we make it the end - the telos - of the Christian transformation. In short, this is deeply idolatrous. The telos of the gospel is the action of God in Christ to bring about a future that only God can bring to bear on the world. The telos of the gospel is not me or us - radical or not. In Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer confronts this fanaticism by observing that “we are therefore confronted with a paradox. Our activity must be visible, but never done for the sake of being visible” (158). When we highlight the need to be radical in the place of merely living an ordinary (obedience, devotion, etc) human existence we turn it into an unhealthy end. When I was a kid my parents often taught my siblings and me to let other people speak of our accomplishments and achievements. It’s one thing to declare oneself a radical follower of Jesus Christ and an entirely other thing altogether for other people to, having observed for quite some time, confer that it is so. Again, making the end of Christian discipleship about being a radical, for the sake of being radical, seems misplaced at best. 

Further, radicalism creates positions of power. “I’m radical and you’re not.” “I have exclusive rights to the gospel because I am “radical” enough to do this or that (however true or just these actions might be).” When we begin to unravel certain levels of Christian discipleship over against the other we are closer to the pharisaical tradition than we might think. 

Finally, I think calling students to be radicals is exploitive. Adolescence is filled with angst. Students naturally want to shirk off authority, rage against the machine, and create an identity where they feel acceptance. Playing on this already existent tendency to be radical is manipulative. I used to wonder why students could go through such seasons of “fire” and then, rather abruptly, experience such drought and apathy. Students who were “radical” in high school walk away from the church at 20, 22, 25, etc. Why? Maybe they were called to be radical in a particular time and place surrounding particular issues rather than invited into a life of ordinary, arcane existence that is less about consistently being on a mountaintop and more consistently about dwelling in the valleys below. 

Perhaps what is really missing in this infatuation with radicalism, found primarily within evangelical subcultures in general and youth ministry in particular, is a healthy dialectic conversation. I think I would have less an issue with radical language if it were balanced with healthy conversations of what it means to be ordinary - what it means to accept the arcane and the unknown, to doubt, to enter into despair, to share ordinary life with ordinary people. Perhaps I just really, really get annoyed with gimmicks and new ways to advertise Christian discipleship.

In the next few weeks I hope to unravel a series of posts with regards to this dialectic concerning the radical erosion and its effects on the youth ministry world and, consequently, the Church.