JH Summit 2005

April 4-6, 2005

Bay Club Hotel, San Diego, CA
Tuesday
Chap Clark

Issues to discuss:
- Preventive ministry
- 9th graders
- Involving HS as leaders
- Communal Assimilation model
- Reflections on spirituality of early adolescents in light of research
- What are we doing in our ministries to contribute to abandonment?
- Blank-slate youth ministry
- Helping Parents
- Clusters on a MS level
- 5 strategies
- Layering/hypocritical?
- Inevitability?/continuum
- Help w/ HS Pastor

Found no dissent in the conclusions, and they weren’t a priori conclusions

- in all 20 focus groups (12 reported officially)
- out of 300 interviews, only 2 disagreed

Adolescence
- Invention of society
- Latin word (biological/evolutional word) – morphing from one thing into
another
- George Stanley Hall – from beginning said 12-early 20’s
- Puberty begins in community – female beginning (physiological combined
with psychosocial – not just body and mind, but how other people see and
treat them)
- Childhood – dependent on parents
- Adulthood – interdependent on community
- Adolescence ends when culture/society say you can join – society
abdicated their responsibility to work through that process through rites of
passage.
- Cultures used to look at children as most important asset, especially to
pass on communal meta-narrative. People began to shift to focusing on
personal legacy.
- Marko: used to think early adolescence was it’s own marked transition, but
now it seems that it’s an overlapping transition. True?
o Autonomy, identity, and belonging – mid-adolescence is when they
start to become more cognitive of those questions.
o Adolescence and Early Adulthood, Jeffrey J. Arnett
o Early adolescence – concrete thinking still holds true
  Ability to conceptualize relatively complex ideas
 Sometimes get complexity because they’re not encumbered by
social constraints
 More about social and psychosocial cause and effect – don’t
have the ability to figure out “if I believe this, how does it affect
my world.”
 Social capital – how it affects students and how they spend
their social dollars
 Early adolescents are far more trusting than mid-adolescents –
shift happens about 9th grade
• Think it’s more developmental than structural – things
are not different in MS and HS
• Need one teacher at least through 7th grade
 I to I/thou – ego centrism of early adolescence – don’t
consciously make a decision to be selfish – they don’t know
they are there.
• 4th grader more aware of how they interact with others
than 7th grader
• lengthening of adolescence contributes to the inability of
students to think outside themselves
• by late adolescence (start 19-21) ready to move into
interdependence – there are thou’s out there and I’m
more aware of how they view me and interact with them,
but still great emphasis on how “I” relate to thou as long
as I don’t lose my identity – assert myself, but recognize
consequences of going too far with that.
• Middle of that process is egocentric abstraction – don’t
really care what the “thou” thinks; just concerned with
surviving.
 early adolescence has remained relatively stable but going
early – CDC committed to 12.2, more realistically 11.5 –
African-Americans and urban latinos are 6-9 months earlier
 It is not a physiological process – it’s psychosocial – female
mensus is a socially affected process
o Cristin: adolescence has gone from 10 to 15 years. Where is that
going in the future?
 Developmentally, don’t see that it can get much younger than
9-10 years old.
 This process is at least a year younger in South America – has
to do with sexual activity in their culture.
 The body is not able to deal with it much younger.
 Wouldn’t have occurred to people 20 years ago that menarche
would have started this young.
 Some people get off tightrope, others stay on it as long as they
can.
  Proliferation of counseling is because abandonment has been
going on for 20-30 years, so they go into counseling to unpack
that.
 Culturally there are no concerns for protecting children
 April: how much of this is because of absence of rites of
passage?
• Been gone in NA for a couple hundred years
• Industrial revolution was a bi-product of social change
o Mid-adolescence – 14-19/20
- What are markers of early adolescence so we’re aware of those in picking
staff?
o Wounded but unaware
o Anything goes (as long as my community says so)
 Don’t think that clustering happens in early adolescence
• Choose friends according to “self-concept”
• 80’s – don’t increase self-esteem – were found to be
some of the most violent people – “I” concept
• How I see myself, how you see me, and how I deal with
how that package
• EA don’t have the ability for that
• When they go underneath, they will look for people like
them – cluster relationships are not true friendships
because they are friendships of convenience and
protection
• EA – parents can have a huge influence on who their
friends are
• Queen Bees/Wannabes – just a glance
• Clusters are chosen, but they choose roles – power is
given by the cluster itself
• EA – friendships are pre-clusters based on affinity while
they figure out self-concept (Marko)
• Assimilation Contrast Effect
o Anytime you have an opinion of something at a 3,
and someone tries to convince you of a 2 or 4, 80%
of time, you will go.
o If they try to convince you to go a larger jump
ahead, it will take you further backward.
o You can have friends in clusters one step away (2
or 4); 1’s intimidate, 5’s aren’t liked
o Columbine was 7’s and 3’s at war with each other
for 2 years – schools told 3’s to put 7’s in line.
o Cousin clusters – 3’s will have relationships with
other 3’s
• Doesn’t happen in MS, but they’re preparing for it
because they see it in HS and on TV.
 • If you have a student at a 2/3, disciple them to be friends
with 4-6. Have adults who can help them be together.
o Break roots before they get solidified.
o Create a cluster-like environment that breaks some
of the boundaries.
o Self-concept is developed in EA but rooted in
childhood (students 4-6 probably because parents
told them they were idiots)
 8-yr study on people who took abstinence pledges – lower than
average on vaginal sex, but higher than others on oral and
anal sex
o Vulnerable (because of I vs I/Thou)
 easily manipulated
 Best people need to be in MS
• We have to be willing to flex – still concerned with “I” so
they’re not aware of what you’re allowing who to do
• Can use 19/20 as leaders, just need to be trained
o Tender
 Sometimes with pain go back to something from childhood that
is safe and unstructured
 David Elkind’s books
 Have to be so aware, especially with discipline, of each
individual kid
 Can’t single them out
 Shell is very thin
o The issue is really the issue behind the issue (Nate S.)
 Want to go, but wanting someone to notice
 Maybe not even aware of it
 Don’t connect the dots yet because they can’t – deal with the
dots
o Discovery – Information Overload (Marko)
 Discovering everything about the world – no filters
 Not self-aware
 Can draw a map of discovery or process it
 No resources to deal with it
 They need to experience faith, have adults help boundary the
experience, then handed off to adult community.
• Sex isn’t about sex, especially for MS.
• It’s about loneliness
• Direct correlation between relationship with their dad and
willingness to engage in sexual intimacy with people they
don’t know well – both guys and girls
- What do we do:
o Silo view of ministry is killing us
  Somehow the church has to have a commitment to holistic
ministry
 We can’t fix parents
o 5:1 – 5 adults to 1 student
 rethink what a leader is
 Tell every person that leadership is caring about a kid and
getting everyone to care
 Not programmatic or mentor relationships
 We kill it when we programatize it
o Shift the goal of YM to:
 By the time a kid is done with HS, they sense the church is
their home and family
 MS – be a part of this process
 Allow the silos to exist at some level, but lower the walls
 Adults must be constantly barraged with reminders that their
job is to assimilate kids and bring them into the body of Christ.
Adults’ job is to train students to be a peer with them in the
body of Christ.
 Ceremony up front with every kid’s name and part of their
story is put in front of the congregation.
 With a rite of passage, there has to be a change of status.
- HS students as leaders in MS
o Students need to have ownership
o Abandonment in the church is when we tell students that we can’t
reach their friends so they need to…
o Never give a kid an opportunity to do life-on-life ministry without an
adult there to help them when they blow it.
- What are we currently doing to contribute to abandonment?
o Programs can run right over kids
o Numbers are down and we ask, “Where is everybody?”
o We see them as valuable when they show up
o We devalue pressures they’re getting from other areas
 Church is the most important thing…
- Need to have more compassion on how hard it is to be a parent
o Don’t lead parent seminars if you’re under 35
o They need to be at least peers or a little older
o Parent seminars
 Get a group of people committed to it
 Let them pray for and go after the parents who really need ot
be there
o Create a council/body (Vision and Support Team)
 Some parents
 Former youth workers
 Empty-nesters
  Permission to partner with highest level of YM and support the
ministry
 They can offer parent support stuff…
 Find easiest way to make that happen
 Find a chair of that council, partner with them, and let them sell
it
- If you could recreate…
o We need community
o So much theology in our culture
o Commit to small, intimate, community groups that are permeable
o 5, 12, 17, 35, 60 year olds to be in fellowship in intimate relationship
o Church is the network of these smaller communities
- Need to be in the back pocket of Children’s Ministry
- Spirituality of EA
o Developmentally (“I” situation), Jesus can be real to them
o Discovering who they are and owning their own faith which can’t
happen developmentally until late adolescence
o Growing out of faith coming through family structure
o Experience life through feel and ethos of community – enhance the
scaffolding of what it feels like to be in the body of Christ.
o The feel of MS ministry is far more important than content.
- Books:
o Bonhoeffer – Life Together
o A Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren
o Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard
o Church Next, Eddie Gibbs
o David Elkind, Hurried Child