With the numbers of 18-30s in our churches at an all-time low, what does that tell us about the effectiveness of youth ministry? Jo Derry asks experts and practitioners how we can think beyond the teenage years, and invest in young people now to encourage their long-term spiritual growth.
If you’ve been in youth work for long enough then it may well have happened to you. Aged 15, they were totally committed to your group, your church and to Christ; ten years later are nowhere to be seen in any church – yours or anyone else’s. They’re nice people, but they’re not disciples of Jesus.
What happened? Did the church fail them once they left the safe harbour of your youth group? Or was it ‘just life’? Are these actually the much talked-about ‘prodigals’ who are sure to come back to Christ, and by default our churches, eventually?
This is a youth work magazine, but recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the 20 and 30-somethings, the generation who are missing from our churches, and whether we, as youth leaders, have a responsibility, in some way, to them.
I’m not the only person who’s been thinking about this. Last year the Evangelical Alliance held a symposium to discuss the problem of the ‘missing generation’ of 18 to 30 year olds in our churches. According to figures presented there, the numbers attending church in the 20 to 29 age group have declined by 62 per cent in the past 20 years. This is in spite of increasing investment in youth work in churches. The year before, in 2008, research conducted by the Barna Group and published by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, stated that six out of ten 20-somethings in the US who were involved in a church during their teen years failed to translate that into active spirituality during their early adulthood. And in 2006, Peter Brierley recorded in Pulling Out of the Nosedive that the frequency of churchgoing declines so rapidly in the 20 to 29 age group that by the time they are in their 30s they are the least frequent churchgoers of any age group.
The long game
If those statistics are right, then there are huge implications for how we work with young people now, before they hit adulthood. Adult life is increasingly challenging, and the world we’re equipping young people to face has dramatically changed. Levels of unemployment are higher, as are levels of debt. The average age that people get married has risen, as has the average age most people have children.
The challenge to youth work is to start looking way ahead, past next Friday, or next year, beyond the 18th birthdays, and to imagine the kind of disciples God wants the people in your youth group to become; to envision a preferred future for our teens and to put foundations in place now that will turn the tide and buck the trends. We might not get directly involved in work with the twenty-somethings, but we can help teenagers grow a faith that is strong enough to meet the challenges their lives will hold.
So what could this look like? ‘It’s easier to criticise than to offer an alternative vision,’ says Chris Curtis, Director of Luton Churches Education Trust. ‘But I’m not sure we teach on any of the important issues for young people. If you get 17-year-olds to write a list of the five most important things in their life and then asked a youth worker which they had dealt with in depth, I reckon most youth groups wouldn’t have covered most of those topics. A lot of youth work doesn’t go near those issues or just dances around them. We’re answering questions they aren’t even asking. And it isn’t just that we aren’t equipping young people, we’re conveying the message that Christianity doesn’t have anything to say about those things either.’
‘The reality is we have failed 0 to 45s,’ agrees Ali Campbell, Diocesan Youth and Children’s Adviser for Chichester. ‘It’s not just this generation of young people. We used to think they would come back when they’re older but now we’ve realised they aren’t coming back. One of the issues I think is that we explore what they should believe but we don’t adequately explore how they can own those beliefs for themselves. We tell them what to believe and give them a bunch of statements about Jesus rather than helping them to know him.’
Of course this makes perfect sense. We know the theory very well – that Christianity is about relationship with Christ and with one another, that it’s about turning our lives around to be increasingly God-centred, about being transformed by the Holy Spirit to have life in all its fullness. And we also know that without an encounter with Jesus, all we’re left with is a series of empty traditions and practices.
Chris picks up this theme: ‘It’s about the big obvious stuff that everyone has figured out – less programme, more relationship. In the early days if I wanted young people to stay Christians I would have gone and looked for a course at the Christian bookshop called Staying a Christian but I wouldn’t do that now! It’s easy to go on camps or to give a great preach. But showing young people who I am is a million miles away from a church programme on discipleship. I get a lot of pressure to perform which can draw me away from a relational mindset. But I do want young people to see me with my family. I want them to see what discipleship looks like.’
Modelling Christ
Seeing Christianity in action, in the ordinary decisions of life – in work or in unemployment, in relationships and in singleness, in having or not having children – this is where discipleship and commitment to Christ needs to be modelled, so that young people understand how to apply their own faith to their own circumstances. And this is perhaps where we need to recognise that we need the wider church.
Beth Tash, Youth Pastor at St George’s, Leeds, collaborated with Jason Gardner from the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity, to explore how the church can give young people an insight into how Christians apply their faith to their every day lives. ‘After all, how am I to prepare people for the working world when I work for the church? We have to realise our limits as youth workers,’ she explains. They linked school leavers with people in the church who were in jobs they were interested in to shadow them for a day. ‘So a businessman in our church took four of our guys who had left school and they spent time with him at work, talking about money, marriage, how he conducts his business ethically and how he handles everyday things as a Christian. They had to meet him at the gym at 6am, then shadow him for the day in suits, taking his train to work... It was a brilliant experience for them.’
This is just one example of how we can model Christianity in adult life, beginning to redress the balance between the sacred and the secular. ‘If you’re a good Christian you’ll spend 10 hours a week at church,’ Jason Gardner explains. ‘But you’ll spend 110 hours at work, rest and play. What do we do in those 10 hours that prepares us for the 110? For most church curriculums and services the focus is on the 10 hours of people’s lives, the spiritual disciplines or devotions rather than focusing on the issues they’re facing.’
‘If all they hear is a Bible study and a talk it means nothing,’ Chris continues. ‘But if we’re giving them a sense of who we are as people and how our faith affects that, if they can see that I struggle, to see the dilemmas, the ups and downs, then we’re modelling something real. If they don’t hear that, then I don’t know how they’re going to process what they’re going to do when they struggle. They’ll assume either that I’ve got it wrong or that Christianity “doesn’t work”. Either way you’d be likely to give up by the time you get to your 20s.’
‘We need to get away from this idea that the youth worker ‘does’ the youth work. We are not the ‘saviours’ of the church. We need one another,’ Beth adds. This doesn’t mean recruiting hundreds of adult volunteers with ‘ordinary’ jobs to help out. It means working to cultivate intergenerational communities in our churches, whatever that might look like.
‘Often adults feel disenfranchised when it comes to youth work and churches should look to empower adults and to change people’s perspectives on what it means to be a disciple of Christ, recognising the challenges to faith in the 21st century,’ says Jason. ‘For youth workers perhaps we need to grasp that the youth work model we have created is swinging too far away from the church community.’
There’s an incredible opportunity here, to take stock of how far we’ve come and look ahead, not just to rethink how we equip young people to face the future, but also to envision the kind of church that we are building and the values they will carry forward. There are no definitive answers, and it’s up to each one of us to look at our youth groups and ask God what kind of church he’s building, and what role he wants you to play in it. It’s all up for prayer and discussion, but there do seem to be some emerging themes:
Honesty
Ali Campbell sees the potential in the next generation of young people to bring greater openness into the church. ‘We aren’t very good at being vulnerable. But young people will share everything with the world – on Facebook and Bebo etc. We have a generation for whom openness is normal,’ he says. ‘You can have authenticity in youth groups, where they’re one another’s supporters but also critics, where they confess their sins to one another, that you don’t have in adult house groups.’
It’s something Chris Curtis also highlights. ‘If we can, we should bring an honesty about life into our work,’ he says. ‘For example, running a session about not having a job. Then raising that issue with group of young people and figuring out with them how a living, patient and real God deals with that. Or how he is present when you’re being dumped on Facebook or if you’re desperate to be a microbiologist.’
Community
Greater openness leads to greater community. Increasingly we’re discovering that we need to work together with, and as an intrinsic part of, the churches we belong to when it comes to youth work; nurturing community within our groups and allowing adults to engage as church family with young people.
‘Teenagers want to know the stuff we have discovered and they need somebody to help them,’ says Ali. ‘And if we’re articulating what’s going on we also need to give young people permission and the opportunity to respond, constantly asking ‘How we can do it together?’ Let’s find how this can work for us being together.’
Encounter
Finally, we know programmes and strategies alone don’t work. There are no magic wands to be waved. Ultimately, the only reason any of us, regardless of age, continue in a committed relationship with Christ is because we have encountered him as real for ourselves.
‘I want to give them an experience within something that is real for them,’ says Beth Tash. And so we should look to create opportunities for encounter, not just at one-off events, like summer camps and 24/7 prayer weeks, but in the nitty gritty mundane parts of our lives.
Our lives speak more than our works do, and those lives should speak about being transformed by Jesus, of working out our salvation, of being in it together. And it’s by this all men will know we are his disciples.
Jo Derry is a journalist and volunteer youth worker based in London.
