Youth Ministry is broken, but should we fix it?
13 February 2007 Jeff Gill
The following article is not scholarly, although I think I pretty much got the facts right. It is highly opinionated, though I believe it is based on truth. It is a definitive foundational statement about the way i61 will minister to children and young people. Having said that, it is pretty open-ended with plenty of room for discussion and even correction. For the more enjoyable story side of this subject, read ‘Community’ by Christine.
Youth ministry as it is practiced today (in North America and the UK, at least) is a failed experiment. I’m not the first person to say this. Mike Yaconelli, who was a major youth ministry guru in the USA, said it back in 2003. A lot of other people have been saying it too.
My side of the story
I don’t think I am being too revisionist when I look back at my ten years of youth ministry in the USA and call it a failure. Let me clarify:
- My youth ministry did a fantastic job of discipling Christian kids who had strong Christian families, either natural or church. Almost all of these kids have continued to follow God. (I think six to ten years on, I can safely call this ‘fruit that remains’.)
- I didn’t do so well with kids who only had a peer connection with church, no matter how many meetings per week they attended.
- The number of kids who gave their life to Christ through the youth ministry was quite small.
We could say that I just wasn’t very good, except for two things:
- A significant number of families came to the church because of the reputation of my youth ministry.
- What happened in my ministry is repeated in church after church across the western world.
The problem is not with the people doing the ministry. The problem is the received wisdom that underlies the structure of most churches.
A brief history
Adolescence was ‘invented’ around the turn of the twentieth by G. Stanley Hall. His unique combining of evolutionary theory and human development from infant to adult seems to have left us with a couple of enduring ideas. The first is that teenagers must rebel (in contrast to ‘develop independence’) in order to grow up fully. The second is that adolescents need to be separated from adults and children in order to be taught properly.
Teenage culture came into existence in the 50s and solidified in the 60s. For the first time in history there was music, literature, entertainment, etc. specfically for people whose age ended in -teen.
Today being a teenager and participating in teenage culture is accepted without question in the church and in society as a whole.
Now
To be a teenager is to be revered and to have power beyond what one would think possible. Who are we told repeatedly by the media to be afraid of? Groups of teenagers (in hoodies).
Parents feel they have neither authority or wisdom to offer their teenage children. Their role is simply to provide funding and transport for the fulfilling their teenager’s desires and to turn them over to the state at prescribed times for education and socialisation.
With this model of parenting teenagers (and increasingly, younger children), is it any wonder that parents expect to be able to turn their teenagers over to the church for spiritual education and solcialisation? It shouldn’t be, especially when that is what the church offers them.
Remember a few years ago when the government mooted the idea of parents as helpers in school classrooms? Incredulous outrage! Parents helping to teach children? Are you insane? The idea is ridiculous. They don’t have the skills or the training to help a teacher!
This is the overall state of things as I see it. We have invented a foreign species called Teenager. They live in ghettos called Schools. A few of them visit Christian ghettos called Youth Groups on weekends. We are afraid of what is becoming of this species, but all our answers seem to revolve around throwing more resources at the development of the ghettos.
Hope
Now that many Baby Boomers (the original teenagers) are too old to have teenagers any more and are turning their attention elsewhere, some radical voices are making themselves heard. The concepts of family and parenting are being rediscovered. Two examples:
- Christine and I are taking a Positive Parenting course in the spring that offered by the local council. If the government is putting money into helping parents parent instead of just relieving parents of their children, it means change is afoot.
- There are a number of new churches that are focussing in one way or another on ministering to people instead of age groups. Artisan is one such church. In their version of this kind of ministry everybody stays in the main meeting on Sunday mornings. One of their members writes about this fairly often in her blog. Another church that comes to mind is ours
What the bible says
There is an age-old concept called family. Another one called community. They were both found in the garden of Eden.
If we look at God’s dealings with Israel — how about an extreme example: When the people of Israel stood on Mount Gerazim and cursed anyone who would have sex with his mother or an animal or his sister or his mother-in-law, everbody was there, including the kids. They weren’t off doing a craft about fluffy sheep. (Deuteronomy 27:11-26) When it’s not war, it’s all family and community all the way through the history of Israel.
Have a look in the New Testament. The closest thing you can find to a youth group is when the young men carry out the bodies of Ananias and Saphira , and that’s not close at all because the young men were in with everyone else, not off in the youth room playing a game with a blindfold and some smelly socks.
What you will find in the New Testament is whole families getting saved. (Scroll down to Acts 11 and carry on from there.)
This isn’t even a slightly comprehensive biblical picture of God, family and community, but it is a place to start.
Next
What is the way forward? Now that I have declared youth ministry dead, what will replace it?
I see gatherings for people, not age groups. There is already one that happens every week at our church. The Alpha Course we are running is about half teenagers. We could have run a youth Alpha, but there was no need. During the discussion time the teenagers go into one group and the adults into another. I think this is a brilliant model: together as much as possible, separate when necessary. And we can do together a lot more than we may think. Teenagers can understand much more than we think, and they are actually more likely to apply God’s truth to their lives. Adults like silly games a lot more than they let on.
I see us empowering parents to parent, not just with workshops and teaching, but with activities where we can learn how to do it by doing it all together.
Is this all pie-in-the-sky idealism that ignores the realities of today? No, rather it is recognition of reality and meeting it head-on with what is missing: God, family and community.
It is of course a lot easier to gather a bunch of teenagers in a youth ministry while ignoring their heathen parents. But if we are smart, if we want fruit that remains, we will work with families, we will be family to those that are without, and we will build community. God created family and community a long time before he created the church. Jesus said that his good news would mean division for some families , but if we look at the whole of Scripture we see that it is family AND community AND church.
We have something to offer that the world has not got. It is time that we start offer it to them instead of continuing to recreate the dysfunction of the twentieth century in our churches.
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Things being said about Youth Ministry is broken, but should we fix it?
On 13 February 2007 steve wrote:
WOW, now that’s something worth praying about….... how about tomorrow at 7.30am everyone??
ahh go on, you can make it, honest
On 13 February 2007 Sarah wrote:
I like the idea of one big family instead of different age groups.
I think teens are cool and would love to hang out with them, I like it when we’re all together. We should definitely talk about this more (in my opinion, which let’s face it, is the one that REALLY matters)
Way to think it out guys!!!
On 13 February 2007 Beth wrote:
You can do it, Bob (not Pob, y’hear me?)
On 14 February 2007 ruth wrote:
Yep I love family! This is how I grew up and I loved it! So let’s go for it. But it only works if we are also family during the week. And we have to approach others and be approachable.
On 14 February 2007 Jenna wrote:
I love hanging out with everyone!
On 14 February 2007 Jenna wrote:
By the way, where has the John thing gone? Are you not doing it any more? (Sorry, its got nothing to do with this, I was just wondering!)
On 14 February 2007 Jeff Gill wrote:
Jenna, It’s still there. Click on ‘Dig In’ near the top left of the page. Or just type www.d-train.net/digin into your browser, then bookmark it!. I haven’t posted today’s yet. I forgot. Bad Jeff! It will be up there with tomorrow’s within the hour.
On 14 February 2007 Beth wrote:
dicipleship. I like that word.
On 15 February 2007 steve wrote:
This is what I call ‘Relevant’
On 15 February 2007 iona wrote:
i love it when we’re all together, we’re one big family, it’s great!
On 15 February 2007 Steve & Gill wrote:
we love it that you are part of the i61 family Iona, we thank God for you
On 15 February 2007 Beth wrote:
Yup, me too Iona and Jenna, I love hanging out with you guys too!
On 16 February 2007 Sonya Armstrong wrote:
Inspiring! Thanks, Jeff; I really enjoyed reading this.