Does Youth Ministry Have a Future?: Hope for Teens Beyond the Mental Health Crisis

Youth ministers were once missionaries, meeting teenagers where they gathered in schools, malls, and parking lots. But over the past decade, something changed. Youth workers have struggled to connect with anxious kids glued to their phones and have found themselves filling the role of therapist for adolescents coming of age on the internet.

We need a new approach. A veteran in youth ministry, Andrew Root explains how the church got here--and why soothing teenagers hasn't alleviated their mental health crisis. It is not their inner lives but their relationships that need mending, Root argues. Youth workers can guide young people toward true connection and healing through art rather than through therapy and medication.

Providing both robust theology and practical solutions, Does Youth Ministry Have a Future? is indispensable for pastors, youth workers, and campus ministers serving the anxious generation.

Table of Contents:
1. Bad, Bad Metaphors: When Youth Ministry Loses the Therapeutic
2. A Huge Mistake: Youth Ministry in the Digital Space of the World
3. Youth Ministry and Mental Health: Welcome to the Medicine War
4. The Rise (and Hopefully Fall) of the Therapeutic: The Three Cultures, Flat Inner-Space, and Youth Ministry
5. Peel into the Deep Layers of Language: Youth Ministry and Healing the Inter-Space by Address
5-1/2. An Interlude of Divine Action in the Poetic: Psalms and Inter-Space
6. Gazing Pictures and Youth Ministry Responsible Portraits
6-1/2. Revealing the ConclusionRead less