The Hein Fry lectures from 2001.

Last year Roland Martinson of Luther Seminary and Tom Beaudoin of Boston College served as the Hein Fry lecturers on ELCA seminary campuses. In these lively interchanges they addressed the challenges facing the church in its ministry to young people. What the presenters have in common is an identification of the postmodern in youth culture as one of its basic characteristics and a fascination with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German martyr, as a potential resource for those who minister to, with, and for youth. Martinson, a Lutheran, touts himself as the "kids' guy," who studies what is going on with the youth of the church and devises strategic responses to it. Beaudoin, a Roman Catholic, is immersed in postmodern youth culture, in part as a participant and in part as its philosopher and Christian critic.

Martinson asks what postmodernity means for how Christians go about living the faith today or discerning the presence of God in the face of a new generation. Contrary to popular belief, many "Boomers" and "Xers" do not return to the church when they marry or have their first child. Studies of the "Buster" generation, those born between 1962 and 1981, indicate that they have great ambiguity in their lives regarding career, family, future, and sexual identity. High rates of depression and suicide, later first marriages and first children, and materialism also characterize this generation. Although this generation has a high interest in "spirituality," few are interested in religion. What people in this generation have in common is a "postmodern consciousness" and a high reliance on experience, but they lack a common metanarrative that gives coherence to the world--unless that metanarrative be consumer capitalism.

This article identifies eight significant factors in the lives of the 25 percent of people between the ages of 16 and 24 who stay involved in the church. Quality relationships, theological vitality, and ethical integrity are major dynamics in young adult spirituality. The pollsters find that 90 percent of the young say they believe in God, but the majority deem the church unnecessary because they find it to be out of touch, trivial, and foreign. Some in this generation are skeptics (traditional understandings of God are unrelated to their experience), others are seekers in a diverse spiritual marketplace, and a third group is active in the faith although not present in great numbers in traditional worship services. The author finds a high correlation between postmodern youth and the life and thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer loved the church and chastised it; for him experience, reason, and behavior belong together. "Truth as suffering" becomes a theme that connects many young adults with Bonhoeffer. The article contains a number of stirring Bonhoeffer quotations that ring true with the spiritual hungers of the postmodern generation. Bonhoeffer's theology addresses "Who will be there for me?" and asserts that Christians are called to be there for others.

The complex theological work of ministry with this generation must be historical, descriptive/contextual, systematic, and strategic. Specific strategies for young adult ministries include niche ministries, cross-generational ministries, and intergenerational ministries. The article concludes with ten proposals for the ELCA to consider in ministering to young adults in this generation.

In his first essay Beaudoin investigates Christian subjectivity on the basis of Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison, read with the help of French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984). Psychology, religion, sexuality, medicine--all have freed and imprisoned us in new categories of self-definition. Foucault challenged the limits that have been set on what we can be and urged people to create new ways of practicing themselves. Foucault challenged us to ask how we can take up new relationships to ourselves that rely on less dominative strategies, that give over less of our bodies, intellects, and freedom to institutions, traditions, and governments that do not serve the critical practices of human flourishing. The technology of self is a set of practices that are dangerous because they have been shaped by institutions and traditions seeking not only to form but also to deform the self. In his letters from prison, Bonhoeffer reveals fragments for a Christian technology of self, funding an apophatic rela tion to self. In prison he experienced existential separation, he acknowledged an indebtedness to others, he practiced an active memory with regard to his own history, and he found solidarity with the suffering of others and his own suffering. Through these techniques Bonhoeffer discovered a christomorphic practice of self in which he came to know less than ever about himself. He understood Jer 45:5 (I will give you your life as a prize of war) as God's final blessing on his life of fragments straining toward harmony. These thoughts of Bonhoeffer may help us contest our contemporary technologies of power and abandon any attempt to "make something of ourselves." Bonhoeffer senses both the lack of ground under our feet and our responsibility in this groundless situation. Bonhoeffer struggled against fascism and also against an interior fascism that caused him and causes us to love power and to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us. Our culture of options, whether in church or society, remains too often a culture of normalization. The church should enable young adults to take up a critical distance from technologies of power and reestablish technologies of trust that will help them resist. No other institution in our culture can perform this liberating service in the struggle against the fascism of our inner life in the way that the church can. Like Jesus before Pilate, we who minister today must not be overeager when pressed to define truth. We need to live the irresolvable tension between the examination of truth as a practice, and the seeking of God's freedom for us.

In his second essay, Beaudoin observes that many young adults live deeply immersed within what we might call consumer media capitalism. Consumer capitalism allows for youth to glitter in endless variety as long as their behavior does not fundamentally upset the economic order. The article notes the nonstop sales pitch that is the white noise of our lives. Consumer media capitalism functions as a highly effective religious address to young adults. It is an anonymous spiritual discipline resembling in many ways classic spiritual disciplines. As theocapitalism, it attempts to secure its ends in and through religio-spiritual terms and practices. Consumer media capitalism attempts to form the imagination about what is good--in cars, homes, jewelry, and designer clothes. Its theology of culture starts with grace as drama, wherein grace is identified with intense sensation, excitation, episodic excess, and titillation. Transcendence is confused with episodic excess. A second characteristic of this theology of cultur e is a domesticating tolerance that invites one to suspend judgment about the winners and losers in the culture. This theology reinforces a politics of functionalism that perpetuates theocapitalism, a rhetoric of efficiency that gives the impression of resource maximization, and a hermeneutics of plasticity that stretches to include any interpretation of theocapitalism's materials. Third, in this theology consumers take up a relation to themselves in which the truth about themselves is to be found in a constant movement through commodities. Our lives become our own creation, through buying. We are what we have. A fourth characteristic of theocapitalism is the denial of history in general and the particularity of specific histories. We deny our spending patterns and refuse to pay attention to what we spend money for. We deny the origins of our products (coffee, for example) and the effects their production has on everyone but their end user. Theocapitalist strategy aims to orient imagination, belief, value, an d practice in the direction of the success of consumer capitalism. Every theology of consumer media capitalism is also potentially a theology of Western Christianity's present. A laissez-faire religiosity tempts us to treat our spirituality as a consumer identity in which we borrow various elements from the world supermarket of religions. A resort to fundamentalism surrenders to a dictator of desires. A system of thought that rationalizes unequal wealth finds itself at home in the postmodern United States, most markedly in our refusal to criticize "the market." Postmodern Social Darwinism and some theodicies help legitimize one's unearned inheritance, spiritually and economically, both naturally (through the market) and supernaturally (through God). For some, God is extrinsic to the world, only intervening at episodic moments as a Pez dispenser of grace. Our secular and spiritual lives, in this understanding, are looking for more efficient ways to use the things in our secular lives and for ever more efficien t practices to get God into our lives. We need a ministerial and theological engagement with theocapitalism in order to turn mission outside in and to turn theology inside out.

Ministry to, with, and for youth is serious business because of both the complexities of youth culture and the strategic value of the youth who are a treasured part of the church of today and the promise of the church of tomorrow. What is described in these essays as youth's culture has seeped into the culture of which we are all a part. The alienation, confusion, and excitement of postmodernity challenge, shape, and inform youth of all ages. Boomers, Busters, Millennial Kids, and those of us who grew up in the Depression and the Second World War are part of the problem and, with God's empowerment, potentially part of the transfiguration of youth culture. Mother never said it would be easy.