Diagnosing Adolescence: From Curing Adolescents to Caring for Young People

Abstract

Scholars have been defining adolescence throughout the history of youth ministry, but the nature and function of the term’s application has often remained unexamined. The practice of diagnosis provides the appropriate metaphor for the activity in which practitioners and theologians engage when they apply “adolescence” to the experience of young people. Drawing from the field of disability theology, the author exposes some of the potential dehumanizing pitfalls of a diagnostic approach and seeks to reorient youth ministry toward the Christological praxis of caring for young people as opposed to the diagnostic practice of resolving or “curing” adolescents.

Keywords:

• Youth ministry
• diagnosis
• disability theology
• Christopraxis
• adolescence

Acknowledgments

Thanks to John Swinton, Andrew Root, Erin Raffety, Mike Langford, and Andrew Esqueda for reading and providing constructive feedback on this article. The mistakes and missteps are all my own, the rest is thanks to you.

Notes

1 The term Christopraxis was introduced to practical theology by Anderson (1997) of Fuller Seminary. Anderson borrowed the term from Moltmann (1990). While the term does not originate with him, Root (2014a) is responsible for offering it as robust methodology for practical theology.

2 Though the social construction of adolescence is occasionally contested by authors and practitioners, it has yet to be convincingly contested at an academic level. Arguments against the social construction of adolescence are consistently betrayed by a blatant misunderstanding of what social construction constitutes or a total lack of engagement with the actual theory (see Kirgiss, 2015).

3 This rationality is preeminently foundationalist and universal, in essence regarded as a univocal spectrum on which objectivity occupies the most prominent end, deeming more “speculative” sciences, such as theology and philosophy, to be less rational from the start, forcing them to rely on other disciplines to maintain their epistemic legitimacy. This is basically what has happened in youth ministry throughout much of its history, wherein it was forced to rely on the interpretive framework of developmental psychology in order for its normative claims to be accepted as academic. For more on foundationalism in rationality, see van Huyssteen’s (1999) The Shaping of Rationality, in which he argues against foundationalism and pushes toward a postfoundationalist rationality.