I don’t think enough has changed in youth work over the decades. It feels like you could time travel a youth worker from 1991 to the present day and they’d obviously be completely confused and terrified by the digital world. Then you could take them to a youth group and I suspect that in, a lot of youth groups, they’d immediately feel totally at home haven’t been able to break out of the way that youth work has been done for 25 years.
I think there have been lots of positive changes in youth culture. It would be easy to list all the new terrible things that young people can do or have access to but I think it’s worth saying that it’s not all bad, it’s just complex and fractured. I think, as with so many areas of life, what we’re now dealing with is a more complicated and difficult picture in which no one answer, model or approach works any more. In schools’ work 25 years ago you struck an agreement with one local authority to engage across a bunch of schools. Now you’d have to have a conversation with 25 academies and figure out what you are going to do with each of them separately.
It’s impossible to ignore the huge change in young people’s access to knowledge, ideas and friendships online. It’s incredibly exciting but asks so much more of youth workers. When I was a teenager we all went to youth group because that one evening on a damp Thursday night in a damp square hall was a genuine social engagement that you didn’t get anywhere else in the week. So, even though it was probably a little bit boring, the chance to connect was compelling. That world no longer exists. It’s more complicated to connect with people physically as well as virtually.
I think we need a real wake up for the Church around young people. It’s fantastic that some young people come to our youth groups but, if you step back from that, as a Church, we’re not engaging with most young people in the UK in any way. I actually think most youth workers know that. I’m not sure most church leaders do. I think there’s a real challenge to church leadership to look and understand what’s going on in youth work at the moment. I don’t think it’s a big enough priority and they don’t know enough about it.
I hope we’ll look back in ten years and see a passionate and dramatic shift to engage with young people differently
We have to acknowledge that the majority of young people now live their teenage lives, in every possible way, outside of any engagement with the Church. I would love to see a burst of energy across Christian youth work that begins to bubble up with creativity. What are the new models, approaches and ways of meeting young people, speaking to them, engaging with the issues that matter to them, showing that our faith has something to say about all the things that they’re engaged with?
What I long for is a renaissance of energised, creative and at times crazy, innovative youth work. I think we’ve got to enter a period of really seeking and searching for new approaches and models. Some of these won’t work, but we’ll learn as much through those as anything else. We need to find ways that are bigger and different to just a weekly youth group gathering.
There’s a growing conversation about evangelism in youth work. We’ve lost our confidence in evangelism but we also deep down know that the methods and approaches and models are probably a bit ill-fitting too. Here’s an illustration from Luton which has energised us; there are 106 churches in Luton: 75 per cent of those churches don’t do youth work, 50 per cent don’t have any young people at all, 25 per cent have got a few young people in the congregation but aren’t doing any intentional work with them. That only leaves about 25 per cent of churches who are doing any sort of formal youth work. Roughly half of those are really only looking inwards – they’re, rightfully, discipling young people in the congregation but they’re not looking any further than that – that leaves 12 to13 churches who are engaging with young people missionally in the community. There are nearly 23,000 teenagers in our town. How are 12 to 13 churches going to engage with 23, 000 young people? We need to challenge churches to look outwards and work missionally. That has to be the default setting of youth work going forward.
Without sounding too dramatic, we’re at a crossroads: the Church is disengaged from young people. What I hope is that the Church as a whole – leadership, youth workers, congregations, volunteers – will collectively say ‘let’s reimagine this together and figure this out’. I think over the next decade we’ll see a new wave of innovative youth work. I hope we’ll look back in ten years and see a passionate and dramatic shift to engage with young people differently and talk honestly about the things that matter and engage with mission and be prepared to let go of some of the models that worked in the past but don’t anymore.
