This summer my parents decided to up sticks and leave my childhood home. Although I haven’t lived there for years, and although my room has effectively become a ‘spare’ room – the announcement cut me deeply. The bedroom where I would endlessly play shops and families, the tree under which I built my first shelter, the kitchen where I hosted many a birthday party – all to be occupied by some other rogue family. An uncomfortable futon would welcome me in a random study in a random house each Christmas. I reverted to spoiled child mode and declared: ‘NO! You can’t leave! You always have to live exactly where you are, and do exactly what you are doing – and never have a life.’
We live in a time of accelerated change. According to Alvin Toffler, we have so accelerated the rate of change in our lives that we experience future shock – akin to culture shock, but within our own culture; feeling like the future has arrived before we are ready for it. In his 1970s cult-classic Future Shock he says: ‘Change is avalanching upon our heads and most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it.’
Looking back through history it’s almost as though the constant and steady graph of change abruptly peaks in the latter half of the second millennia. We are riding at the top of this swiftly accelerating graph, with no exact clue of where we are going or how to adapt quickly enough to the changes occurring around us. We youth workers face the difficult prospect of navigating our own lives in the midst of flux and uncertainty, while also guiding young people as they face the new: new school years (see Back to School, p.40); university, or the world of work (see Job Done, p.24).
Sometimes our knee-jerk reaction is to slam our feet on the brakes and drag our heels – rejecting all change and keeping things as they are, in a desperate plea to feel secure. This mimics my feelings with my parents: the desire to simply press pause on life and freeze everything as it is. But we cannot stop this change; it is far bigger than us, and will most certainly take no notice of our desire to slow down.
The opposite end of the swinging pendulum is to embrace the change before us. As Jonny Baker insists in Pioneer Youth Ministry on p.20, we must be the re-interpreters of the gospel in our time, re-imagining what church might look like for the young people we serve. Historically, youth ministry has been the back-door of renewal to the church; it is highly strategic and influential to be a youth worker, if we take our call in this respect seriously. So this month’s issue is all about change; the scary daunting prospect of life accelerating far faster than we can keep up with, and the need to refashion what youth ministry can and should look like today. I hope that it helps you to manoeuvre the minefield of your life, and the lives of your young people, just that little bit more smoothly.
We are riding at the top of this swiftly accelerating graph, with no exact clue of where we are going or how to adapt quickly enough
