Youth Ministry Is Public Ministry: Kody Hersh on Power With.

Religious education has always been public ministry. Following Pentecost, Jesus’s disciples became apostles, students became teachers — the foremost religious educators of the early church. 17th century Friends traveled in the ministry sharing an emergent faith and developing practices. The 19th century invention of “First Day School” moved formation outside the home and family and placed religious education in the public community of the meeting. If Quaker public ministry is a Spirit-led, relational calling to the outward sharing of Truth, then in addition to these examples, the Friends today who step outside of the community in worship on a Sunday morning to attend to the spiritual formation of younger generations are public ministers. -- Melinda Wenner Bradley

Image from Quaker Religious Education Collaborative.

In his previous interviews on the blog, Kody Hersh has invited us into searching conversations about the nature of public ministry itself: how call emerges, how it is tested, and how it is either recognized or quietly sidelined within our meetings. This is the third interview in the series with Kody on modern public ministers and ministries. You can find the previous two interviews here and here.

Again and again, he has pressed on questions of weightiness and authority, asking who gets named as a minister and what communal habits shape that naming. Our exchanges have traced the relational cost of faithfulness, the vulnerability of stepping into visible service, and the subtle ways Quaker culture both sustains and constrains those who feel led beyond the walls of the meetinghouse. He has been especially attentive to the dynamics of power, accompaniment, and spiritual energy, probing what it takes for ministry to remain rooted in obedience rather than ego, and for community to offer real eldership rather than polite distance. This latest interview grows organically out of those earlier threads, deepening a conversation that has never been abstract but always grounded in lived discernment and shared responsibility.

Kody and I, clearly, have been talking for years now. What you may not know is that we first knew each other from youth ministry and that our conversations over the years have often been circling questions of youth ministry, public ministry, and the places in youth and public ministry where Quaker communities quietly reproduce the very power dynamics we claim to resist. In this conversation, Kody begins with a wondering about weightiness and recognition, about who is seen as a minister and whose work is treated as peripheral or preparatory. What unfolds from there is a searching, layered reflection on youth ministry as a form of public ministry that demands unusual integrity, discernment, and humility, precisely because it takes place in relationship with children and young people who are exquisitely attuned to inauthenticity.

As someone who came into public ministry through religious education, I recognize myself in much of what Kody names here. Youth ministry is not where I started and then left behind; it is where my sense of call was formed, tested, and sustained, and it continues to shape how I understand right relationship, intergenerational community, and the work of accompaniment. This conversation moves between personal experience and communal diagnosis, touching on ministries carried for a season and those carried for decades, on power held with rather than over, and on the quiet labor of creating conditions in which the Spirit can move without being managed.

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Kody: In worship this past First Day [note from Windy: "First Day" is "Sunday" in "Quaker Speak"] I found myself wondering about the idea of a "weighty Friend" [note from Windy: a "weighty Friend" is someone implicitly recognized in Quaker community as influential], and how I see people engaged in youth ministry in Quakerism being recognized or not in that category. I think, as is so often true within our Quaker communities, even if we don't want to, we replicate some of the problematic patterns of the world. And I think one of those patterns is really undervaluing work that has to do with kids, which I think is connected to ageism and to sexism, because so many of the people who do that work are not cis men.

And then, contrasting that with the incredible depth that really skilled youth ministers offer. The first person who comes to mind for me in this category, of course, is our beloved mutual friend Melinda Wenner Bradley. And I think about how Melinda and other folks are often bringing a profound understanding of Quakerism, a deep engagement with spiritual formation, and doing the creative discernment work of thinking about how to share those things in ways that will land with people at different developmental stages.

I think the word discernment is what feels strongest to me—the ability to understand a very complex picture of what Quakerism is and what’s important for Friends to understand about it. What do people need from religious education? And to have the discernment to get to the heart of that. Because to work with young people, you have to get to the heart of things and be able to share authentically from that place.

I think youth ministry, like all public ministry, requires so much integrity and authenticity, but in a uniquely intense way. Kids and teenagers don’t listen to anybody they believe is being inauthentic, and they are some of the most skilled people in the world at identifying inauthenticity.

Image from Quaker Faith and Play

And so I think about folks like Melinda [who is currently staff at Quaker Faith and Play], like Beth Kelly in New York Yearly Meeting. You. Elizabeth Freyman, from Albuquerque Friends Meeting [Intermountain Yearly]. Andrew Wright in North Carolina Conservative Yearly...just bringing real breadth and depth of skills to the work of ministering to young people within Quakerism.

I think another piece that’s interesting, in looking at youth ministry as public ministry, is how it highlights that a Friend can be given a ministry for a season or for a lifetime or anything in between. Many people I think of as skilled and gifted youth ministers in Quaker community are no longer serving in those roles or no longer doing youth ministry as their primary work.

When I was working for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting youth programs, I worked with Stephen Dotson, Matt Sanderson in the middle school program, and Hannah Mayer—my beloved colleague and "work wife"—in the high school program. To my knowledge, none of those folks are doing youth ministry as their primary thing now. And the respect that I have for those folks, the work they’ve done, the care and skill they brought to it, really makes me freshly respect that ministries we carry for a time and are then released from are equally authentic and important as ministries carried for a lifetime. Both look like faithfulness when we're acting in alignment with how we’re called.

I also think about some of the youth ministers I respect deeply who have been committed to youth ministry over decades, and who are not best known for that in Quaker circles. I think of Jean-Marie Prestwidge Barch, who is known to so many Friends for being everywhere, doing everything with grounded wisdom and love. I can’t think of anyone more beloved in more circles of Friends. And I don’t know how many of those Friends know that Jean-Marie has been supporting the Friends General Conference high-school program at the Gathering for literal decades. I think she served as the Friend-in-Residence for maybe 15 years. Kri Burkander has similarly been working with that program for many years, bringing so much brilliance and discernment.

Image from Friends General Conference.

And I love that reminder of how multifaceted the call to public ministry can be. So often we're not called to do just one thing. The process of finding the ministry that is the right shape for the minister—because each of us is a complex person with many skills and interests—means public ministry often isn’t just one thing.

Windy: I came out of religious education. I think that might have been how we first met. I didn’t even use the language of public ministry when I had a ministry of religious education. My incubator was that national presence of religious educators [now Quaker Religious Education Collaborative]—that’s where my public ministry was fed and housed. I really liked what you were saying about how it’s not lesser than other public ministries, or just where you start. It was where I started, but it’s where I stayed and grew. And honestly, it still is part of everything I do. Because you can’t be concerned with Right Relationship [my call to ministry] without being concerned about intergenerational community, and that is a concern of religious education.

Kody: Yeah, I can relate to so much of that. In the process of doing ministry with young people, I kept encountering the big, scary things that would come up for them. And out of that commitment and love, I was drawn into education and advocacy around child sexual violence, into wanting to work with Quaker communities around child safety and sexuality and consent education—which I didn’t really see coming.

Windy: I would like it if you said more about your current call and what you’re trying to do in Quaker community and outside it. What is this ministry you’re called to, Kody?

Kody: I am starting a project offering support to transgender young people and their parents and families. I’m using very secular language in public work because many of these folks have had harmful experiences with religion, but I see it as a ministry of pastoral care. It really came out of direct experiences with individuals I care deeply about. As a youth minister in Quakerism, I’ve mentored trans young people as they’ve come out to themselves, families, and communities. And seeing—not a mirror, because it’s different for every person—but a new, beautiful iteration of the same experience I had of transition making me feel more aligned in my integrity and more available to joy and faithfulness.

Image of Kody from Trans Youth Coaching

I’ve seen kids blossoming. The process all of us go through of understanding who we are and how we want to present that to the world, and the ways we thrive when that’s met with love and shrink when it’s not.

Concretely, I’m offering no-cost, donation-based coaching sessions for young people or parents to talk through questions about gender transition. I’m also working to present workshops or do education in broader communities—Quaker and beyond—to make sure the folks I’m trying to serve are in communities that are more skilled, equipped, and knowledgeable.

Windy: I once heard an anecdote about travel minutes [note from Windy: a "travel minute" is a traditional Quaker letter of introduction or recognition of ministry service on behalf of a meeting] being issued for those called to teach and be with children on Sundays, because they miss the regular Meeting for Worship. But when I've brought this up in other contexts I often get told, dismissively, as Friends refuse to consider doing something like that in their own context, "we're all ministers." Do you have a theory about why when we say defensively, “We’re all ministers,” we also have no processes to thank each other for the ministry we’ve offered, recognize it, grow and support it, or hold each other accountable?

Kody: The piece I’ve thought a lot about is this: how does it impact our meetings that over decades and centuries we’ve changed from communities where our lives revolved around the meeting, to communities where the life of the meeting is one thing among many things? The proportion of our time and energy we can give to our meetings is much smaller now.

And the work of tending to and supporting one another as ministers is big work. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a meeting that didn’t feel stretched beyond its capacity. So my theory about why we use “We’re all ministers” as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card is that if that means we don’t have to do any work to support anybody in ministry, then we’re not failing. And we’re not failing in a way that feels beyond our control to change.

Windy: I wonder if there’s also a piece that many of us don’t know what it would look like to have a community where we actually supported one another as ministers. The broader Church doesn’t offer that. The "priesthood of all believers" is a Protestant idea, but many people have spiritual trauma, and clergy in their childhood communities had power and misused it. So when they hear “public ministry,” they misunderstand because the only example they’ve seen is a clergy person at the top of a hierarchy.

Kody: I think of power with versus power over. There is immense power in public ministry, and it should be power with and not over. But if you haven’t seen power with, power looks like it must be control.

One of the things I’m passionate about in youth ministry is that it subverts one of the power structures of the world—that adults are the important people and children are proto-adults who just haven’t gotten there yet.

Many folks I respect in Quaker public ministry are deeply committed to seeing children as full spiritual beings who are equal members of our community, and to shifting the center of gravity in our communities so they no longer default to prioritizing adult needs.

When we practice disrupting default patterns of power in any way, it helps us disrupt them in all ways.

And that’s part of why I see youth ministry as critical to moving toward wholeness in the Religious Society of Friends.

Gosh, is it easier to feel the movement of Spirit in a community where children are included and celebrated and enfolded in the life of the community than in communities where that isn’t true!

Windy: So how would you differentiate between a meeting where children really are enfolded in the life of the community, and a community where children are publicly celebrated during meetings but not truly included?

Kody: I think it’s pretty simple. Is it based on relationship or on tokenization? Do the kids experience meaningful relationships with adults? Do they feel respected? It’s not hard to tell the difference between tokenization and real inclusion.

Windy: It feels more like consumption to me, when they’re decorative children.

Kody: One of the things that characterizes a really skilled and grounded youth worker is the ability to test: Is what I’m doing in connection with this child actually for the child, or is it for me?

I think that’s a question we can ask ourselves as communities: Is this thing we’re doing "for the children" actually for and with them, or are we doing it because it makes us feel like we’re doing something right?

Windy: I was telling you about the book Finite and Infinite Games. The premise is that God’s games—the divine games—are infinite games, and the games people tend to play are finite. The role of power in a finite game is the reward for winning. He talks about strength being a virtue inside us that we can develop, and that keeps us in the infinite game. The infinite game is the game we play for the joy of playing.

Kody: That makes me think about all the ways we build strength in our bodies, and the parallel ways we build strength in our spirits.

So much of ministry—especially ministry with children—is creating conditions for people to explore their own spiritual growth and then getting out of the way. I had a lovingly prepared activity I was excited about doing with kids, and they were like, “Yeah, no, we don’t really want to do anything serious today. Can we just go outside and play a game?” And so we went outside and played a game.

I had to let go of “But I prepared this thing!” and instead participate in reinforcing that they are the decision-makers about their spiritual growth and journey.

Windy: Yeah. There’s a sort of humility to it that feels very different from power.

Kody: Hannah and I used to remind one another that the program we lovingly designed for youth retreats, and put so much energy into, was probably about 10 percent of what mattered about the experience young people had at those retreats—generously 10 percent. The best we can do is have a program that supports that and doesn’t detract from it.

If getting out of the way meant absenting yourself, it wouldn’t be ministry. But there’s something powerful when we’re fully present but not trying to control.

One of the things I was thinking about as you talked is that there are many cultural and generational differences in what our bids for connection look like. And in youth ministry there is a practice of learning cross-generational communication about connection. Learning what one another’s bids for connection feel like is a really valuable skill for building our communities.

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Youth ministry, as Kody describes it, requires a willingness to be fully present without controlling outcomes, to offer strength without domination, and to practice discernment that is relational rather than programmatic. It exposes, with particular clarity, the difference between inclusion and tokenization, between ministry that is done for children and ministry that is genuinely with them.

What Kody names here resonates deeply with the work of the Friends Incubator for Public Ministry. Again and again, we encounter Friends who are called, gifted, and already laboring faithfully, but who lack the communal structures that would allow their ministry to be recognized, supported, and held accountable over time. Youth ministry makes that gap visible, because it sits at the intersection of power, care, vulnerability, and trust. It asks communities to grow skills they cannot avoid if they are serious about public ministry at all.

I am left wondering, as I often am after talking with Kody, what might change in our meetings if we took youth ministry seriously not as a pipeline or a proving ground, but as a site of deep theological and spiritual formation for the whole community. When children are enfolded rather than displayed, when their relationships with adults are real and mutual, the center of gravity shifts. The movement of the Spirit becomes easier to feel. And the work of public ministry, in all its forms, becomes a little more honest, a little more possible, and a little more shared.

Queries: • Whose ministry do we recognize as weighty, and whose labor do we overlook or minimize?

• Do we understand youth ministry as public ministry? If not, what assumptions shape that gap?

• How do we practice power with rather than power over in our relationships with children and young people?

• Are children in our meeting enfolded in the life of the community, or primarily displayed and celebrated without real inclusion?

• What structures of care, accountability, and recognition does our meeting need in order to faithfully support public ministry?

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Kody Gabriel Hersh (he/they) is a Friend currently living on the lands of Tiwa-speaking peoples in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Their (sometimes) released ministry among (primarily) unprogrammed Friends has included youth work, pastoral care, workshop facilitation, public speaking, and writing. Kody is passionate about the intersections of spirituality, justice, and joy. He is under the weight of a leading to support transgender youth and their families in navigating the current, hostile political climate in the United States.

UPCOMING

Paul Anderson will talk to us on March 9th about his new modern English translation of Margaret Fell's 17th-century classic, biblical, defense of women in public ministry, Women's Speaking Justified. Everyone who registers will receive a 25% off coupon for Paul's book from the publisher, the generous Barclay Press. Register: HERE.