Embodying Youth : Exploring Youth Ministry and Disability

Embodying Youth: Exploring Youth Ministry and Disability seeks to help close the gap between disability theology and youth ministry education.

What is youth ministry? And who is it for? Christian youth workers and ministers in the West have been answering these questions either implicitly or explicitly for decades. The ways we answer these questions, and the ways in which we go about answering them, have huge implications with regards to the faithfulness and effectiveness of the church’s ministry with young people. These questions have not always been pursued with the experience of disability in mind. In fact, it is often excluded, not only from the academic field but from the church’s practice of youth ministry as well.

In this book, scholars and youth workers seek to attend to the questions of youth ministry by putting the experience of disability at the forefront, with hope not only that the church might include young people with disabilities, but also that our very understanding of what youth ministry is, and who youth ministry is for might be transformed, for the sake of the gospel. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Disability & Religion.

Wesley W. Ellis, M.Div., is the Associate Pastor of First United Methodist Church of Toms River, New Jersey, USA and a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Aberdeen, UK.

Michael D. Langford, Ph.D., is the Associate Professor of Theology, Discipleship, and Ministry at Seattle Pacific University in Washington, USA.