Andrew Root > Quotes

“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.
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― Andrew Root, Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation

“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

“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 Relational Pastor: Sharing in Christ by Sharing Ourselves

“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 Promise of Despair: The Way of the Cross as the Way of the Church

“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, Unlocking Mission and Eschatology in Youth Ministry

“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, Christopraxis: A Practical Theology of the Cross

“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.
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― Andrew Root, Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation

“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, Unlocking Mission and Eschatology in Youth Ministry

“Ministry is about joining God where God can be found.”
― Andrew Root, Unlocking Mission and Eschatology in Youth Ministry

“Friendship means we are obligated to one another, but obligated in a way that doesn't destroy our freedom.”
― Andrew Root, Unlocking Mission and Eschatology in Youth Ministry

“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, Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker: A Theological Vision for Discipleship and Life Together

“Apathy sets in when our passion for the future is miscarried.”
― Andrew Root, Unlocking Mission and Eschatology in Youth Ministry

“But if faith is only for the future, there will be no faith, for like manna, faith saved spoils.”
― Andrew Root, Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker: A Theological Vision for Discipleship and Life Together

“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, Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker: A Theological Vision for Discipleship and Life Together

“The cross reveals this Jesus: not a magical one but a suffering one, not a God who takes away pain but a God who joins us in it.”
― Andrew Root, The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry

“A mission trip in youth ministry is not about bringing the resurrection; It is about witnessing to the resurrection.”
― Andrew Root, Unlocking Mission and Eschatology in Youth Ministry

“The Anselmian call for "faith seeking understanding" may start and gather its 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, Christopraxis: A Practical Theology of the Cross

“Up against deep hurt, loss, yearning, and brokenness we are often thrust into silent loneliness.....The church often matters to so few people because the church has not been able to face reality. It has been the place of positive denial. But the church cannot be a place of love, the Love known through the crucified God, unless it is willing to abandon its hyperpositivity, abandon its need to be safe and clean, ad instead seek to wrestle in the dirty pathos of human yearning.”
― Andrew Root, The Promise of Despair: The Way of the Cross as the Way of the Church

“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, Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker: A Theological Vision for Discipleship and Life Together

“we become incarnational witnesses, people who must use our own lives to "put wheels on the gospel”
― Andrew Root, The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry

“This book is a thought experiment that desires to present a constructive practical ecclesiology that draws inspiration and direction from Barth”
― Andrew Root, Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age

“The faith that you will confess today with all your hearts needs to be regained tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, indeed, every day anew. We receive from God only as much faith as we need for the present day. Faith is the daily bread that God gives us. You know the story about manna. This is what the children of Israel received daily in the desert. But when they wanted to store it for the next day, it was rotten. This is how it is with all the gifts of God. This is how it is with faith as well. Either we receive it daily anew or it rots. One day is just long enough to preserve the faith. Every morning it is a new struggle to fight through all unbelief, faintheartedness, lack of clarity and confusion, anxiety and uncertainty, in order to arrive at faith and to wrest it from God. Every morning in your life the same prayer will be necessary. I believe,”
― Andrew Root, Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker: A Theological Vision for Discipleship and Life Together

“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, Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker: A Theological Vision for Discipleship and Life Together

“The only criterion necessary to belong to the church is to know impossibility, suffering, yearning, brokenness, and failure. Only those who have had such experiences (which is everyone) are welcome. For it is only through our loss, yearning, and brokenness that the suffering God of Jesus Christ encounters us, and it is only through these experiences that we can really be in relationship with others. A church that cannot admit it is filled with those who suffer is a community that cannot share relationship with others, for relationships that are rich and transformative are relationships built through our shared loss, yearning, and brokenness, through despair.”
― Andrew Root, The Promise of Despair: The Way of the Cross as the Way of the Church

“Practical theology is the need to interpret the “where” of Jesus Christ in our experiences of the now.”
― Andrew Root, Christopraxis: A Practical Theology of the Cross

“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, Unlocking Mission and Eschatology in Youth Ministry

“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, Relationships Unfiltered: Help for Youth Workers, Volunteers, and Parents on Creating Authentic Relationships

“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, Unlocking Mission and Eschatology in Youth Ministry

“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, Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation

“Sabbath is a period of 'trying on' God's promised completion, trying on God's future. Sabbath is not rest for a privileged few while all others serve them – that's tourism. Sabbath is the inviting of all creation to be still and imagine the coming of God.”
― Andrew Root, Unlocking Mission and Eschatology in Youth Ministry