by Pete Ward, Professor of Practical Theology at Durham University
In the last few years, the Church of England has developed a Vision Strategy for ministry and mission in the Church. Work among children and young people forms a major element in this strategy, and the announced aim to grow a younger Church includes the ambition to train 30,000 youth ministers in the next ten years. Of these, it is anticipated that 10% will be employed either part-time or full-time. To achieve this aim, tens of millions have been set aside and the first grants to pilot training projects have already been allocated.
This is extraordinarily good news for those of us who have been working in this sector for the last 40 years. Yet the fact that this is happening should make us pause and think. This investment in youth ministry is not because of our amazing success record. Rather, the Church has been panicked into spending its historic resources because we have an ever-decreasing number of children and young people. Anecdotally, Churches who want to hire a full-time or part-time youth minister find recruitment extremely difficult because there are currently very few trained youth ministers out there. Hence the Church of England’s decision to develop a strategy to turn things around by training a whole new cohort of youth ministers, both voluntary and paid.
I want to raise one simple question: what is the theological underpinning for what is now proposed? I think a significant part of the calling of the International Association for the Study of Youth Ministry is to reflect deeply on the experience of the Church and on the lives of young people, both those in the Church and those outside. Reflection, if it is to be worth anything, needs to be costly and to dig deep. It needs to ask awkward questions and we need to be honest with ourselves and with others. In particular, how have we got things wrong? Why have we not made the impact that previous funding hoped for?
It is perfectly possible that, even where we have done things that have been filled with the work of God, such activities have also been the cause of our present problems. Even as we have seen amazing youth ministry stuff happen, we have also been causing our own downfall.
In 2002 I wrote a book called Liquid Church (Paternoster Press). My central argument was that all denominations seem to see Church as a meeting; a gathering of people in the same room (sometimes, now, an online room), to do the same things. How might Christians instead engage with the spiritual life and practices that are outside the Church and see these as a missiological starting point for ministry? In my earlier book, Youthwork and the Mission of God (1997), I suggested that there were two approaches to youth ministry: one based on gathering young Christians and Church kids into groups that would be attractional, the other based on a more missional, relationship-based ministry that starts anywhere that young people are naturally present.
In Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (1989), the missiologist Lamin Sanneh distinguished complementary ways of doing mission: through diffusion and by means of translation. Translation sees the Church expressing itself in context, in the vernacular, and taking new forms. But diffusion, drawing on what feels familiar, assumes that Church as we know it is the right response, and in the Church of England it was this option that was seen as more attractive and more effective. Church Planting, investing millions of pounds in developing ‘Resource Churches’ on the model of HTB, is essentially a form of diffusion.
The ‘Church Youth Group’ model draws on gathering a group of young people who are already connected to the Church with the expectation that they will draw in others. While there has been a growth in schools-based ministry and school chaplaincy, here again the base line of the work remains the Church Youth Group.
But sticking with the Youth Group model meant the writing was on the wall. Young people are like butterflies. They are with us for a while but soon they move on because they grow up. This makes youth ministry a rather unstable environment; something that is a huge success at one point can, in a relatively short time, struggle to keep the doors open. The logic of the Church Youth Groups rests on a steady flow of young people coming primarily from Christian parents. Many of those in our youth groups do not go on to be adult members of the congregation. That means fewer young adults in the Church, and in turn it means fewer children and young people who might in turn form the basis of future youth groups.
In the late 1990’s and into the 2000s, the language changed, but little else. While ‘relational youth ministry’ became the ‘in’ way of talking and everyone started to find ways to connect with schools or other places young people were to be found, this was used as an add-on to Church groups. The focus inevitably remained on Christian young people and those with whom they socialised.
And it was worship that became the main event; the assumption was that we meet God through sung worship. Recent revelations at Soul Survivor, Hillsong and elsewhere have led many of us, not just in the youth ministry academic community, to start asking questions about these developments: how do we understand what has happened? The worship revolution powerfully reinforced the idea that a meeting in a large auditorium was the basis for mission, to the extent that this has now become the assumed theology of most youth ministry people in the UK. In previous generations, groups were smaller, meeting in someone’s home; the main event was Bible study and prayer, perhaps with a few songs to get us all feeling good. The large worship event told us instead that, if we really wanted to meet God, we did it by singing these songs. If we were to doubt the power of worship, all we had to do was look around us at the way God was moving so amazingly in and through these kinds of events. There are now several generations of young Christian leaders who cannot imagine any other way of meeting God than through worship songs.
The use of the word ‘Church’ to describe missional work among young people also brought problems. The Church of England reacted to missional innovation by developing a culture of surveillance. Check lists were constructed and dioceses were surveyed to decide when an activity was a Church and when it was not a Church. Church leaders began to develop a scepticism of certain kinds of missional project if they did not conform to what was expected of a ‘Church’. These developments together have meant that forms of missional and contextual ministry were often sidelined.
And then there are the questions around training and employing youth ministers. As various dedicated courses and schemes have closed down, youth ministry training risks becoming too generic, without enough connection between those who are innovating on the ground and those who are being trained. Practitioners need to support, and learn from, each other. The Church has also failed to offer the kind of terms and conditions of employment that can sustain a career. Low pay (and the sense that clergy will always carry more status in the organisation) eroded the confidence of those we had trained and, after one or two jobs, most moved on.
I do not believe that the prevailing pattern of youth ministry based on Church groups and worship events will deliver what is required. It may continue to give energy and life to some, but it is a model that has diminishing returns built into it. My own Diocese of Durham is a warning. If you have no children and young people already linked to the Church and your congregations are aging and declining, then a method that starts by gathering Christian young people is pointless. The larger worship events that we have seen – quite apart from concerns around abuse, money, and power – while they offer life to many, ultimately only serve to cover over the true extent of the problem.
Our dominant existing model of Church Youth Groups and Worship Events makes too many assumptions about how young people meet with God, and shapes what that encounter should look like. Our practice carries a theology and speaks of what we understand God to be and how God might work. Contextualisation puts these assumed theological certainties into the mixer. Adopting a missional approach to youth ministry is effectively the pursuit of a new understanding of how God might be at work and indeed what the social, ethical, and personal implications of meeting God in new ways might be.
The Church of England, as well as having large amounts of money to throw at these problems, has another very significant asset in its network of Church Schools. Several within the central organisation of the Church have started to grasp that, while Churches may have very few if any young people, there are thousands coming every day to the schools that are linked to the Church. This is clearly a wonderful situation and working out how to responsibly, and ethically, share faith and grow disciples, in and through the connection between Churches and Schools, represents the most exciting of prospects.
But here too the model of what ‘Church’ is can be a danger. My own experience has been that many young people are open to experiencing faith and exploring spirituality but what they are less willing to do is join a Church. Where this problem has been overcome, reaching out to young people involves a significant reorientation of congregational life. In other words, contextualisation becomes a key factor in reshaping not simply faith among young people but also the wider life of the congregation. Where the Church is able and willing to change, I think there is hope.
So there is a risk that this last hurrah for youth ministry may be a lost cause unless we are willing to spend some time reflecting upon the problems and shortcomings of everything that has been done to develop youth ministry in this country. I argue for more missional and contextual approaches to work with young people to be developed.
Any thoughts?