I’ve noticed something common in the culture of student ministry, something that was true when I was a teenager and still presents a challenge today for spiritual growth and maturity. It’s the assumption that Christian devotion can be measured by feelings of passion. The strongest Christians are those who feel or demonstrate the most “on fire” intensity for Jesus.
This assumption leads us to think the purpose of a youth group—and by extension, the church—is to rev up believers and to rekindle the campfire feeling of closeness to God by providing “mountaintop experiences,” whether through summer camp, weekends of worship and teaching, or midweek rallies. The right combination of meaningful worship, powerful preaching, and committed relationships will result in softened hearts, elicit tearful confessions, and fuel the desire for holiness and whatever recommitments are necessary to keep the fire alive.
It’s no wonder one of the largest and most influential gatherings of young people in the United States bears the name “Passion.” Being “on fire” for Jesus is what the Christian life is all about, right? If you don’t feel passionate, you’re failing, backsliding, losing sight of your first love.
A Fire That Lasts
I don’t want for a second to question the intentions or motives of selfless leaders in the thick of student ministry. Nor do I want to throw cold water on any attempt at regaining a passion and excitement for God and his Word. Who isn’t inspired by the passion of the apostle Paul? Or convicted by the words of Jesus to the church in Ephesus that, despite all the believers’ activity, they’d “lost the love they had at first” (Rev. 2:4)? My heart soars at the call of John Wesley for just “one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God” who will “shake the gates of hell” and extend God’s kingdom. I want the church to rediscover the adventure of Christian faith, “the thrill of orthodoxy.” The Passion conference’s worship music regularly shows up on my playlists, for good reason.
But I fear that when we bounce young people from experience to experience, where flames arise and then quickly dissipate, we create the expectation that the faithful Christian life depends on “the next big thing” to reengage the heart. Shouldn’t we long for a generation to be on fire for God for a lifetime, not a roller coaster of ups and downs or swinging between hot and cold?
Fire Needs More than Kindling
Fire needs more than kindling. You need structure and support, a scaffolding that helps the fire to grow, and you also need the right amount of consumable material at just the right time to keep feeding the flames.
If you’ve ever watched the nail-biting “fire challenges” that come near the end of Survivor, you know how crucial it is for the contestant to not only ignite the sparks but also set up the structure that enables the flames to expand. Pile too much on top, and the fire gets snuffed out. Don’t pile enough, and the fire leaps high before disappearing. Blow just enough air and the flames will spread, but blow too much and you’ll put the fire out. The best contestants at making fire know not only how to get it going but also how to feed and maintain its growth.
Student ministry culture often tilts toward sparking. The big experiences are sparks intended to get the fire going, and then we pray God’s Spirit will fan those sparks into a flame. At their best, these events put us in the right posture for God to light a fire in our hearts.
But too often, we think flint is all we need for fire. Just scrape that flint until God gives you a spark and then pray the fire will spread!
Fire and Form
The student ministers who do the most good long-term adopt a different mindset. They’ve seen what happens when fire leaps up and then quickly disappears, with no forms or structures to support it. And so they give just as much attention to a typical Sunday morning group time as they do to a midweek rally. They focus just as much on materials that will stoke and grow the fire as they do the initial matches that get it going. They keep working on the structures at the base of the fire: teaching the “how-to” of personal spiritual disciplines, drawing young people into deeper community, regular exposure to the Scriptures, and other practices. They know how both fire and form are essential parts of the Spirit’s work.
Mark Sayers makes this point, likening healthy biblical renewal to a bird with two wings—form and fire:
We need His fire to come, His empowering presence, to do what human strength cannot. We need His fire to come to cleanse us and purify us, accelerate our ministry and mission. We need His fire to smash strongholds, and to take spiritual ground for the kingdom. Yet we also need His form to shape us. We need holy patterns to remake us in Christlikeness.
If you pursue fire without form, you wind up chasing spiritual experiences that slip into nothing more than human enthusiasm, and you get disillusioned and disappointed when the flames dissipate and God’s will doesn’t work out as you planned. If you pursue forms without fire, you begin to lean on yourself, your habits, and your routines until you settle for a complacent Christianity marked by drudgery, not delight.
Don’t Forget the Forms
When I hear from student ministers, even the ones who fall more on the “form” side than the “fire” side, they tell me it’s tough to keep giving attention to the regular rhythms of spiritual growth and discipleship, simply because (in larger churches especially) the expectations around big events and experiences demand so much attention. The tyranny of the urgent takes over, as every few weeks you’ve got another event that needs planning and preparation. Student ministry culture is built around fire-hopping in the hopes of creating passion again and again.
But Kyle Strobel is right:
Man will not live by fire alone. If you want to bear good fruit you don’t simply try hard, as if fruit-bearing is an issue of sheer force. Instead you establish a healthy connection with the tree.
The healthiest student ministries don’t dampen enthusiasm around big events but are built on the forms and structures necessary for fire to endure—the habits and patterns of abiding in Christ in the ordinary seasons of life, the regular rhythms of feeding the fire, and, above all, relying on the Spirit to do the work of formation only he can accomplish.
If you would like my future articles sent to your email, as well as a curated list of books, podcasts, and helpful links I find online, enter your address.