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Youth Who Participate
... In "Tough Questions about Youth and Family Ministry" (Facets, Audrey Forbes, May/June 2007) ... the article asks, "How many teens participate in your worship service each week — not counting youth Sunday?"

First, at Bethany Church [where I serve] we do not have a "Youth Sunday" (or a "Women's Sunday" or a "Left-Handed Italian's Sunday") because everyone participates every Sunday. A sin of Corinth was particularity at the expense of community. Paul's response is that everyone is important; qualitative and quantitative measurements have no place in the worship ministry of God's people.

Second, a better question is not the absolute number of youth participating on a Sunday morning but the percentage of available youth participating. An even better question is "What percent of youth participate in the total ministry of the congregation?"

Treating youth participation as an absolute number can be quite misleading. You must first determine how many youth are available (at least in theory). "Availability" includes both active and inactive youth, including those who choose to work on Sunday morning. Youth who are out of town (college, military service, etc.) would be "not available."

Work is one of the major issues of youth. Today's institutions / corporations no longer respect the need for Sabbath rest or allow for Sunday services. (Interestingly enough, our local Wal-Mart has been most cooperative in scheduling our members around liturgical and educational duties.)

Thus, many youth are at jobs on Sunday morning when they should be in church. This may also be a parent issue, allowing children to seek employment which will, up front, inherently conflict with the duty to "Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy."

A more significant figure for the spiritual life of a congregation and its youth is the ratio of youth actively involved in ministry to those who are "on the books." Twenty active youth out of two hundred represents a different level of spiritual health than twenty out of thirty. When youth have been properly discipled, they will be present, sometimes in spite of their parents.

The liturgical ministry, while public, is neither the only ministry for youth nor the most significant. When we posit liturgical ministry as the ministry par excellence, we deny the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the breadth of the means of grace (for instance, the Smalkald Articles [III, IV] affirms that "the mutual conversation and consolation of the faithful" is a means of grace, i.e., youth talking to youth, peer ministry, etc.) and, again, commit the sin of Corinth. Youth get excited about what they do, period! A ministry on the congregation council (with full voice, vote, and respect) gives particular insights into how people think and interact at leadership levels. Ministry on various congregation committees provides opportunities to explore and develop specific principles and actions in the life of a congregation and its members. Specific individual ministries (visitation, etc.) enhance personal skills and interests.

Third, the ultimate question for recruitment and retention of youth in a congregation is the depth, rather than the breadth, of youth involvement / commitment / faith. The primary underlying/base question is "What is the involvement of the youth's parents in the life of the congregation?" When parents are faithfully involved, youth tend to be faith-full and involved. When parents are not involved (not faith-full), the odds are youth will not be faith-full and involved.

Of course, there are exceptions. We all know faith-full parents whose children are idle or absent because of demonic intervention. By the same token, in each of my congregations in over 35 years of ministry, there have been youth who have been faithfully and deeply involved in the life of the congregation in spite of parental inaction and even downright opposition. The Holy Spirit does work.

Pogo and Ministry
The recent article in Partners on [Word and Service] ministries troubles me (Comment, "Ministries of Word and Service," May/June 2007). When I was in seminary 30 years ago, my systematics teacher and I liked the comic strip, Pogo. One such unit was entitled, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Pupdog was drowning and the key figures of the Okefenokee Swamp convened a meeting to discuss how to save Pupdog. All sorts of suggestions came to the table.

Meanwhile Pogo proceeded to get an old inner tube and a piece of rope and rescued Pupdog. The committee was elated that Pupdog was rescued, but got angry at Pogo for circumventing the process and rescuing him. Then they congratulated themselves on a committee meeting well done.

I left the ELCA 12 years ago (as an ordained pastor). Before I left, the diaconal ministry was in danger of being discontinued for lack of new deaconesses. Back then, I had friends in other ... lay professional ministries. They complained among themselves and to pastors — who were compassionate to their plight — that they were second-class citizens to ordained ministers. [In the Comment, the author spoke about] presentations by three people in seminaries around the country — each one not directly involved in lay ministry, but ivory-tower theologians. [The presenters] fulfilled part of their contract and reported back to their seminaries that they did these intellectual reports. [The] presentations were an intellectual construct.

[But] diakonia is not a concept — it is a relationship, a series of important relationships that fly under the radar because they are not as important as ordained ministers. There was a time of considering giving associates in ministry an equal voice instead of electing one spokesperson with voting status at convention.

The one [pull quote] box in your article — "How can public ministries of word and service help the ELCA sustain faithful mission in the coming decades?" — shows once again how marginalized these ministries have been. Paul Tillich once said that treating people like objects and objects like people was sin. I wonder what he would say about treating people and their ministries like concepts would be?

...[I]n the early church, Deacons were two major groups: local pastors who served congregations and social ministers who like Stephen dealt with food pantries. Later the church undertook the Roman model of government and bishops became upper-level managers, local pastors became priests, and social ministries were often under the auspices of convents and abbeys.

More important is the Pauline image of the body of Christ and the purpose so articulately stated in Ephesians 4:11-13.The ministries of these lay professionals still come across as second class in the ministries of the church and they are still being sinned against, denigrating their erstwhile work to concepts and ideas.

In the meantime, you can congratulate yourself on a rousing ministry committee, but Pupdog is still being rescued and the ministries are going on. The best thing that you can do is get your butt off of Higgins Road and really get out this next year and experience the ministry that is happening, the ones that have been all along when they were the hidden ministries of the predecessor bodies.

Then we get to finances, who will provide for these professionals a decent living wage to minister in the vineyards?

Clumping these ministries into one group is for the bureaucracy and not for those doing ministry.

George Wirsing
Manassas, Virginia

Why Contingency?
Do you suppose that George Murphy is willing to say that the theory of evolution is contingent (Handiwork, "When Assured Results Aren't So Sure," p. 26)? Being aware that the string theory remains untested for the last 25 years, he ought to realize that evolution has not been subjected to observational tests for much longer than that and surely that theory is contingent.

I'm glad that he had the daring to say, "The assured results of New Testament scholarship sometimes aren't so assured." Why dwell upon contingency, when we have the revelation that God has clearly revealed to us in his Word. I wonder what George will come up with next? A vivid imagination may be popular in our day but one best knows the difference between that and God's revelation of the here and now.

Lester F. Polenz
Mansfield, Ohio