Practicing Discernment with Youth

Throughout history youth have been at the center of their communities' energy and creativity, including their efforts to seek faith and justice. However, today's adolescents have been relegated as passive learners and consumers, lacking full adult power for longer than any age cohort in history. This book traces the modern domestication of adolescence from its ancient roots through several key moments of its descent into passivity. Empowering youth as agents of Christian faith in the world is not only a social need, but is theologically warranted. The church and the broken world need the gifts of youth. This book elaborates four pedagogical movements--listening, understanding, remembering/dreaming, and acting--as key for noticing and nurturing the faith commitments of youth. Too much of contemporary youth ministry represents an attempt to pump energy into our youth--to get them excited about what we have to offer. This approach attends to energies already present in the lived experiences and hidden commitments of youth and connects them to God's mission in the world.

--Andrew Root, Luther Seminary and author of Faith Formation in a Secular Age

""In Practicing Discernment with Youth, David White paints a lush vision for youth ministry that takes seriously the wisdom, power, and vocation of young people called into a discipleship of action. More than a decade after the book's original release, youth ministry continues to wander in the desert of domestication, capitulating to approaches smeared with consumerism and spectacle, and White's vision for youth ministry patterned by Christian discernment remains a crucial map for exiting the wilderness.""
-- Andrew Zirschky, Assistant Professor of Practical Theology and Youth Ministry, Memphis Theological Seminary, Academic Director at the Center for Youth Ministry Training, and author of Beyond the Screen: Youth Ministry for the Connected But Alone Generation.

""If you read only one book on youth ministry, it should be this book. If you are a practical theologian, here is a thoughtful diagnosis of how our maladaptive culture distorts young lives. If you train youth workers, here is a concise introduction to the church's treasure chest of discernment practices. If you are a youth worker, here is a detailed, practical guide to equipping youth to discern the call of God throughout their lives.""
--Skip Masback, Founding Director of the Youth Ministry Initiative, Associate Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, and Director of YCFC's Adolescent Faith and Flourishing Program.


David F. White is the C. Ellis Nelson Professor of Christian Education at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Dreamcare: A Theology of Youth, Spirit, and Vocation (2013) and co-author of Awakening Youth Discipleship: Christian Resistance in a Consumer Culture (2007).