Interestingly, Dawn starts her book with references to "people without a story" (p. 5). Dawn talks of churches that "trivialize God and trivialize young people" and observes that we must reject the postmodern assertion that there is no universal metanarrative (p. 35). Yes there is, but we have failed to show people how to become part of it. Dawn speaks of the "dialectical tensions" of the Bible (p. 42) and yet we so rarely find preachers who are willing to talk of tensions within the text. Somehow that is taboo in the church. Issues of predestination vs. free will, grace vs. judgment, and so on are just "too difficult" and so we find a preacher willing to present a sermon on grace on one Sunday and then another on judgment a month later, but never address the tension between the two. The congregation surely must edit such contradictions from their minds before they leave the building. Dawn uses Lewis' notion of Sehnsucht ("the insatiable longing that afflicts us all") but I wish she hadn't as I didn't like it much when I first read Lewis and I like it less in Dawn's hands. Try asking someone on the street what "insatiable longing afflicts them" and I doubt very much that you will find the answer that Lewis conjures up. Only those with enough to eat and a safe place to sleep conjure up insatiable longings of the Lewis variety. Most peoples' longings are much more basic. And God is revealed through these longings just as He is revealed through Lewis' Sehnsucht.

Dawn talks of youth who do not participate in education because they do not understand it (p. 67) and this seems to be another way of saying that they do not see how to join themselves to the story being told. She observes that the church confuses worship with evangelism (p. 75) and that seems to me to be true in many cases. In particular, handing over the worship ceremony to a "worship team" (p. 71) has always seemed to me to be a hideous thing to do as it separates the people from true participation and, in the worst cases, reduces the worship ceremony to entertainment. Kids like to be entertained (adults too) and often parents are happy to have a "youth group" that is simply a supervised place for the kids to hang out and have some fun. Certainly many parents don't expect their children's lives to be radically changed through participation in youth group! Well, we have to stop catering to that and start acting like pastors (p. 89-103) and real parents (p. 104-125)! Dawn talks about the need that children have for boundaries (p. 117) and I think that the key to working with children both as pastor and parent is creating a safe space for them to explore, question and develop but ensuring that there are safe and firm boundaries around that space and that everyone knows where they are. Parenthetically, I think that the central problem in the movie Dead Poet's Society was exactly this - Robin Williams created a safe space but the boys did not know where the boundaries were or that the boundaries were firm (i.e. in the sense that they could not be crossed without very real consequences).

Part two of Dawn's book runs through the obligatory list of woes (various forms of idolatry, materialism, power, the media, the information explosion, workaholism, violence, sex, etc.) but I found little new here. In fact, I think that a problem with the approach taken by Dawn and some others is that they see behavioral changes only in terms of the part of the behavioral spectrum with which they have familiarity. I am reminded of a story of a supposed life-long Christian who was critical of a young woman dressed in revealing clothes standing outside her apartment building with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. His colleague took him to task by pointing out that the young woman had been born already addicted to crack cocaine because of her mother's drug habit, had been abandoned on the streets at twelve, had turned to prostitution to support herself by age thirteen and had been addicted to heroine and alcohol by age fifteen. But now, after three years of nurture and support, and through agonizing hard work on her own part, she was free from drugs, drank no strong liquor, had stepped away from prostitution, had her own apartment, a regular job and attended church faithfully. In fact, she had come much, much farther in her journey of transformation than the supposed life-long Christian. They had simply started in different places. Recognition of this fact is, I think, crucial in ministry. Not everyone starts in one place and some have struggled to get to the point where others began. That is no small accomplishment and it is one to be applauded and for which thanks are to be given to God. ( )