A Theology Of Youth -- By: Paul G. Kelly

Journal: Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry
Volume: JBTM 13:1 (Spring 2016)
Article: A Theology Of Youth
Author: Paul G. Kelly


A Theology Of Youth

Paul G. Kelly

Paul G. Kelly is Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley, California.

Editorial Note: The following article was delivered as a convocation address at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley, California, on September 10, 2015.

In 1904, G. Stanley Hall, an American educational psychologist and the founder of the American Psychological Association, published the seminal work in the field of adolescence, a two-volume set entitled Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education. Hall presented adolescence as a specific phase of life—neither childhood nor adulthood—characterized by “storm and stress.”1 While a number of factors contributed to the rise of adolescence as a unique field of study during the twentieth century, Hall set the stage for a new way to view young people between the time of puberty and the attainment of full adult responsibility.2 Mark Senter described the progression of thought related to adolescence: “As far as young people were concerned, the twentieth century started with a formal statement of the nature of adolescence with the publication of G. Stanley Hall’s Adolescence in 1904; morphed into the age of the ‘teenager’ following World War II; and was proclaimed a ‘youth culture’ as the century came to an end.”3

The American church has developed strategies to address the spiritual needs of youth at least since the colonial period of the 1600s.4 Even so, the shifts in culture and the new understanding of adolescence of the twentieth century led to the church formulating new responses to the spiritual needs of young people—modern youth ministry.5 Youth ministry has grown into a multi-million dollar industry. A wide variety of publishers and non-

profit companies provide expensive and creative youth camps, Bible study and discipleship curriculum designed to meet the cognitive needs of adolescents, books for church leaders and parents on the complexities of adolescence, and college and seminary degrees designed to train men and women for the role of ministering to adolescents.6

Adolescence is not merely an American phenomenon, and the experience of a...

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