Rethinking Youth Ministry around Tribalism
It was nearly 1:00 am and I was sitting in an empty restaurant just off the hotel lobby across from a broken and hurting seventeen-year-old girl.
I was at a youth conference in Florida, and members of my youth group were in their hotel rooms for the night. We had just had a powerful evening of prayer, Eucharistic Adoration, and empowerment, and the teens in my group were buzzing. We had had our standard small group discussions after the experience and I said, “If anyone still has something that God did in their heart tonight—something that they need to talk about—I’ll sit down here in the hotel lobby for a while and we can talk it out.” Sure enough, I had several teens take me up on the offer. Around 1:00 am, I thought I was done talking and could finally go to bed, when Julia came around the corner and approached me.
“I need to talk,” said Julia. I could tell it was important.
“Ok. Let’s grab a seat in this empty restaurant,” I responded.
As soon as we sat down, Julia blurted out, “I can’t stop drinking.”
I knew a little bit about Julia’s background before I took her to the youth conference. Julia was a senior in high school and she had a reputation. She got drunk at parties nearly every weekend, had experimented with drugs and had a reputation for being promiscuous. I believe she even showed up for the youth conference hung-over.
On the other hand, Julia was a sweet girl, very beautiful, artistic, and full of good intentions. She had been coming to the youth group for a few months and I had convinced her to go to the conference. It didn’t take long in our conversation for me to realize that she had encountered Jesus in a powerful way that evening and that she was wrestling with her own sin and brokenness. However, the conversation went in a direction that I wasn’t expecting.
I said to her,
“There are a lot of people who have wrestled with addiction. The first step is to admit the problem and to come closer to Jesus.”
She interrupted me,
“I’m not an addict. I would have no problem giving up drinking. I know that is what Jesus wants me to do and I’m ready to do it. I don’t even like getting drunk. The problem is, I can’t leave my friends.
That caught me off guard. As we talked, I got more of Julia’s background story. Her parents were divorced: her father was absent but knew about her partying and promiscuity and didn’t care and her mother wasn’t present emotionally. Her brother was in rehab. She said, “The only people in my life who love me are my friends and they all party. If I stop, I’ll lose them.”
This was not the conversation I was expecting.
Excerpt from The Art of Forming Young Disciples: Why Youth Ministries Aren’t Working and What to do about it.
The need to belong
The human need to belong is powerful. It is so powerful that some people will abandon virtue in order to find belonging. Julia’s situation was far from unique. She made it clear that if I could guarantee that her need to belong and to be loved would be met by the Church she would turn away from sin and believe in the Gospel.
When it comes to formation in the Catholic Church, I have long said that our focus on instruction is ineffective. That’s not to say that catechesis is a bad thing. Rather, the way that we do catechesis is obsolete. Memorization, classroom instruction, text books, curriculums, and programs are frequently mis-attuned to the actual ministry needs of the people that they seek to serve. Christianity, first and foremost, is about a relationship with a person, and removing community from formation is a sure-fire way to ensure that the Gospel message becomes uninspiring.
Tribalism
I find it fascinating how human beings develop identity through belonging. When the Eagles won the Super Bowl, their fans can be seen yelling, “we won!” The fans had nothing to do with their victory or the team’s excellence. But people all over the world develop lifelong allegiances to their favorite sports teams - purchasing merchandise, scheduling their lives around viewership of their games, and developing friendships with people who share the same interest. This phenomenon isn’t unique to sports. You can find the same kind of allegiance in political parties, university fraternities, fans of musicians (like the Swifties), etc.
Tribes have been around forever. Judaism was broken into twelve tribes of Israel - descendants of the twelve sons of Jacob from the book of Genesis. Even in the time of Jesus, disciples associated themselves with as followers of different rabbis or prophets. Andrew and John were disciples of John the Baptist before becoming members of the twelve apostles ofJesus Christ. When people join a tribe, they typically will identify with the beliefs and practices of that tribe for the rest of their lives. Try converting a Chicago Bears fan into a Green Bay Packers fan. It is nearly impossible to accomplish such a feat because the loyalty that the fanbases have toward their teams runs very deep.
I want to see the Church develop the same kind of allegiance among its members. Formation of young people should be less about instruction in the catechism and more about developing identity within a tribe devoted to the teachings of Christ. Encountering a community of love is essential in order to understand Christianity and becoming part of this community speaks to the innate human need to belong. But the community goes a step further when it begins to develop a kind of tribal identity. When people feel like they belong to a tribe, they assimilate the beliefs and identity of the tribe into every aspect of their lives. In this way, the tribe becomes formative and the formation becomes transformative.
Andrew Ministries has a plan to rethink youth ministry around tribal formation. Our plan is to have this ministry approach in over 1,000 parishes around the world by 2030. Stay up to date on our plans and announcements by joining our newsletter list.
