Return to the Arena part 1: Wherein I Say Nice Things About CIY

I’ll go ahead and repeat the truism that someone coming back home from a long stay in a foreign place notices things that people who never left simply take for granted.? My own journey into Christian faithfulness started in the Stone/Campbell movement’s version of the evangelical youth group movement, and Christ in Youth played a key part in those experiences of the early nineties in Plainfield Christian Church’s Impact teen group.? A few years later, in the summer of 1999, when my dear friend and youth group sponsor Jon Arvin had to cancel on Impact’s annual CIY trip on short notice, I stepped in and acted as a youth group sponsor for a weeklong CIY conference, and I noticed much that had changed since 1995.? Now, ten years later, I’ve just come back from a weekend as one of the sponsors of Athens Christian Church’s junior high youth group on our trip to Larrytown (Lawrenceville, GA) for CIY’s Believe conference, and a great many things have changed even since 1999.

I’m not sure how many parts I’m going to take to reflect on CIY, but I do know that I want to start with a post in which I offer unqualified praise for the good things have happened.? Before I do set to critique (and I will), I want to think carefully for a day or three, and I want for readers to know that I offer them not with the intent to condemn CIY in particular or youth ministry in general but to commend all of us who work with junior high kids (myself included) to look at adolescence and adolescents with both eyes open and with a willingness to think theologically about what it means for folks this age to be Church.

That said, here come the praises:

1. It’s intentionally geared towards junior high kids.? I was surprised, when we showed up, to see so many vehicles marked with the names of Nazarene, Community-Church, and other non-Stone-Campbell traditions in the convention center’s parking lot.? I was even more surprised, when I started browsing the program, that the touring event’s main session speakers hailed not only from Stone-Campbell congregations but also from well-known megachurches like Willow Creek, Saddleback, and Mars Hill Bible Church (the Rob Bell Mars Hill, not the Mark Driscoll Mars Hill, in case you’re keeping score.)? My initial assumption (grumpy Campbellite that I am) was that the event must have gone soft-evangelical, eliminating the distinctives of the Stone-Campbell movement like adult baptism and such.? Not so.? The program cites Acts 2:38 in good Campbellite fashion, and the folks in front always mentioned baptism as part of the process.? When I started researching to write these blog posts, I came to find out that, according to a few sources anyway, Believe is simply the best traveling conference geared specifically towards junior high rather than high school students, and folks who are not official movement Campbellites are willing to get on board despite our tradition’s quirks because we’re doing what we do so well.? So I have to give kudos where kudos are due there.
2. They’ve partnered with some really cool organizations. Included in the week’s program was the newest comic from Dust Press, a graphic-novel-style retelling of Jeremiah and the Babylonian Exile.? I wasn’t familiar with Dust before (they’ve let their web domain lapse, or I’d give you a link–hmm… maybe I should register the domain and sell it back to ‘em… nah), but the comic that they gave us is no Sunday school side-project; it’s a pretty sharp little project that pays attention to the international politics and the theological nuance of the sixth century BC and manages to portray the invasion of Nebuchadnezzar in ways that take war more seriously than do most evangelical popular culture but without fetishizing it the way that something like 300 does.? And in the back of the convention hall, I found out that all of the offering and a good chunk of the conference registration proceeds went to Rapha House, an organization that rescues Cambodian girls from the sex slave cartels.? In other words, CIY is not as self-contained as once it was; it’s neither an artsy Emergent thing nor a full-blown activist organization, but it does look beyond itself to those practices of the Church.
3. They’re building visual arts into the experience. In the intermissions between main sessions and before each session began, students had opportunities at stations around the convention hall to work on giant graffiti walls together.? That’s not too hard, I realize, but they did have volunteers dedicated exclusively to making sure that the giant rolling paper-wall kept rolling and that all the kids were kept stocked with markers and paint.? Beyond that, the side of the convention hall opposite the main entrance, about halfway between the front stage and the back of the hall, there was a clear plastic cage, reminiscent of the walls between a minor league hockey rink and the stands, in which Eric Samuel Timm, a Stone-Campbell junior high youth rally performance artist (a category that I could not even imagine before this weekend and whose job search and interview I still can’t imagine), plied his trade during each session’s song service, in one session sculpting foam rubber with a chainsaw and in the next welding together metal pipes and in the next using melted wax on canvas to create visual analogues to each session’s song service and youth pastor’s message.? He obviously had the pieces planned ahead of time (they corresponded, visually, too perfectly with the conference’s official graphics), but the coolest thing is that the conference actively encouraged kids who weren’t into the song service to wander over to his transparent workshop and to watch him work.
4. They’re attuned to what Christian ethics might mean in a junior high setting. Rather than limiting their exhortations to “share Jesus” and other such vagaries, and rather than making the transmission of doctrinal content into the sole domain of Christian ethics for these kids, the last couple sessions of the weekend developed a fairly intelligent spoken-word ethics for them.? CIY broke the ethics down into three clear categories: “Encourage.? Defend.? Share.”? The”Share” part was more or less the sum of the ethical instruction that CIY gave when I was in high school: transmit the content of Christian doctrine to your peers, and set before them the choice to receive the gift of grace or to reject it.? To this (worthy) task CIY has added two others, one the active encouragement of those people ground down by the cares and contingencies of the world and the other the active nonviolent (they did stress that part) defense of those people targeted by the consumeristic caste system of junior high.? They ended the weekend with a session in which Kurt Johnston (the junior high minister from Saddleback and our main speaker all weekend) brought kids from various youth groups on to the island stage (more on that in future posts) and had them talk about particular moments when they could encourage, defend, and share in their contexts back home.
5. They built the weekend around an allegory. At first, recovering-post-evangelical-hipster that I am, I mocked the mixed media, film-and-live-stunt-show story as a ripoff of The Matrix.? And it was.? But the more I thought about it (I had to, as I was tapped to lead our youth group’s devotional time when the film/show’s last installment finished), Brent’s Fable (their title, not mine) does dig into some interesting questions of systemic sin and the dangers of prophetic speech. ?And stuff blows up. ?That’s cool.

I’ll have some qualified praises later, but these thoughts should be good for a start. ?CIY was a good organization 15 years ago when I was a teenage convert, and it’s still a good organization. ?And when I write the next few posts, I’ll write them from love, not from spite.

So there.