Andrew Root Quotes & Sayings

If the beneficiaries of globalization are tourists who can travel as they choose, then the losers of globalization are the ones forced to wander: those who move in the shadows, those whose moving is unwanted, and those who work low-paying jobs in service to tourists (such as janitors at airports or hotel housekeepers.) — Andrew Root

American youth ministry often looks beautiful on the surface, with big youth rooms and conferences full of excited kids, but underneath the shine is rot, for the youth ministry has been more about mammon than manna, more about investment in banked faith than about inviting young people to partake with parents and other adults in the daily gift of faith that comes to us all as we pray and confess, I believe. Help [our] unbelief. — Andrew Root

Youth ministry is not about getting things accomplished - only the act of God can bring about the transformation we seek. Youth ministry is about participating deeply in young people's lives as we await, together in suffering & joy, the coming of God. — Andrew Root

Theology starts with a crisis, the very crisis of reality itself. The crisis is the fact that you live, that you have a life to live. ... The crisis is the very mystery of our existence and the yearning for there to be some kind of meaning to it. — Andrew Root

Ministry is not about helping these kids be better Christians; it is about helping them be what God created them to be-human. And it is the degradation of their humanity, brought about by broken and abusive families, violent neighborhoods, failing schools and poverty, that caused them to lash out so forcefully. Ministry is about suffering with them in their dehumanization, celebrating their human endeavors and in all things pointing to the true human, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Having — Andrew Root

Grace is costly because it calls us through our person to the person of Jesus Christ. And when we follow the person of Jesus Christ, when we follow his call through our person, we're sent to act for the concrete person of our neighbor in the world. — Andrew Root

But if faith is only for the future, there will be no faith, for like manna, faith saved spoils. — Andrew Root

Apathy sets in when our passion for the future is miscarried. — Andrew Root

Ministry is about joining God where God can be found. — Andrew Root

It is when we are up against death, when we find ourselves in despair, that the God of cross is near to us. It is through suffering and despair that God is made known to us, for God is found on the cross. — Andrew Root

The Church may have a building, but that is not its place. The building may be the church's location, but its space is in the shared humanity of its persons. — Andrew Root

The Anselmian call for "faith seeking understanding" may start and gather it's energy not in rational study of past theological points but in the pursuit to make sense of our concrete and lived experiences of Jesus who finds us in a hole, knocks us from our horse, or comes to our daughter in her sleep. — Andrew Root

Bonhoeffer helps us see that a youth minister is not someone who heaves theology onto young people, getting them to know stuff, but is rather a minister of the gospel that stands near the concrete humanity of young people, sharing in their experience, helping them wrestle with God's action in and through their concrete lives. — Andrew Root

We are the relationships that make us; we have our being in and through relationships that place us into reality, and therefore we are open ontologically to the possibility of encounter. — Andrew Root

Anxiety, as neuropsychologists today tell us, is toxic; our brains are wired to avoid anxiety. Anxiety corrupts the chemistry of the brain and leads us to depart (emotionally or physically) from others to protect ourselves. Jesus's words to his disciples "to fear not" (Luke 8:50 NRSV) become of utmost significance. Anxiety is so acidic that it is nearly impossible to have relationship, to be a place-sharer, where the air is poisoned with it. Bonhoeffer's calm and composure, even on the first day, signaled to the boys that he had no anxiety, no worry about lessons being unfinished or others thinking he was a failure. His composure signaled to them that it might be that he is really just here for them, rather than to fulfill some goal that they could frustrate (like getting them through the material). Bonhoeffer's composure tacitly indicated to the boys that he was more loyal to their concrete persons than any end others sought for them. — Andrew Root

It actually may be that the shadows of the so-called middle-class utopia always cast heavily on children, particularly in their adolescence. And this is so because the middle class is the proprietor and perpetuator of the category of childhood; living within the economic advantage of not needing children to work (or serve as marriage pawns for continued nobility) leads to a conception of childhood innocence. The child is hidden from the world behind the structural walls of family and education. Middle-class parents take on a heavy burden of seeing it as their core vocation to protect and advance their children. But this projecting and advancing appears to always come with tension as the innocent middle-class child turns into the alien middle-class adolescent.[2] — Andrew Root

In true relationships, the only point is to be together. Once there is another point, the relationship withers under the heat of expectations and obligations. — Andrew Root

And like so many of us in youth ministry, he explains at the end of the letter that he felt small next to the significance of the boy's deep theological question. It is more than ironic that the arrogant young man felt insecure next to the ten-year-old's question. Bonhoeffer never doubted himself in defense of his dissertation or while wrestling with Harnack in his seminars. But in the shadow of the ten-year-old and his cosmic question raised by the lived sorrow over his dead dog, the overly confident Bonhoeffer sits in fear and trembling. — Andrew Root

Paul connects faith and hope. Rather than saying young people have faith if they believe without doubt, it might be better to say they have faith if, up against doubt, fear, and struggle, they hope. — Andrew Root

The resurrection is the promise that death will not prevail, that nothingness does not have the last word. God promises to overcome it with life ... We can trust that God will overcome death because Jesus is the resurrection, because on the third day Jesus rose again, as the first of many. — Andrew Root

we become incarnational witnesses, people who must use our own lives to "put wheels on the gospel — Andrew Root

The disciples of the One resurrected are the oddest of people; we live honestly in the now but yearn for a future so greatly that we take on its future characteristics. In a world of competition, power, and hatred, we live into the future by taking on the future's characteristics of being last, weak, and loving. In this way we provide a world that knows only certainty, immediacy, and domination with a vision of the future encompassed in the faith, hope, and love made possible by the resurrection of Jesus, who has been crucified as our place-sharer. — Andrew Root

Sociologist Robert Wuthnow argues that churches (and American institutions in general) have abandoned this age group, who must consequently make the most important decisions of their lives-decisions with long-lasting consequences about love, work and ideology-without the benefit of traditions or elders to guide them.22 — Andrew Root

It was not so much rebellion that fueled the German youth movement (as it did in the American youth movement of the 1960s); rather, it was romanticism. — Andrew Root

Practical theology is the need to interpret the "where" of Jesus Christ in our experiences of the now. — Andrew Root

Friendship means we are obligated to one another, but obligated in a way that doesn't destroy our freedom. — Andrew Root

Here we see a young man in an empty room, checking his watch as no one comes to share in the refreshments he has carefully placed on the table behind him. There is some comfort for those of us taking the theological turn in youth ministry to hear of Bonhoeffer's own failures, especially with young adults. We also often find it hard to create the spaces to connect with young adults. And if Bonhoeffer is our forefather, it is important to recognize his failures as much as his glowing successes. — Andrew Root

A mission trip in youth ministry is not about bringing the resurrection; It is about witnessing to the resurrection. — Andrew Root

Bonhoeffer hears the narration that is the revealing of the boy's humanity by embracing the boy and taking him to his knee, giving him his person in the midst of his suffering, being close enough to hear the boy, awaiting the deep theological questions the boy has, which are tied to his very concrete lived experience, to the deep questions of childhood, questions Bonhoeffer himself remembers from his own childhood. — Andrew Root

By mobilizing relational ministry from how, by stopping only at Langmead's first aspect of incarnational mission (Jesus as a pattern for mission), the who of personal encounter, of participation in the continued presence of Jesus, is squeezed out into a utilitarian pattern (Jesus did it this way so we should too) that can be duplicated but lacks the indwelling power and direction of God. — Andrew Root

The point of the mission trip is to invite young people to act in ways that witness to the promise of God's action, which will make all things new. — Andrew Root

Ministry, then, is not about "using" relationships to get individuals to accept a "third thing," whether that be conservative politics, moral behaviors or even the gospel message. Rather, ministry is about connection, one to another, about sharing in suffering and joy, about persons meeting persons with no pretense or secret motives. It is about shared life, confessing Christ not outside the relationship but within it. This, I learned, was living the gospel.
I — Andrew Root

Hope trusts in the promises of God. Hope seeks the action of God that brings forth a new reality. Optimism stands in the current reality, wishing to make the best of each individual experience. But hope stands knee deep in the history of this reality by yearning for the action of God to bring forth a new reality in which everything in this reality is reconciled and redeemed. — Andrew Root