Post-Colonial Youth Ministry

April 12th, 2007

I’ve been listening to some lectures by Brian MClaren in Ireland…

In one of the sessions Brian refers to a recent visit to Africa where he was invited by a man (Claude) from Burundi to speak to a number of leaders from all over the place, Claude said that the younger generations of African leaders seem to share similar frustrations that he was writing about.

Brian tells the story of Claude who, while standing amongst the leaders says something like “you all know that I’m the son of a preacher, I went to church 5 or 7 times a week when I was a boy, but what you might be surprised about is that all in that time I only ever heard one sermon and that was “Jesus might come back today and if you’re not ready you’ll go to hell and be left behind you better repent and accept Jesus”, and that was the only sermon that I’ve ever heard.” Brian shared that the people started to laugh at this point as they realised that this was the only sermon that they ever heard as well.

Claude continued to share his feelings of disillusionment that in his lifetime millions of people were being killed in genocides, but never had he heard that Tutsis should love Hutus, that Hutus should love Tutsis, he had heard “you better repent or go to hell” but never did he hear that they should reconcile with each other and try to forgive each other over our past failures.

Brian tells that the young leaders there had realised that there was something wrong with the approach to Christian faith that they were given. Over the next two days Brian says he and Claude lead a discussion, firstly they created a matrix, first of all by looking at the “colonizers” and the “colonized.”

Brian quoted Jomo Kenyatta “When the Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the Land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible”.

The Matrix:

Words: The gospel that was told to the colonized: “you are sinners, you are going to hell, you need to be saved and forgiven for your sins and we will show you how”

Deeds: And this is what came out in deeds was “we will take your land, profit from your resources, run your lives, make you slaves, replace your inferior culture with a superior one”

How did this make the Colonizers feel?: Superior, wise, powerful, with God and confident

How did it make the Colonized feel?: Dirty, ashamed, in danger, afraid, incapable, dependant, grateful and incompetent.

Brian asked the question: What if there was a problem with this message and that this problem made it possible for the colonizers to commit atrocities and in some ways it made the colonized willing to submit to them in some way? What if as we move from the colonial period to the post colonial period we have to go back and rethink what the message is…

What if the Gospel of the Kingdom is: “We’re all sinners but the kingdom of god is available to all through Christ all are called to reconcile with god and with one another and to seek god’s justice for all people”

Desmond Tutu once called the colonizers to give back the land, to humble themselves, to seek first God’s kingdom. In this way the colonizers have to seek the kingdom as well as the colonized, in a way the colonized saw in the cross of Jesus the call against revenge.

How would the Gospel of the Kingdom make the colonizers feel?: Repentant, ashamed, humble, conciliatory, sorry…

How would the Gospel of the Kingdom make the colonized feel?: Competent, hopeful, capable, responsible, and empowered. If the gospel of the kingdom is true then we feel empowered to move forward… everything must change.

What does this have to do re Youth Ministry?
I wonder what it has to say to us as people in ministry with young people.

I think that this might have a lot more to do with our ministry with young people than we’d like to admit, that our youth ministries have been based in a colonial world more than a post-colonial reality and that, by far has had a lot to do with our successes and failures in our youth ministries.

The story of the colonizers and colonized is, for the most part a story about us verses them, us being the civilized, or the ones with faith and them being the uncivilized and without faith. Its a story about us selling a message that has not changed that much in thousands of years, that of “you are sinners, you are going to hell, you need to be saved and forgiven for your sins and we will show you how.” We have perpetuated a colonial model of Christianity in our models of ministry with young people where young people are those who need to be colonized.

How many of our high school ministries are about conquer and commanding, about colonizing and being colonized?

If we were to create a similar matrix to that of the one that Brian and the community created in Africa for that of our youth ministry in schools would it look something like this?

In words: The gospel preached to the school students “you are sinners, you are going to hell, you need to be saved and forgiven for your sins, and we will show you how”

In deeds: “We will remove you from your culture, take up the rest of your free time, introduce you to new friends because your old ones aren’t good enough and spend the next few years indoctrinating you.”

This form of ministry seems to suggest that we’re coming from a position of power, much like the colonizers…

I wonder if what we’re seeing in young people’s spirituality, cynicism of the church as an institution and lack of interest in the church and its structure is in a way the young people of today holding the Gospel of the Kingdom up to us in order to tell us that we’ve got it wrong, in much the same way that Desmond Tutu once attempted to force the colonizers to confess and repent their wrongdoings.

So, what would a post-colonial youth ministry look like? What would mission with young people look like if we fess up to being like the colonizers, fess up to our need for repentance, fess up to needing the Gospel of the Kingdom just as much as the young people that we are in ministry with do.

In the words of one of the women that Brian shares about: “everything must change”