To preach or not to preach?

      There are many weeks that I am plagued by a question regarding my work as a minister that turns into a minor (sometimes major) vocational crisis. 
     “Am I doing this right?” 
     You may want to quickly respond, “Of course you are! The work you do is very important!” You may think the presence of such a question is only an indicator of ministerial burnout or discouragement. Maybe. I’ve certainly experienced personal frustration in ministry. But I think my concern is deeper than that. For a long time, I’ve wrestled with the idea that I’m not ministering the way that Jesus would if he were living my life. And this is unsettling, because I’m utilizing the same approaches that were handed to me through local church ministry since I was 5 years old. How could those be un-Christlike?
      Taking a closer look, one can see that the typical Bible-belt conversation around the how-to of ministry presupposes an  Evangelical American model. This framework holds as its supreme value the oratory preaching of the Gospel message. This takes on a very particular form; gathering a group of people (small or large) so they can listen as you announce information about the Gospel to them. Mega-church and little local congregations alike operate from this speaker-audience centered                   presupposition. I am not arguing that disciples haven’t been made from this approach, but my current context begs the question: 
What if our American Evangelical framework is not actually Jesus’ universal template for ministry?
     Interestingly, my vocational crisis usually emerges before, during, or after a youth service or chapel group. When I have done my best to make the service engaging, fun, and interactive, I look out at groups of girls and boys who all speak Christianese, have bible verses memorized, and who have, at one point or another, said a prayer of salvation. They almost always show me tired eyes and blank faces. On the cusp of my vocational breakdown I ask, “Why are they so lethargic in their faith?” After many conversations and desperate prayers, a half-answer has emerged:
     Because we live in a society that is drenched in Christian language and ethics.
     Most students have heard some form of what I’m sharing with them plenty of times already. Sunday morning services, grandma’s lectures, television preachers, the Christian radio-station, Christian staff workers, Salvation tracts, billboards, the     sign-holders downtown… the list goes on. There’s no question that for many young people, the services and Bible studies that I facilitate get lumped in with all of these. I am just another voice in the mix trying to talk about a Jesus they’ve already heard so much about. Worst than that, my voice gets associated with the doomsday salvation tracts and the lady with Pink hair on     Christian television.
     This saturated environment presents unique challenges. On one hand, my work is cut out for me just trying to sift through the distorted religious ideas that kids have pulled from billboards. On the other hand, I am pouring out a glass of water on a land that is flooded. How helpful is it going to be to keep the flow of Bible information going when they are already inundated with it? Most of these kids KNOW all kinds of information and yet their lives are still in shambles due to abuse they’ve suffered or behavioral issues they feel powerless to overcome.
     Since I’ve started at Days of Hope, I’ve continued to use John 1:14 as a guide to my work, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…” This passage has served as a launching point for my understanding of the tangible way that God interacts with us. He refuses to stand at a distance and give us information (the law) but joins us in our humanity in order to transform us by loving relationship and then ascends to the Father, bringing us along with Him. Throughout the Gospels we see that Jesus is not setting up church services or Torah study    programs. He certainly preaches sermons, but much of his time is spent healing people who are diseased, speaking to his disciples in private, interacting with the people he comes across. For Jesus, it seems that announcing the Kingdom is not reduced to a practice of oratory presentation. It is embodying God’s Kingdom in the most basic interactions that he has with hurting people. So, when it was    appropriate to preach, Jesus preached. But He didn’t need a formal preaching setting in order to announce the Kingdom. In fact, his most overt and powerful act of ministry was one in which he was led like a lamb to be slaughtered, where he “opened not his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7).
     The answer to my “crisis,” seems to be that of John 1:14; Word becoming flesh. If God had to live out his law in front of us in order to draw us in, perhaps the best way to announce God’s Kingdom in a post-Christian culture that is   flooded with biblical information is to live out our new lives in Christ in relationship to those we serve. Maybe instead of giving more information, we should live as disciples who take that information seriously. The practice of our faith can be so subversive to the consumeristic systems of the world that Gospel conversations become inevitable.
     To be clear, I’m not saying that we should never do Bible studies or listen to sermons on Sunday mornings. I value both of those avenues for ministry and participate in both. But it seems obvious that they are not the universal template for carrying out the ministry of Jesus. There are times in which this formal speaker-audience framework can actually miss the point of the Gospel altogether (Word becoming flesh)!  
     My crisis is not entirely solved. I don’t have all the answers; maybe I never will.
     Maybe I’m just doing a poor job of convincing kids of the good news.
     Or maybe they are minimally interested because no matter what words they have heard from a preacher, they’ve never seen them become flesh.
     Lutheran minister, Andrew Root takes insight for youth ministry from Dietrich Bonhoeffer saying, “…a youth minister is not someone who heaves theology onto young people, getting them to know stuff, but is rather a minister of the gospel that stands near the concrete humanity of young people,   sharing in their experience, helping them wrestle with God’s action in and through their concrete lives.”