I am an optimist. My enthusiasm levels were compared as a child to those of Tigger, as a teenager to Dave Benson Phillips (how good was Get Your Own Back!) and, in my later balding years, to Louie Spence. When someone tells me it’s going to be ok, I want to shake them and tell them it’s not… it’s going to be brilliant!
I am also a youth worker. When my youth leader moved on when I was 17, I was put in charge which was an absolute baptism of fire; I caught the bug and have volunteered ever since. I also work for Youth for Christ because I am convinced that if the world is going to be changed and come to know Jesus it is going to be through young people. My role is supporting churches because I love the Church, (I do, I love her) and the best way of reaching young people is through the local church. It is the hope of the world.
So, considering my positivity and passion, you can imagine that when I read blogs that tell me we have a problem, magazines that talk of impending doom and attend conferences that tell me we are in crisis it grates a little. And this agitation has led me to two places:
Challenge the narrative
I concede that youth ministry is not easy. My wife can tell how bad a night at youth club it has been by hearing the pace of my trudge up the stairs. I sit in PCC meetings fighting the corner of funding for youth mission. We are swimming against the tide. But the latest talk is that this situation is somehow new. Youth ministry has always been hard, the context always challenging and the workers always few. After the people of Israel have been on an extraordinary journey with God, Moses and Joshua, Judges 2:10 tells us, ‘Another generation grew up who neither knew the Lord nor what he had done for Israel.’ Jesus’ youth ministry was in crisis: he didn’t have enough volunteers (Luke 10:2), his group were always bickering (Matthew 18:1), he had problems with group members’ parents (Matthew 20:20) and many a church leadership would have asked him about the fruit of his three years’ investment: Peter denied him, Thomas doubted him and Judas betrayed him. And the golden years of the 1990s always look shinier with a glance over our shoulder. Granted, Delirious? could fill a stadium and Christendom wasn’t quite dead, but I was a young person throughout the ‘glory years’ and I remember ‘Youth Famine’ Sunday services and talk of imminent extinction.
Today, in many ways we are in crisis: money is tight, the landscape is changing and adapting is hard. there are less young people who have heard the Christian story and so the journey to faith often takes longer. But crisis is nothing new: not to youth ministry, nor to Jesus. There are just new and different problems that require (as they have always done) great determination and creativity to overcome. We do need a revolution to save youth ministry, but we’ve always needed one. The pace of cultural change means that missional thinking needs to perpetually reinvent itself to reach the next generation. Karl Barth said that we need to hold the Bible in one hand and newspaper in the other. For youth workers that is the Bible app under one thumb and Twitter under the other. Let us keep innovating but also let us not let the statistics, the blogs and the overarching narrative of disaster bring us down. Fight discouragement; there is always hope. I know that Christianity is best when its back is against a wall because I know a saviour who knows his way out of the grave.
Challenge myself
The big problem with being an optimist is that the glass can sometimes be half full even if there is no water in it. I know on some matters I have to pull my head out of the sand. And when I do, I see the need to do three things:
- Keep doing the basics and do them well. You know the adage about the baby and the bathwater; well the baby is keep telling young people about Jesus and giving them the chance to become Christians. Keep encouraging them to read the Bible, to pray, keep listening, keep serving and meeting needs. Keep empowering them to be missional (the best way to reach young people is through young people) and keep loving the church.
- Innovate and imagine. Here’s some new bathwater… in a Google world, the gospel is less ‘four points’ linear and more encapsulated in a story. If a youth work job is ‘deleted’ (or even if it is not) we need to envision an army of volunteers of all ages. Youth ministry is too important and the job too big to be done by professionals (when a full timer moved on from our church, 25 of us stood up the front to fill the gap). We need to do more out-reach, not just in-drag. In a post-Christendom world, the building has to be less and less important.
- Fix our eyes on Jesus. There’s an amazing verse I pray in times of trouble: ‘We do not know what to do but our eyes are upon you.’ (2 Chronicles 20:12 - It also rhymes which is nice.) Crisis should lead us to more sacrifice, more prayer, more fasting, more risk and more Bible reading. Times of comfort can lead to spiritual obesity. Let’s take this opportunity to press on together in our commitment to Jesus.
So keep calm and carry on. Keep the main thing the main thing and innovate around the edges. If crisis talk encourages more people and pounds investment in youth ministry then great, but let’s be careful that it spurs us to action not moaning or resignation. We might be on the edge of something glorious…
