Practicing Discernment With Youth

Throughout history youth have been at the center of their communities’ energy and creativity, including their efforts to seek faith and justice. However, today’s adolescents have been relegated as passive learners and consumers, lacking full adult power for longer than any age cohort in history. This book traces the modern domestication of adolescence from its ancient roots through several key moments of its descent into passivity. Empowering youth as agents of Christian faith in the world is not only a social need, but is theologically warranted. The church and the broken world need the gifts of youth. This book elaborates four pedagogical movements—listening, understanding, remembering/dreaming, and acting—as key for noticing and nurturing the faith commitments of youth. Too much of contemporary youth ministry represents an attempt to pump energy into our youth—to get them excited about what we have to offer. This approach attends to energies already present in the lived experiences and hidden commitments of youth and connects them to God’s mission in the world.