Book Review - "Taking Theology to Youth Ministry" by Andrew Root

As part of the GYM Blog we will be putting up youth ministry book reviews. Here is our first one...

"Taking Theology to Youth Ministry" is the first book in a four part series by Andrew Root that takes you on a theological journey through youth ministry. This first book presents the question "what's the point of youth ministry?" It's a question that's I'm sure every youth worker has asked themselves or has been asked of them. This book gives us the answer in a new and inspirational way. Root introduces us to a fictional youth worker called Nadia who has just started a new job. As she starts to get her teeth stuck into the role she begins a theological journey into the purposes of youth ministry and her role.

An inspiring book that has opened my eyes to seeing youth ministry in a new way that has helped me to seek for the action of God in my life and my ministry. I highly recommend it!

Rather than limiting youth ministry to being about helping young people to become good Church goers or about helping young people become good moral people. Youth ministry, Nadia discovers, is about participating in the action of a God who is revealed to us in the midst of our own young people's nothingness (their broken reality). This is because it is in this nothingness or "death" that God brings life. This revelation leads to reconciliation.

Nadia discovers that the role of the youth worker is neither a "hired-hand" who looks after the youth because it's the "right thing to do" nor is the youth worker "set apart" in any way (that's we find it so hard to call ourselves youth ministers). Youth ministry is not primarily a functional job but theological. Root references Moses as an example of the model minister. It was only in his own failings and weaknesses that God acted. The role of the youth minister is to seek for the action of God in their own life and in the lives of young people. Taking this further, in the context of the Church, Nadia recognises her role as ministering to the whole congregation to pass on faith to adolescent. And so, youth ministry should be concerned with encouraging and assisting the congregation to participate in the action of God in young people's lives "by seeing, hearing and being with their children, by passing on faith to them".

Root, through Nadia, challenges that youth ministers are local theologians. Theologians because part of our job is to see and articulate who God is (the God of revelation and reconciliation); local because we seek God's action next to the lives of young people.

So what about the young people? This where gospel and mission come in. Our job as youth worker is to assist young people to participate in God's action through their own brokenness and the world's brokenness. How do we help them find their brokenness?... only through relationship.