Book Review: Biggest Brother

I recently finished reading Biggest Brother: The Life of Major Dick Winters, the Man who Led the Band of Brothers by Larry Alexander.

Winters is a main character in the Band of Brothers book written by Stephen E. Ambrose and the HBO miniseries of the same name produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, and in Biggest Brother, Alexander goes beyond Winters’ time in WWII and gives a biographic account of his life.

All in all, I thought Biggest Brother was good but I didn’t love it. First, the account of the most exciting part of Winters’ life—his time with Easy Company of the 101st Army Airborne—is fairly redundant if you have already read or seen Band of Brothers. Also, in Biggest Brother Winters loses a bit of his virtuous luster, holding old grudges and giving frank and sometimes very negative evaluations of his fellow soldiers and friends. It is certainly true that becoming aware of some of Winters’s faults and shortcomings makes him more human, but it was nice seeing him as the idyllic American hero.

Of course, Winters still was a hero, and I think my favorite parts of the book were quotations from his own writing which underscore how dutiful and responsible he was:

“In three years, I’ve aged a great deal. It seems as if the college days and the days of civilian life when I did as I pleased are long gone. It must have been a dream, a small, short, but beautiful part of my life. All I do is work to improve myself as an officer, and them as fighters and as men, make them work to improve themselves. As a result, I am old before my time. Not old physically, but hardened to the point where I can make the rest of them look like undeveloped high school boys. Old to the extent where I can keep going after my men fall over and go to sleep from exhaustion, and I can keep going like a mother who works on after her sick and exhausted child has fallen asleep. Old to the extent where if it's a decision or advice needed, my decisions are taken as if the wisdom behind them was infallible. Yes, I feel old and tired from training these men to the point where they are efficient fighters. I hope it means some will return to that girl back home.”

After Germany surrendered, Japan continued to fight on, and Winters tried to explain to his mother why he felt like it was his duty to continue to fight, despite all of the work he had already done:

“I feel that God has been good enough to let me get through this war. As a result I am combat wise and ins a position to do some good to help a lot of men. I know I can do the job, better than or as well as any of the rest. How can I sit back and watch others take men out and get them killed because they don’t know; they don’t have it? Maybe I’ll get hurt or killed for my trouble, but so what if I can make it possible for many others to go home. Their mothers want them too, the same as mine. So what else can I do and still hold my own self respect as an officer and a man?”

Especially in comparison to today’s society, where words like duty and responsibility are almost entirely foreign concepts, Winters’ character shines as an example to emulate.

• • •

While reading Biggest Brother, I was struck (somehow, for the first time) how young these guys were who went out and basically saved the world. For those who have seen Band of Brothers, here are the ages of some of the major characters on June 6, 1944 (D Day).

• Colonel Robert Sink–39 (who seemed so incredibly old in the movie)
• Major Dick Winters–26
• Captain Lewis Nixon–25
• First Lieutenant Harry Welsh–25
• Captain Ronald Speirs–24
• Second Lieutenant Carwood Lipton–24
• Staff Sergeant Denver “Bull” Randleman–23
• First Lieutenant Lynn “Buck” Compton–22
• Sergeant Donald Malarkey–22
• Staff Sergeant Bill Guarnere–21
• Staff Sergeant Darrell “Shifty” Powers–21

What’s Wrong With Youth Ministers? Some Common (and often Legitimate) Criticisms, Part 3

Disclaimer: I have been involved in youth ministry in some fashion for almost ten years now, so the statements below are based on observations I have made during that time. That being said, I am in no way claiming to be an expert on youth ministry, and I am certainly not suggesting that I am a perfect (or even particularly good) youth minister. Below are a collection of humble opinions and suggestions based on personal experience. See Parts 1 and 2 of this series here and here.

(4) Youth Ministers are shallow.

I had a hard time coming up with the title for this area of criticism, but really it’s just an umbrella description for specific criticisms of youth ministers that I’ve heard voiced or implied several times like, “All he does is plan fun events! There’s never any spiritual emphasis!” or “His Bible classes are pure entertainment! There’s no Bible to them!” or “He doesn’t even know the Bible! Why is he teaching our kids?”

Fun Events: in a time when a lot of teenagers are having fun in some decidedly unholy ways, I think there’s nothing wrong with having certain events that are for the express purpose of having good, clean fun. Of course, these fun events should be balanced with other types of events, but I honestly don’t know of any youth ministers who do nothing more than play basketball with their teens. Most organize regular devotionals to provide a time outside of worship to study the Bible, and many travel to a variety of youth rallies, retreats, and summer camps to provide an opportunity for worship and spiritual growth.

If there is one area in which I think youth ministers as a whole could be more intentional about planning activities it would be service. Fundamentally, Christians are supposed to be servants, but that’s a hard message to get across in our self-centered, consumer culture. One thing I’ve always tried to do as a youth minister (sometimes more successfully than others) is to provide a variety of opportunities for service to remind my students that following Jesus means adopting His model of servanthood.

Entertainment vs. Bible: I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but teenagers in today’s world don’t exactly have stellar attention spans. This isn’t particularly surprising since most of them have been watching television since birth and spend most of the day plugged in through a smart phone, iPod, or laptop.

Because of this, there is undoubtedly a need for capturing the attention of our students in order to teach them effectively. That being said, if you’re not careful, you can spend so much time engaging the students that you don’t have time to engage Scripture. I’ve seen Bible lessons for teens that were so focused on grabbing their attention and making the Bible relevant that they barely had mentioned the Bible at all!

Fundamentally, I believe that the Bible is relevant to the life of every person, and because of that, it is interesting. I don’t claim to be a great teacher, but the Bible is a great book, and since I make it a priority to teach Scripture in my classes, it’s usually fairly effective.

Bible Knowledge: I have become personally convinced that Christians, on the whole, are woefully ignorant of the teachings of the Bible. That’s a scary thing to me, but even worse, a lot of Bible teachers (including some youth ministers) aren’t much better.

I don’t want to over-generalize here, because everyone is different: I’ve known youth ministers with little formalized training who are outstanding Bible students, and others with college degrees in Bible who seemed completely unaware of basic biblical teachings. Regardless of that, on the whole, we as a people don’t know our Bibles well enough, and I’ve never known anyone who spent too much time reading and studying Scripture.

And, related to the point above about Entertainment vs. Bible, the better you know and understand the Bible, the easier it is to teach it. Being able to describe the historical and cultural background of a specific story or passage is more interesting than just having your students take turns reading it out loud. Better understanding leads to better teaching.

(5) Youth Ministers are liberal.

I really dislike the labels “liberal” and “conservative” when it comes to church discussion, because everyone defines those terms so differently that they become largely useless.¹ I dislike the labels so much that I almost left this one off the list entirely, but it is a common criticism, so I thought I would address it briefly.²

In this last criticism, I am not referring to the idea held by some people that having a youth minister is inherently liberal,³ but rather the notion that youth ministers individually tend to be more liberal than the congregations that employ them, and thus, cause problems at those congregations.

Like I said above, this is a common criticism, and I’m sure it’s valid to a degree, but I think it tends to exaggerated a lot. Let me explain.

It makes a lot of sense for youth ministers to be a somewhat liberal group as a whole when you remember that, as a general rule, youth ministers tend to be young, and they also tend to be only a few years removed from an education at a Christian university (typically, people are more liberal when they are younger, and usually Christian universities are somewhat more liberal than are a lot of the congregations whose young people choose to attend them).

Nevertheless, if a congregation has done a good job in the interview process to find a youth minister that is a good fit for them, then really it shouldn’t be an issue—more liberal churches will have no problem accepting youth ministers with more liberal views, while more conservative congregations will avoid those candidates and instead hire someone whose views are more in line with their own.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that if there is⁴ a huge problem of youth ministers being too liberal for the churches they work with, at least part of the blame should fall on the congregations who hired them in the first place when they obviously weren’t a very good fit.

The next (and hopefully last) post will close out the series with a few summary observations.

• • •

1For example, some people use the term “liberal” to refer to the idea that Jesus wasn’t actually define and wasn’t physically raised from the dead, while other people use it to refer to the practice of clapping hands while singing in worship. The fact that the same term is used to describe such widely varying theological beliefs and practices renders the term almost meaningless. It becomes just a relative term—anyone to the left of (whoever is speaking at the time) is “liberal”, while anyone to his right is “conservative”.


2I won’t put the terms in quotation marks from here on out because that would be annoying to read; just realize that I am making no attempt to actually define the terms, but am just using them in a general and relative sense.

3Some Christians/congregations believe that, since the New Testament doesn’t specifically speak about the use of youth ministers, congregations that have them are using a “liberal” innovation. Obviously, I disagree. Not wanting to go into great detail on this point, I would suggest that since the New Testament comes much closer to supporting a congregation having a youth minister than having a multi-million dollar building to worship in.


4There is no doubt in my mind that there are multiple examples of guys who have come in with more liberal views, tried to bring change to the congregation they were working with and caused a great deal of damage in the process. Nevertheless, I don’t really think this is a common occurrence; it is certainly not true of the vast majority of the many youth ministers I have known and worked with. 

Brady Quinn on Tim Tebow

Apparently, in an interview for GQ, Broncos backup quarterback Brady Quinn had some unflattering things to say about his teammate and former fellow backup Tim Tebow’s headline grabbing 2011 season. Quinn seems to question Tebow’s ability, his humility, the showiness of his faith, and even the overall success of the team.

I thought Quinn was pretty good at Notre Dame and have been surprised by the degree to which he has completely flopped in the NFL. Regardless of your opinion on Tebow, does anyone see this as anything other than sour grapes on Quinn’s part?

I mean, Brady, I know your career hasn’t exactly gone as planned, but do you really think running down your teammate (who happens to be arguably the most popular player on the planet right now) is the way to go about improving things? 

If you don’t have anything nice to say…

What’s Wrong With Youth Ministers? Some Common (and often Legitimate) Criticisms, Part 2

Disclaimer: I have been involved in youth ministry in some fashion for almost ten years now, so the statements below are based on observations I have made during that time. That being said, I am in no way claiming to be an expert on youth ministry, and I am certainly not suggesting that I am a perfect (or even particularly good) youth minister. Below are a collection of humble opinions and suggestions based on personal experience. See Part 1 of this series here.

(3) Youth Ministers build allegiance to a group, not to the Church.

In recent years, this has become a vocal criticism of youth ministry as a whole, and I think it is a valid one, so I want to spend some time addressing it.

Multiple studies have shown that evangelical teens leave the church at an alarming rate after they graduate high school,¹ and it seems likely that at least part of this phenomenon can be attributed to problems with the way we do youth ministry.

Consider the following, hypothetical example:

On a regular Sunday at ___________ Church, the youth group meets for class in their special, isolated, youth room in the Family Life Center. After class they head out to the auditorium for worship where they sit with the other teens on the special youth group rows, and after services are over, they either stay where they are, visiting with friends, or rush back to the youth room to play ping pong/foosball/PS3. 

On regular Sunday evenings, instead of meeting at the church building with ‘old people’, the youth group has a special Life Group where they meet in each other’s homes to have a devotional, sing a few songs, and then have a meal. 

These are just on regular Sundays though, which don’t actually occur all that regularly, because the Youth Minister has made it a priority for the youth group to be gone to as many trips and youth rallies as possible on weekends, in addition to regular monthly Sunday night gatherings with teens from other youth groups (after all, it’s hard to keep teens excited about just going to ‘regular’ church). 

On Wednesday nights, of course there is a special teen class in the youth room in the Family Life Center, and because this is such an important time during the week for the teens to fellowship with one another, they don’t come out after the Bible class period to spend time singing or having a devotional with the rest of the church family, but instead just stay in their room to have more time with one another. 

Each week there will be a devotional at one of the teen’s homes. 

In addition to youth rallies and weekend retreats, special activities include a ski trip over Christmas Break, a couple of church camps in the summer, and a short-term summer mission trip. All of these are primarily for teens, but there will be a few parents and maybe a youth deacon or two thrown in as chaperones.

Obviously this is just a hypothetical example, and to be clear, I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with any of these specific activities, but when added together, what you get is a group of teens who spend a lot of time with each other, but have very little meaningful interaction with anyone else in the church. They likely don’t even know the names of the majority of adults who aren’t their Bible class teachers or youth deacons or parents of their friends. The careful and diligent work of the Youth Minister has made them very dedicated to the youth group, but has also (unintentionally) isolated them from the church family as a whole.²

What happens when they graduate? Is it particularly reasonable, after cultivating an allegiance to the youth group (which has been largely separated from the church as a whole) in them for years, to kick them out of the youth group once they graduate and expect them to eagerly ‘switch allegiances’ to the church as a whole (largely made up of parents and ‘old people’)? I think it’s increasingly becoming clear that the answer is, ‘no.’

Does that mean that mean that youth rallies, youth trips, youth rooms, and even youth groups should be done away with? Well, judging by the fact that I am a Youth Minister, I obviously don’t think so, but I do think that it means that youth ministry needs to be rethought somewhat.

I think it is important that we provide opportunities for our students to build relationships with other Christians their own age, and I also think it is appropriate to offer teaching that is customized and directed at teens, dealing with the issues they face in a way that is interesting to them. Taken together, these goals provide justification for a lot of the things I mentioned in the hypothetical example above, but these goals must be balanced with the intentional effort to make teens disciples of Jesus, which of course, involves a lifetime of service to His church (not just 6-7 years of involvement with a youth group).

Instead of being isolated from the church, teens are an integral part of it, with their involvement including, but not being limited to, youth group activities. Of course, that’s easier said than done—how do we make teens active and functioning parts of the Body instead of merely loyal members of a youth group? Well, I don’t claim to have all the answers, but here are a few suggestions:

Limit how often the youth group is absent from the corporate worship of your congregation. From personal experience, I can say that it is really tempting for youth ministers to have their groups miss a lot of the worship services of the church, opting instead for special events where the worship is different, fresh, and exciting. But is there any doubt that the more your kids are absent from worship with the local body, the less they feel like they are a part of that body?

If high school graduates want to hang around for a while, let them. I’ve known some youth ministers who are adamant about getting kids out of the youth group as soon as the summer after their senior year is over. Considering what I mentioned above about students leaving the church at an alarming rate after graduating high school, I’m not sure this is a great idea. Transitioning from high school to college is a difficult time for a lot of students, and especially if you don’t have an active college group at your church, some might not know where they fit in. I’ve always encouraged those who have already graduated but who are still interested in coming to youth events to come—they provide good, older role models for the younger students, and it also helps to keep them involved with the church.

Provide opportunities for adult Christians to mentor students one on one or in small groups. This is something we started doing this year as part of our Lads to Leaders program, and with work, I think it could develop into something very positive for our church. Having students work with adult mentors provides another positive Christian role model in their lives (and they can never have too many), and also gives them another connection to the church outside of the youth group and their own family.

Allow teens to be involved in the life of the church, and encourage them to do so. Let your young men serve in the worship assembly. When high school teens reach a certain level of maturity, encourage them to teach (or help teach) a children’s Bible class for a quarter. If there is a work day at the church building, let your young people know that they are needed as well. Look for ways in which your congregation can serve the community and make sure that your teens work hand in hand with older members to accomplish those projects.

These are just a few ideas; what other things can churches and/or youth ministers do to make teens an active part of larger congregation?

I know this post was long, but as I mentioned above, I think this is an important and valid criticism. Next time I’ll focus on two more that I have heard a lot.

• • •

1Statistics from different studies range on what percentage of teens leave the church after high school. CrossExamined.org places the number at 75%.

2For what it’s worth, I do think teenagers actually enjoy this type of youth group—taking lots of special trips, being isolated from adults and the elderly, having their own special worship and Bible study gatherings—I’m just not convinced that, when taken to an extreme, it’s conducive to healthy spiritual development.