When I started out in youth work, Youthwork magazine ran an article highlighting the decline in young people connecting with church (June/July 1993). These findings prompted considerable reflection: strategies for reaching and keeping young people, the emergence of relational youth work, a rise in youth congregations, diversification of schools work and a resurgence in open Christian youth work. Much of this activity was enabled by an increase in full-time workers (me among them) as well as the continued dedication of volunteers.
In the early 2000’s further research suggested there was still a significant problem. I wrote about this in Youthwork, identifying our problem with ‘discipleship decay’. Research indicated that every generation saw only 50 per cent of churched young people remaining Christians.
So how are we placed in 2016? Well, there’s bad and good news. The bad news is that the need to address this issue remains a priority. The From Anecdote to Evidence report (2014) concluded that, ‘There is an urgent need to focus on children, young people and their parents.’ The good news is that what we are doing - youth programmes, youth retreats, conferences and camps - is working. The question perhaps is how and why this helps reverse discipleship decay?
DISCIPLESHIP DECAY
Faith formation in our contemporary context doesn’t just ‘happen,’ it needs to be stimulated and supported. This is obvious in the context of mission, but it is equally true for churched young people. This means looking more closely at what it is actually like for these young people in the journey towards adulthood. What do we need to do as communities of faith to help provide the conditions and catalysts for faith generation?
The eventuality of future generations forming and expressing a vibrant Christian faith is no longer a natural process, even when parents and others are supportive and active in wanting to raise their children in the faith they hold. The passing on of faith from one generation to the next has always required an active engagement in telling the story and helping young people grow into their own understanding, yet the Church is experiencing what Crockett and Voas in Generations of Decline: Religious Change in 20th-Century Britain termed, ‘A general failure in passing on faith from one generation to the next’. This is because holding faith in a secular age is under a new set of pressures, particularly felt by those transitioning between childhood and adulthood.
FIGHTING THE IMPACT OF SECULARISATION SINCE 1864
Youth ministry and mission have been fighting against the changing nature of this trend for some time. We have learnt some crucial insights and developed some helpful tools. The challenge now is to put these insights and tools together to tackle the challenge of faith generation.
We need effective places that build plausibility of faith to help young people make the implausible choice
Over the course of our short history we have identified three major shifts in the landscape of young people’s faith, which mean we need to rethink how we work with them to form and express a plausible, meaningful and reliable faith. At first it seemed as if this was an institutional problem – a drift from belonging but not from belief. This led to making church more accessible and relevant and reaching out to unconnected young people. Secondly, we began to respond to the fact that young people’s approach to belief – like many others in our culture – was shifting. We were working with ‘spiritual; but not religious’ young people, trying to contextualise the gospel in their culture, or help make connections between their spiritual questions and Christianity. Recently, we’ve noticed a third change. That young people’s Christian faith is shifting and in danger of morphing into ‘moral therapeutic deism’ – the idea, as Kenda Creasy Dean points out in Almost Christian, that God expects us to be a good person, is there for our happiness but isn’t overly involved in our lives. Taken together, these three shifts put the next phase of youth ministry in a very different context: institutional disconnection, malleable spirituality and flattened faith – we are in the realm of forming faith in a secular age.
The tools we have developed have been important in helping us to engage in these issues. We have learnt that youth ministry must provide distinct learning, intentional relationships and transformative practices.
Young people need the space and opportunity to explore and come to understand faith in their own terms, often in informal settings. We realise that the best way to do this is by forming intentional relationships. We also need to ensure that central to our mission and church contexts are the chance to engage in prayer, worship and other practices that invite God to transform us.
FORMING FAITH IN A SECULAR AGE
For young people there are three key challenges to faith formation: making the implausible choice, making coherent sense and making reliable use of faith.
The requirement of choosing to believe comes not from questions of meaning, but a powerful social pressure on their identity. As one young person told me, ‘[I’m] completely different around school, friends... So I have a safety catch mode where I [guard] my faith’. Youth ministry must play a role in helping to make faith plausible in the modern world and helping young people to establish their own Christian presence. The capacity of youth ministry to help in a choice to believe is also about sustaining an on-going choice. We need effective places that build plausibility of faith to help young people make the implausible choice.
Choice around faith is something that all young people need to make. Experience tells us that from aged 10, Christian young people already sense they are ‘not normal’ with respect to their friends. Choice though is only possible if they have a strong sense of faith. When young people talk about their experience of God – in fact their need for an experience of God – they tell us something crucial about the pressure of holding faith in a secular age. Another young person said, ‘I can remember singing during the worship and this overwhelming feeling of happiness and comfort came over me… It was at that point that I fully realized the awesomeness of God, and for me it was the proof of his existence I had always craved.’
When young people tell us of the struggles they have in making sense of God in the face of the cynicism of others and the scepticism created by the trials of life, they express this as a challenge to their sense of identity. Youth ministry plays a valuable part in setting the space for making sense of faith as an issue of identity as well as understanding. Done well, this can also help communities of faith share in this task. ‘Look for somewhere that you can go talk to people about faith… That will help you’, says one young person.
As young people begin to see that the life of faith is useful, and that their lives might be useful to God, we see the importance of focusing intentionally on generating faith. We may feel that teenage faith is a little self-focused. Yet this is what might be needed for many young people – someone to give something extra to their sense of self. We may feel that young people’s spirituality is self-indulgent. However, surely our faith has to be useful to us? Listen to the testimonies of young people and you see clearly that this is powerful. This might be in helping address specific issues such as anger, self-harm or low self-esteem, as many of the young people who had become Christians told me. It relates to an awareness of God being with them as a ‘friend’ but also as a point of finding real purpose.
Being Christian ought to help lead us towards an abundant, meaningful and fulfilled life. If we start by listening to how being Christian helps young people negotiate their immediate needs in seeking this fullness of life, we can then seek to engage in deeper conversations about what a life of discipleship might look like. Conversely, we may find that such a life is already richly present, but we are not accustomed to recognising it because it looks different from the discipleship of adult believers. The activities of youth ministry can provide a challenging environment for young people to nudge forward a wider sense of engagement in life, as disciples, to test and deepen the reliability of their faith.
Faith generation requires action to address the plausibility, identity and reliability of faith in a secular age. The good news is that we have the tools to do this. The challenge is to re-imagine how we give these tools to the young people we work with.
This article is an introduction to the themes and research in Faith Generation: Retaining young people and growing the church ( SPCK August 2016).
