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YouthFront July 30, 2008

Posted by Zack in : Uncategorized , comments closed

At that meeting over the weekend I met an amazing guy named Mike King. He hosted us at the campus of YouthFront, an organization he’s worked for and led for 33 years. I got some of Mike’s story in the car on the way and filled in some details reading his book later, Presence-centered Youth Ministry.

After driving through Missouri and Kansas fields and forest, when we finally arrived at YouthFront I immediately thought of that scene in the Matrix when Neo walks into the Oracle’s apartment for the first time. Remember the scene?: those kids, rebels in training, are sitting around silently meditating, levitating, bending spoons with their minds—sharpening their resistance to the Matrix. In her living room that Oracle character was building a revolutionary counter culture right in the belly of the beast.

So when we pulled up into the YouthFront compound, a couple hundred teenagers were scattered individually in silence around the grounds: they were sitting alone under trees and in doorways, in quiet meditation, writing in journals or studying the Bible. There was a magic energy. Like…you could just feel how much these kids were into what they were doing.

Earlier, the kids had been in a session with a “story teller” who (and I’m sorry if I’m getting it a little wrong here) tried to help them see the Bible as a story, and help them to see their own lives as stories inside of God’s story. I think an insufficient but helpful secular translation might be: they were finding significance for their own lives in the grand unfolding of history.

After the first part of our meeting, we joined the kids in the sanctuary where they were meditating, praying silently and out loud, reciting scripture and participating in liturgy. They were together accessing ancient Christian traditions of worship and prayer. (Again, my description will seem off to Christians because I still don’t understand the nuances of all these words.)

Mike King has been with YouthFront for 33 years. I think he started right out of high school. For most of that time he has been the leader of the organization. I also met the camp manger who has been there for more than 20 years, and he didn’t look more than 40. In other words, this place is being built by people who have dedicated their entire lives to it. That kind of dedication to and continuity in institutions is almost unheard of in the world I come from. Maybe it’s more common among Christians because the central model of leadership is of pastors and volunteers who often live out their adult lives—or their whole lives—serving in a single church.

And after all this time, YouthFront seems to be only just getting started. The same revolution/movement of the spirit that’s sweeping the church everywhere is at work out here in these Kansas woods, in this one-time outpost of extreme Fundamentalism. There is a feeling there of a whole new project, a whole new world unfolding. It made me think of the Highlander Folk School. Highlander had already been around for 25 years by the time it emerged as one of the incubating institutions of the Civil Rights Movement in the 50’s and 60’s. It was a place where young leaders of groups like the SCLC and their mentors gathered for practical training, study and spiritual retreat. I thought of the importance of the unconscious traditions that are embodied in these “long haul” leaders like Mike King: all of the knowledge and habits, all the little things, as well as the big ideas and inspiring words, that make a place work smoothly and make it a place where people can unfold and find themselves and others and, in this case, God.

A little more about Mike’s story: he grew up in a mainline church, was a bit of an “experimenter” in high school in the early 70’s, and then got sucked up into Christian fundamentalism through his participation in Youth for Christ (later renamed YouthFront). Youth for Christ started out in the 40’s as a relatively progressive (for it’s time anyways) church organization to serve the masses of adolescents left behind by World War II (by their fathers who were fighting and their mothers who were in the factories working overtime). Then in the 60’s and 70’s, the movement become consumed by the expansion of Fundamentalism (no rock and roll, no dancing, “literal” interpretation of the Bible, exclusive focus on salvation as getting to heaven when you die, etc…).

I’ve read that when the Christian Rock scene rose up, there were a whole lot of Christian fundamentalists taking issue with it. To a certain subculture, Rock was still the devil’s music. That’s still out there actually. I heard an anti-Rock tirade just last year on a rural Christian radio station. The speaker described a scientific study that played Rock music and Gospel music to plants. Yes, Rock music killed the plants! They thrived when exposed to Gospel music. Except… (yes, really) the Marijuana plant! It thrived with Rock and shriveled with Gospel.

Mike was one of those guys. But eventually one day (or one year) he woke up and said, “I’m a Pharisee.” The Pharisees were the religious sticklers in ancient Israel who Jesus was always challenging. They were concerned with following the rules of scripture to a T, but had lost sight of their overall message. Jesus’ engagement with the Pharisees is one of the key defining stories of this rising movement in the church.

So Mike was born again, again. Just as the whole church is being born again, again right now. You step anywhere near YouthFront’s beautiful 600 acres of sacred space and you can feel it happening right under your feet.

It sounds like YouthFront has suffered a little bit of blowback for these changes. Some fundamentalist and conservative evangelical churches have stopped sending their kids. But “postliberal” and other evangelicals have taken their place. It sounds like a lot of mainline churches that had kind of lost their steam are getting it back partly with the help of evangelical and fundamentalist refugees. I have seen some examples of this, but for some reason I didn’t sense that it was a movement with any momentum. Now I have a word for it (”postliberal”) and I’ll look for more examples of evangelical workers injecting a little extra passion into mainline churches that might have gotten a little too low key for their own good.

Before we left YouthFront in the evening, the teenagers were finally acting like normal kids (what a relief!), chasing each other around, playing games, being incredibly excited about everything (remember that?). Thank you to Mike for hosting us and taking the time to talk to me about YouthFront when he had so many other things that day to do!