Crossroads Podcast: Why Youth Ministry Matters — Even For Journalists

I have this short conversation at least once a month, since I do so much of my journalism via telephone and that often means dealing with people I have never met.

“What is your name?”

“Terry Mattingly. That’s M-A-T-T-I-N-G-L-Y.”

If I’m talking to someone in a major-league baseball city — especially New York — that usually leads to this: “Mattingly? Are you related to Don Mattingly?” They are referring, of course, to “Donnie Baseball,” the great first baseman for the New York Yankees who, truth be told, should be the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Anyway, I have always answered: “My brother is Don Mattingly, but not that one.”

Here is the key to this week’s very personal “Crossroads” podcast. For decades, when talking to Southern Baptists — telling people my name, or having them spot a name-tag on my jacket — I would hear a different question: “Wait, are you Don Mattingly’s little brother?”

Yes, I am that Don Mattingly’s little brother. All kinds of people were touched by his decades of work — local, regional and national — as a youth-ministry expert in the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest non-Catholic flock.

So, here is the Big Idea for this week: “Youth ministry” is in the news, right now, whether journalists realize it or not. Religion-beat scribes need to argue that many of the horrifying trends seen in surveys of young people — with rising rates of anxiety, depression, confusion, suicide and severe mental-health disorders — are matters of the soul, as well as the mind.

All of this is personal for me because my older brother died this week. That news is slowly filtering out into giant networks of youth-ministry leaders that he built across the nation.

If you do a Google search for “Don Mattingly,” “baseball,” you will find about five million links to click. If you search for “Don Mattingly,” “Southern Baptist,” you will find a mere 235 links and Google AI will still remind you that this is a “prominent figure in Southern Baptist youth ministry … not the former New York Yankees baseball player.”

To be blunt, my brother did his trailblazing work in the late 1970s and in the decades right after that — before the Internet. He travelled all over America speaking at workshops, conferences, seminaries, colleges and churches and there isn’t a single minute of those presentations on YouTube.

I hope that SBC leaders have some videocassettes somewhere, because they need to put some classics online — especially if the material is linked to the creation of Centrifuge.

If you look up that science term in an online dictionary you will find something like this: “A centrifuge is a mechanical device that uses centrifugal force to separate materials based on their diverse densities. This is accomplished through high-speed rotation, compelling denser elements to move outward, accumulating near the periphery, while lighter substances gravitate towards the core.”

My brother looked at the whirlwind of change that hit America in the 1960s, when he was in college, and the 1970s, when I was in college, and started using “centrifuge” as a metaphor for a specific form of youth ministry that would help spin young people in a positive way, helping them sort out what mattered in their hearts, minds and souls.

The result, starting in 1979, was a network of summer camps in which young people did more than eat pizza, sing campfire songs and play games. Oh, the young people at “Fuge” camps — the nickname that stuck — do all of that. But they also are exposed to leaders in a host of topics linked to missions, ministry and careers.

This summer, during a camp somewhere in America, the leaders will register the 2 millionth participant in Fuge. Think about that number. Is that news.

This includes MFuge experiences, which focus on missions work at the global, national and local level. The campus still offer tracks in topics such as sports, “STEM” careers, sign language, drama, “Random acts of service,” “spiritual gifts” and more.

This was one of my brother’s big ideas, as he worked and worked, including earning a doctorate in religious education: Young people need to know that God can call them to work in pulpits or in coaching, in “missions” or in arts, in religious education or in hard sciences. The church needed to teach them that.

My brother also believed that religious leaders — in an era with so many broken families and sweeping cultural changes — had to focus on the needs of young people in the years before high school. Parents worried about the changes hitting teens around 16-18. Don wanted to start paying attention in the years before that.

In “Days of Daze,” a small book written for middle-school students in 1976, Don wrote:

Change is there. But you can’t put your finger on it. Like when you’re sitting in class, looking at your wrist watch, wanting the bell to ring, you look at the minute hand and think it has moved. But you aren’t sure. But if your attention is distracted for a moment, the crazy thing will move. Change is like that. It happens before you know it.

Change is noticeably present during your junior high days. Doctors and psychologists say that at this age your body is changing more than at any other period of your life. Your relationships with friends are changing too. And at home, as you gradually approach maturity, your parents hardly realize the changes are occurring.

Decisions you make at this time in your life affect you the rest of your life.

Yes, note the reference to an ancient wrist watch.

In the past two decades, my brother and I started talking about the powerful digital trends that were spinning “tweens” and teen-agers earlier and earlier and faster and faster — with even greater levels of mental, emotional and spiritual violence. I sent him early articles by Jonathan Haidt, Abigail Shrier and others.

To be honest, he was stunned. But he knew we were talking about forces that the church would have to address, or pay the price.

I thought of my brother when Haidt told me this, during a long 2024 interview. This is from a Rational Sheep post, “Digging deeper into spiritual issues in screens culture.”

“Adolescent development needs to be guided by elders in their community. That’s how you pass on a culture. That’s how you shape a child to become an adult in that culture. Once you get a phone-based childhood, now there’s very room for mentors of any kind -- offline. There’s just no room. So, what they get, in essence, are mentors online who are chosen by an algorithm for their extremities.”

No room offline mentors and ministers? Why?

Consider this reality, from an “On Religion” column: “Jonathan Haidt: It’s time for clergy to start worrying about smartphone culture.”

“Half of American teen-agers say that they are online ‘almost all the time.’ That means that they are never fully present — never, ever,” he said. “They are always partly living in terms of what is happening with their posts, what’s happening online. …

“There is a degradation effect that is overwhelming, but most people haven’t noticed. … I am hoping that religious communities will both notice it and be able to counteract it. But you can’t counteract it if the kid still has the phone in a pocket. The phone is that powerful.”

In the midst of all of these high-tech threats, Haidt has started discussing a strategy many people may find old-fashioned, quaint and even naive — summer camps.

At the After Babel website, he pointed readers to an essay by Steve Baskin of the American Camp Association. This Baskin quote was featured in a Rational Sheep post: “Yes, camps matter in this scary day and age.”

Camp is an odd magic trick. When campers overcome a fear (heights) or solve a problem (resolving a conflict with cabin-mates) or experience a triumph (learning to ski), they often think that they are doing so all on their own. No parents are there, so the triumph belongs to them. Here is the trick — while they think they are “all on their own”, they are surrounded by loving counselors who form a supportive community that will spring to action if they truly struggle in a way that becomes destructive or damaging. Campers get the boost of confidence that comes from independent success without the risk of complete and unsupported independence.

And that magic trick, the invisible scaffolding we provide, is what makes the camp experience a unique and vital part of a child’s development when they are otherwise growing up in an online world.

Yes, I told Haidt about my brother’s decades of work with camps and other forms of religious education for young people. He wanted to know more. I hope that, somehow, Haidt gets to meet the current Centrifuge leaders, some of whom have direct links to my brother and his leadership.

I wish that Don Mattingly, my Don Mattingly, had been able to take part in discussions of this kind. He knew that the centrifuge was spinning faster and faster.

May his memory be eternal.

Yes, this was a very different “Crossroads” podcast. Please pass it along to others.