Presence-Centered Youth Ministry: Guiding Students into Spiritual Formation by Mike King. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006, 192pp., $15.00, paper.

My Thoughts in a Nutshell: First, this is a great book, but King stumbles into giving us a new aesthetic for youth ministry (candles for couches) in places that he thinks he’s instilling a new theological outlook. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some serious rethinking of youth ministry going on here — it’s a book that should be read — but it leaves some serious theological work to be done lest we find that practices are just the latest and greatest way to attract teens. If the primary rationale for incorporating practices into youth ministry is that they work with this generation (an instrumental argument), then these “heirlooms of the faith” will be quickly discarded when they no longer seem to hold the allure of fresh and new. King shows us what the latest youth ministry fad is — presence-seeking practices — but he doesn’t make a strong argument for why this must not be a fad and why we cannot afford to let the incorporation of practices into youth ministry rest merely on instrumental grounds. That work is yet to be done, but if it doesn’t happen quick, the whole practices movement is going to be discarded like last month’s Group magazine.

Review

The sweeping shift in youth ministry from programs to practices is brought to an evangelical audience in Presence-Centered Youth Ministry as Mike King delves into a re-visioning of evangelical thought on the subject. The book begins with an autobiographical glimpse of King’s adolescent experiences in a mainline church and follows him through his “conversion” to Christian fundamentalism and ultimately a tempered evangelicalism. Along the way we get a glimpse of King twenty and thirty years ago as a fundamentalist youth minister trained to draw teenagers to the altar with “psychological methodology” in order to reduce “sales resistance for the Holy Spirit” (19). In a confessional tone King admits that many of his “efforts were actually detrimental to the Christian formation of adolescents” and he sets out on a new “journey to pursue God” in a refreshed evangelicalism (21). (more…)