Faith Formation in a Secular Age : Volume 1 (Ministry in a Secular Age): Responding to the Church's Obsession with Youthfulness

Gorman says beautifully, “For Paul, to be in Christ is to be a living exegesis of this narrative of Christ, a new performance of the original drama of exaltation following humiliation, of humiliation as the voluntary renunciation of rights and selfish gain in order to serve and obey.”26

In many ways, the bohemianism of the Beats that inspired the counterculture was diametrically opposed to the Holiness movement. Yet they were linked right at the place of authenticity.

Faith receives the divine action that comes in the weakness of ministry. Ministry has the power to share in negation, attending as new life comes to negation, so that negation itself becomes the location of divine action. To have faith is to allow your life to be bent into the shape of Jesus’s own narrative arc of cross and resurrection.

The youth with faith are those conforming to the youth group through affiliation.

But such a statement, as Bonhoeffer would point out, sees the future of the church not in Jesus Christ but in the young themselves.

Ministry is the deepest form of relationality because in ministry your person is shared in so deeply that the story that gives coherence to your being is completely claimed by the new story of the love, compassion, and mercy of the minister who shares your place.

It is this experience of ministering to our neighbor that allows for a cruciform transcendence that answers Secular 3 with a faith manifest in love of God and neighbor. It’s not that you suck or that when God looks at you, God only sees Jesus. Rather, you are invited to recognize and admit your places of isolation, rejection, loneliness, and fear a

These churches became paradigmatic for many; even those not open to a charismatic disposition watched the patterns and methods these churches used, recognizing how an embracing of youthfulness (as a strategy) revitalized these congregations in numbers and energy.

Youthfulness is so near authenticity (being its core expression) because we have been convinced by Freud that the desires of the id are most genuine; they are our most authentic self.