It’s not that I didn’t believe what I was saying; there is a need to change, massively, and it is through those conversations that I try and get a sense of the bigger picture of youth ministry in the UK, but there was never that one big trend that people were looking for. My answers always felt far too general while people were looking for specifics. But recently, I’ve stumbled across an answer. What’s happening next in youth ministry? What’s the trend that we’re all going to jump on? What great wisdom can I impart? I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that youth work in the UK is about to rediscover its evangelistic thrust.
You don’t need me to tell you that over the last few years, in the midst of austerity-driven cutbacks to youth services, youth ministry has done an incredible job of picking up the pieces left by these slashes to provision for young people and been a huge provider of mentoring, mental health care and other vitally important work among young people. Somewhere in that journey, perhaps we’ve lost a bit of our gospel-sharing impetus.
I’m not trying to separate word and deed here: the amazing work that we’ve all been involved with over the last half-decade has shown the country that the Church genuinely cares about the wellbeing of heaps of young people (as have the work of other anti-austerity responses such as foodbanks). But the reality is that some of that funding has come with strings attached. And perhaps sometimes we’ve got that balance wrong. Should we be taking grants which specifically can’t be used to fund work where we explicitly talk about Jesus? Is that really our role? That feels like a bit of a misstep.
New YFC national director, Neil O’Boyle, pulls no punches in challenging youth workers to redress this balance in ‘The Death of evangelism’. I’ve met Neil a few times now, and his uncompromising style feels like exactly what youth ministry in the UK needs. It’s conversations with him, and other like-minded folks that give me an idea of where we’re heading next. Similarly in this issue, Steve Chalke calls on us to respond to the threat that extreme radicalisation poses to our societies with some radicalisation of our own. In his article the youth ministry legend suggests that Jesus’ radical way of peace has the ability to counteract the violent radicalisation which fragments our communities. What offer that the Church has is more radical than the call to pick up your cross and follow Christ?
There’s no silver bullet here, but as Hilllsong’s Dan Blythe shared a couple of months ago, central to this must be keeping the message central while being open-handed with our methods. I want to spend a decent amount of time over the next few months listening to what’s working – if you’re reaching young people in innovative ways, if you’ve found that balance between serving the community and introducing young people to Jesus, please get in touch. My best answer to what’s going on in the youth work world comes from the collective wisdom of the community surrounding this magazine. We all need each other’s help to navigate sharing the gospel in our ever-changing context.
