Postmodern Youth Ministry?

Like I mentioned, I'm teaching a course for the next few weeks having to do with postmodernism and ministry. The textbooks are standard for the course in our Grad Min MA program, so I'm reading books chosen by someone else. One that is different from my usual fare is Postmodern Youth Ministry, by Tony Jones of emerging fame.

I've taught cohorts coming off this class and after reading Jone's first chapter, I better understand the kinds of allusive statements I've heard them make about the course. I just finished the first chapter. It is very suggestive and impressionistic to me--not inappropriate for a book about youth ministry in a postmodern world. But I can imagine that it has been a cross between confusing and irritating to many of our students.

Here are some of my thoughts. First, I think this book, as so much postmodern hype, confuses what I call "philosophical postmodernism" with what we might call "cultural postmodernism." By the way, this book was written pre-9-11 and pre-economic meltdown, so it seriously remains to be seen what youth culture will look like in the days to come. 9-11 provided a conservative backlash that at the very least affected what is emerging. And a post-economic crisis world may make the anti-materialist message of some moot.

My problem with discussions of the postmodern turn is 1) it essentializes postmodernism--it makes postmodernism into a thing when postmodernism is an anti-thing, 2) you can't live with an anti-thing. We must live as if our conceptions of reality are, on some level, fundamentally true. The end result of postmodernism is thus a humility toward knowledge and a massive sorting out of truths that work and truths that don't.

As a bit of a critique, I think it may be wrong to pin relativism on postmodernism, as so many do. Extreme postmodernism does away with all certainty, even individual certainty. Relativism at least claims certainty on the level of an individual or a group.

So Jones' first chapter gives us some impressions of changes. But I have serious questions about the claim that something completely different is "emerging," that we are at the point of a turn as big as the Reformation. There are some massive turns underway perhaps, but they are more concretely based than based on ideas.

And philosophical postmodernism's contribution to such changes are only transitional. It is an abyss it is significant to look into. But after we have taken a look and realized how little we know, then we will go back about our business of living and ministering, chastened and humbled, but still proceeding as if we know some things. Life is otherwise impossible.