Awakening Youth Discipleship

Book

Brian J. Mahan, Michael Warren, and David F. White. Awakening Youth Discipleship: Christian Resistance in a Consumer Culture. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008.

Reviewer

Andy Brubacher Kaethler, Instructor in Christian Formation and Culture, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, IN

“How should the Church engage young people in vital partnership with Christ, as Christ’s disciples in the contemporary world?” Mahan, Warren, and White contend this question needs to be asked anew with the “scandalous beauty and sublimity of the gospel, as well as its power to challenge business as usual” in mind (xi).

According to these authors, the single greatest identifier of our culture is consumerism, with concomitant identifiers such as militarism and moralism. If the church is going to form young people to into “the way of Jesus and the social practices intrinsic to Christian discipleship” it needs to repent from both the domestication of Jesus and the domestication of adolescence (19).

“Communitarian-narrativists” such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and John Westerhoff have brought to the fore the need for Sabbath-keeping, hospitality, forgiveness, and testimony. However, to these practices of anamnesis (right remembering) something crucial needs to be added: practices of ascesis (right resistance or right-restraint) (xii).

A highlight of the book is the first essay in Part I, where White provides a trenchant, Foucault-like account of the “abstraction” of youth since the onset of the industrial era. Broadly characterized by fragmentation and alienation, negative effects include fragmentation of families, erosion of traditional formation such as apprenticeships, displacement of religious moral formation by the media, and reduction and objectification of adolescence to sexual and physical energy.

In our present “postmodern consumer culture,” White sees the failures of consumer capitalism as extended adolescence, evaporation of the middle class, loss of meaningful employment, criminalization of youth, declining ability for creative and critical thinking, exploitation of youth by the entertainment industry, and ultimately, inhibition of human flourishing and flourishing of the Kingdom of God (3-19).

In the second essay, White introduces “practices of resistance” that enable youth to do the kind of social, cultural, and economic analysis necessary for responding fully to God’s call upon their lives. These practices include critical questioning, engaging in theater and games, and the dialectical practice of “coding and decoding,” based on the work of Paulo Freire (21-37).
In Part II, Warren imagines what an “inconvenient church” might look like if we sought fidelity to the Good News and to Jesus, if the Eucharist became a prototype of Christian assembly, and if all advocated for human dignity as Jesus did. These three convictions would uncloak the individualistic and mechanistic portrayal of adolescence that has become necessary for the “production of desire” in a consumer culture (41-73).

Mahan’s essays in Part III offer practical suggestions for exposing cultural scripts which define “success” in consumerist terms and surreptitiously plant seeds of suspicion and resentment regarding counter-cultural interpretations of Scripture. Mahan proposes “sacred commiseration” as a practice of “ongoing examination of conscience … to uncover and study in detail the personal and collective constraints” of living out Gospel ministry, drawing on wisdom from the Psalms, the Desert Fathers, and, more recently, Thomas Merton (77-106).

In a sea of popularly written books repackaging strategies for reaching middle-class youth and perpetuating the cultural status quo, one strength of this volume is that it radically challenges models of youth ministry geared around entertainment and social events.

Another strength is that the authors engage a wide array of academic resources, including the philosophy of Charles Taylor, the psychology of Erik Erikson, the theology of Martin Buber, the hermeneutics of Walter Brueggeman, and Scripture itself. Third, it is consistent with a theology of the church which is Christocentric and ecclesiocentric rather than personality-driven or issue-driven. 

Three weaknesses of the book are perhaps endemic to the task of lifting up ascesis. First, a more robust account of the relationship between ascesis and anamnesis is called for. Resistance and narrative are best understood as cyclical, continually informing each other, especially since it is “right remembering” that provides the Christian with clues about what to resist.

Second, a danger emerges in which resistance becomes simply being “anti” something and thereby still negatively bound to the old center. Themes such as love of God and neighbor, or long-term discipleship, are offered as the new center, but the authors do not sufficiently spell out what these look like in contemporary culture. A third weakness follows, namely that the concepts of church and culture need to be more fully developed and the relationship between the two clarified.

While the authors’ intended audience are people who engage in Christian formation with youth (pastors, parents, sponsors, and educators), this book will be appreciated by all who share the authors’ conviction that something drastically problematic in our culture is inhibiting the Christian’s ability to love God and neighbor.