I’m completely with Martin. We need a revolution.
The Church at large has proved itself utterly incapable of managing the pace of change required. I see a lot of idealism about the Church among Christian networks, but very little evidence of the Church actually being relevant (like properly deeply relevant) or particularly transformative (a few honourable exceptions aside). Like any revolution, any way forward is going to require a little less asking for permission and a little more just doing things differently, regardless of whether 'the Church' likes it or not.
Here are three ways I think we can do that:
1. We need a funding revolution
Money for youth work generally comes from conservative churches, or from conservative donors to parachurch organisations. As the UK Church becomes less conservative, the investment is falling. But churches and organisations still operate as if that's where the money has to come from - so they still make the conservative pitch (ie it's about the number of conversions and/or new bums on seats). This is not necessarily head-in-the-sand behaviour; most donations come from over-50s who are still typically more conservative. But there are alternatives which we could do more to explore. Local crowdfunding has potential as does the model of youth work as social enterprise (where young people are engaged in business for social good).
Often we are hampered by a perceived need for scale in order to justify ourselves, when actually that doesn't deliver meaningful long-term support or change and is un-replicable.
We shouldn't wait for churches to approve these new approaches; we should just do them.
2. We need a structural revolution
We (rightly) recognised a while back that parachurch organisations couldn't provide a sustainable context for youth ministry so shifted our emphasis onto church-based ministry. But the Church is just too conservative to make the changes required to meaningfully connect with young people today.
Also, being part of a church is now a genuinely weird thing to do. Church-like communities are almost non-existent anywhere else in contemporary culture. Recent government research has confirmed this - apparently churches are the most diverse places in British society. That's something to really celebrate, but it's also a sign of just how difficult it is to create and sustain that kind of community. It's really not normal now for most people to belong to any kind of confessional and intergenerational community.
So we really need investment in new communities, of all different types. I remember the youth church debate in the 90s where there was so much energy expended on whether youth churches really counted as churches if they weren't properly intergenerational (let alone if they didn't practice this or that, etc) - all while my generation was busy leaving the Church at a record-breaking rate. I'm a big fan of the intergenerational church community, and I'm definitely not saying that Soul Survivor clones are the way forward - but we need to find new contexts for Christian youth ministry and not wait for denominational approval before we do.
3. We need a theological revolution
In my work I generally find that people will happily change their financial and structural models as long as they don't have to change their theology. But actually this is the biggest need. It's less about what we believe (although that is important, and some new ways of articulating Christian faith are badly needed), but it's particularly how we believe that really matters.
By-and-large, almost all churches have bought into the American evangelical-pentecostal ideal that belief = something to be certain of and passionate about (otherwise you're not a real Christian, or one of those lukewarm ones on the edges). But that's not how most young people today construct meaning, and in those circumstances where it is, it's often a bad thing.
I wrote recently in the magazine (Youth Work In The Age Of Consumerism - here) that we needed to do more to recognise the doctrinal forces of our contemporary culture (consumerism being the biggest, affecting education, family, identity, sexuality, and so on). It's actually when our Christian story becomes an anti-doctrinal force that we can do the muscular work of creating space so that young people can explore life.
Well that's my three-pence worth for an agenda for revolution!
