So there you have it: a youth volunteer’s response to CIY’s Believe! tour and a youth minister’s response.? Because we actually agreed in more places than we disagreed, let me hit those first:
Nested Narratives and Late-Capitalist Storytelling
Slim’s youth group and mine liked Brent the Stunt Guy’s allegorical journey out of the Factory and back, and I’ll be the first to say that such storytelling is one of my favorite “new features” of the conference.? (I have been away from CIY, even if not from youth ministry, for a decade, so it might not be new to CIY regulars.)? Even better, in my view, was the interlacing of Brent’s “Fable” (I’m still going to call it an allegory) with the story of the young prophet Jeremiah on one hand and the ongoing narrative through Eric Timm’s visual creations and the main session speaker’s talks.? The weekend was not a scattershot production by any means; every element of every session related to the elements within its own session and to themes spanning the weekend.? The team that planned Believe! (I just love the gratuitous punctuation.? Forgive me.) obviously went into planning with an architectonic model in mind, and as someone who plans not class sessions but architectural semester syllabi, I can say that I’m of one mind with that approach to teaching.
Moreover, as Slim noted in his response, the final bit of the Brent-allegory was nothing short of breathtaking.? In that segment, which bookended the final session’s talk, evil drones from The Factory (reminiscent, one must admit, of The Matrix‘s Agents) chain Brent up and drop him in a water tank in the middle of the island stage.? Then, for the next twenty minutes, the main session speaker gives a talk about the dangers of authentic Christian being amidst consumeristic inauthenticity (my vocabulary, not his–most kids don’t read Heidegger until high school these days) while Brent remains underwater.? Then, as the praise band leads the entire hall in singing “How Great Is our God,” Eric Timm, playing The Inventor, hoists Brent out of the water, removing his chains and embracing him.? It’s martyrdom and baptism and Morpheus all in one, and my congregation’s teens were talking about that moment weeks after the conference.? (Johnny Scott, unfortunately, made passing reference to “Brent’s breathing tube” between songs later in the afternoon, ruining the illusion, but that didn’t faze our kids.)
In that moment, as Jeremiah and Brent and the teenagers came together in the symbolic baptism, I realized that somebody? (likely several somebodies) had taken very seriously the spirituality of storytelling.? In the last twenty years or so movies as various as Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, The Matrix, Garden State, Crash, Magnolia, and Smoke Signals (which Netflix classifies as a gay film, but that’s for another discussion) have experimented with plotlines that interweave the grand heroic and mythological stories of humanity’s various antiquities with modern characters who, in their own ways, find themselves in the midst of virtually-heroic, morally heroic, and other variations of the heroic story that take as their setting not the ancient world of wine-dark seas and invincible Pharaohs but short-order diners, desk jobs, and sometimes even schools.? I know that youth ministers have at times tried ham-fisted ways of getting those stories into their Sunday night sessions (there but for the grace of God go I, and I know I’ve been there already).? But at CIY, these folks have done it well.
In other words, CIY is doing something that critics of the CCM culture (and I’ve been one) have long declared undone among the youth-minister set, namely creating a genuinely artistic postmodern narrative setting for teenagers’ imaginations.? I have to applaud that part of the “new” CIY experience, and my hope is that CIY continues to do those sorts of things that, frankly, a congregation’s youth minister isn’t going to have the time and resources, much less the screenwriting team, to undertake.? Now almost a month out of the conference, I look back on that part of the weekend as the result of people’s thinking hard about what a weekend conference might do that a regular Sunday night meeting can’t.? They’ve figured that out, and I do applaud that.
Missionaries to “The Youth Culture”
First of all, given my years working on the “dark side” of youth ministry (among kids whose parents were prostitutes and drug addicts, just to get that on the table), I’m always reticent to talk about “the youth culture” as if the kids I’m working with at Athens Christian now, with their good families and promising futures, are the only “youth culture” out there.? To the folks still working at West Main Street Christian and in other inner-city congregations I send much love, and do know that I was there with you at one point and someday might return.? (Actually, come to think of it, VBS in west Athens is in some senses a return to that sort of ministry.? But on to the main point.)
I’ll agree with Slim that the teens I work with are addicted to electronic devices. ?When we told our group that they wouldn’t be allowed to have their cell phones or mp3 players on the trip (a grand total of 27 hours, mind you), they protested as if we’d canceled Christmas, and when they saw their counterparts from other youth groups sending text messages during the time set aside for youth groups to pray and discuss and such, they protested with increased vigor, accusing their mean youth minister and volunteers of depriving them as our counterparts provided (or at least permitted) life’s essentials for their groups. ?And on top of that, I’ll go ahead and say that I’ve got nothing in principle against using electronic technologies as we do our intellectual work, whether in congregations or in college classrooms. ?Every class that I’ve taught since 2003 has had a course website, and I’ve not collected a student essay on paper since 2006. ?And, oh yeah, I write a blog about teaching in congregations and college classrooms.
I set up this section with those data because at heart I’m a technophile.? Being a thinking technophile, though, means that I try to keep Neil Postman’s central question of any technology in my mind as I attempt to theorize ethically about any new device. ?Postman’ s question, as I’m sure I’ve posted here before, is “What problem does this technology solve?” ?It’s a simple question, but asking the simple questions often helps get on with the more difficult ones.
Now in Slim’s Dominican Republic example, the Spanish language is the technology in question.? And, were Slim to spend the time learning Spanish well, he would be solving the problem of a historical-linguistic separation between the people to whom he was ministering and his own family.? That simple answer leads to more complicated ones, namely why the people there speak differently than do people in eastern Ohio, what happens to doctrinal/theological content when translation happens, and other such things, and I’m certain that Slim posed those more difficult questions to himself and to his group as they prepared for serving and served in the Dominican Republic.? But he’s absolutely right that the Spanish language, if nothing else, is a technology that a missionary in the Dominican Republic needs.
Now the question of a missionary’s use of “technology” at CIY is not itself a single question but a battery of related questions.? A real treatment of technology related to CIY would have to encompass the web-based registration systems, the program/graphic novel booklets that CIY distributed (I love that graphic novel, BTW), the video presentation that Rapha House offered between sessions, the climate control systems that allowed a thousand bodies to be in the same room without suffocating us all, the interstate highways that most of us used to get to the conference, and probably several score more discussions.? So I’m not going to go there, preferring instead to address the “big picture” of technology so much as I’m going to sketch a couple of criteria corollary to “What problem does it solve” that led me to the thoughts I posted last month.
Historical Languages and Ahistorical Desires
Part of what I asserted and Slim conceded was that the convention hall was too loud.? He rightly noted shortly thereafter that teens are also loud.? As I noted in one of the initial series of posts, I came out of the weekend wishing that the weekend had featured more noise from the noisy teens and less electronic noise.? There’s something invigorating, even if terrifying sometimes, about the sounds of hundreds of teens in a place.? As I said earlier, few moments in the song services were more magical than when the praise band and all the amplified vocalists backed out and the sounds of a thousand young voices filled the hall.? Unfortunately, most of the noise was coming not from the young and not from the old but from the inanimate: during entirely too much of the song service, massive electronic amplifiers drowned out not only the voices around me but also my own voice (and I should be able to hear that, through my sinus cavity if nothing else).? Although Athens Christian Church does not have an amplified, guitar-and-drums “teen service,” I know of local congregations that have them, and I speculated at the time that perhaps CIY felt they had to compete with such “teen services” by pumping up the volume beyond what the kids would experience on a Sunday morning.? This is a question that I’ve not had the time to run down answers for, so I hope that Slim can comment.
My concern with the level of noise was not merely a concern with aural health (though that occurred to me more than once) but the isolation that it caused.? In a room full of one thousand junior high kids, in an environment that should have been utter chaos, the weekend proceeded in an eerily orderly manner, the sounds of the kids overwhelmed by a centrally-controlled sonic bulldozer.? In that noise, there were only shapes of people around, not voices.? And stuck inside my head with only what the central controller wanted in my ears (I just realized that I’m taking on the vocabulary of Brent’s allegory), I could not help but long for a return to the noisy squirrels that are in our congregation’s junior high room on Wednesday nights.
My other concern had to do with the weekend’s unwillingness to challenge the culture of overstimulation.? Although I’ve been a critic of G.K. Chesterton (perhaps not here but certainly in other electronic contexts), I do have to hand it to the big man that he could deliver a one-liner.? (Those mid-twentieth-century Brits were fierce with their one-liners.)? And one of my favorites from Chesterton is the following: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”? I think the structure of that comment sheds light on much of Christians’ efforts to reach out to cultures, subcultures, and other folks who are different.? Too often, I think, we Chrisitans fail to offer genuine challenges to people’s lives, preferring instead to set up rituals for initial entrance and then pretty much letting people do as they do, perhaps congratulating ourselves along the way for not being “Pharisaical” or falling into “works-righteousness.”? Now I’m no Pharisee (though I think they’re more interesting, historically, than people sometimes realize), but I do think that part of the vocation of being-Church must always involve movement.? Sometimes, as in the gospels, that movement is picking up a cross.? Other times, as in Galatians, that movement is the slower but sometimes more difficult movement of bearing fruit.? But at all times it’s a historically contingent human being making moves along with or against but always within the systems and networks of human existence.
My proposal here, to cut a bit shorter an essay that’s already rambling, is that CIY and youth ministry in general could present to young Christians (and as a way of life to enter into, for those not yet Christians) some kind of scaling-back on the electronic stimuli.? The assumption that twelve-year-olds need constant contact with their electronic “friends” via phone, text, Facebook, and a dozen other inputs is obviously a recent one historically, and I would contend that it’s less like the Spanish langauge, to return to Slim’s example, and more like a drug culture.? Although nobody (well, these are junior high kids, so I’ll say “almost nobody”) puts cell phones and iPods directly into their veins or mouths, nonetheless overexposure to those devices does become a mind-altering habit, and my hunch, as someone who believes that Christianity is a tradition of careful attention to texts and careful attention to neighbor, is that the jump-cut consciousness that such things breed cannot but diminish some of the best traditions of being-human that Christianity has passed down to us through the generations. To return to Postman, if the problem to be solved is called “boredom,” I think that an environment of hyper-stimulation might not be the best technology to solve it.
I’m no fool; I know that kids are going to beg their parents for and probably use uncritically such electronic toys.? But I also think that, without any counter-pressure, kids are also going to be promiscuous, experiment with cocaine, bully their weaker peers, and do all sorts of things that youth ministers (rightly) oppose vocally and frequently.? Neither electronic over-stimulation nor cocaine ever appears in the text of the Bible, but I would hope that discerning youth ministers could detect the harm in both and teach accordingly that the Way of Christ ultimately leaves room for neither.? (I do realize, I should be clear, that there are obvious categorical differences between electronic overstimulation, which is an excess of an otherwise-potentially-good thing, and cocaine, which does not immediately recommend any “moderate” level of use.? I’m using it as an example, not as a categorical identification.)? My proposal here is that overuse of electronic stimuli might, in the final sum, be something that youth ministers and youth volunteers should consider adding to the list of things we caution teens against rather than the list of neutral “tools” through which we can communicate with ‘em.
Alright.? My WordPress word count tells me I’m well over two thousand words, so I’ll stop for now and kick it over to Slim.? Look for his post over on his blog.
