I've been in Christian youth work for over forty years. When I started, many British churches had reasonably large populations of young people, and the country was rich in experienced local church youth workers who devoted unbelievable amounts of time, money and energy to leading their groups. Organisations like Covenanters, Crusaders, CYFA and Pathfinders flourished as dedicated adults believed they were being called into working with the young as the primary focus of their Christian service.
And just about all of these leaders were ‘amateurs’, by which I mean they had jobs (sometimes demanding jobs) outside their Christian work. The full-time specialists - people like me, who were ‘youth evangelists’, or those who taught and discipled young Christians at places like Hildenborough Hall and Capernwray - were few and rare. We worked against the background of the ongoing, sacrificial commitment of thousands of local church youth workers whose patient, unheralded service laid the foundations of countless adult Christian lives right across our nation. Without them, we'd have achieved very little.
churches all over Britain began to see professionalized youth ministry as the one most desirable ministry add-on if they were to solve the challenging problem of the youth exodus.
Then everything changed. Because of a statistic...
Somewhere in the late eighties, it started to be widely reported that 300 more young people were leaving the UK church every Sunday. (Spring Harvest dramatized the statistic by staging a ‘walk-out’ of an evening celebration by three hundred young people, just to show the adults how big the problem truly was.) The statistic caught people's imagination because it chimed in with much else that was being dimly perceived: lower rates of attendance in youth groups; more hostility towards faith in schools; larger numbers of evangelical families who found it hard to hang on to their children once they'd reached teenage years. And as a result, youth ministry suddenly took centre stage.
More and more churches started re-shaping their budgets to appoint full-time or part-time youth workers. Training courses burgeoned; books, magazines and conferences mushroomed to meet the demand. Just as congregations throughout the nation had suddenly started to build church halls a century earlier, so now churches all over Britain began to see professionalized youth ministry as the one most desirable ministry add-on if they were to solve the challenging problem of the youth exodus.
It was great to see youth ministry taken seriously for once, but I think the boom in full-time youth ministers has had two seriously adverse effects. For one thing, the key impulse in many adults' minds was to stop the drain; and so a style of work developed which was more oriented towards keeping the children of the saints, than towards reaching the unconverted. Organizations which had been working amongst truly difficult groups of teenagers (such as Frontier Youth Trust) found a lot of their financial backing and prayer support eroding as churches focused increasingly on their own in-house youth problems.
Second, the fact that trained full-timers were now assuming command, in what had previously been a spare-time, labour-of-love ministry, led to a great falling away in the numbers volunteering amongst the local church adults who would previously have been involved in youth work. As a result, I believe we've lost an incredible resource of wisdom, experience and local dedication which had been the unsung driving force behind most of the great youth work of the twentieth century.
Twenty-five years down the line, churches are now realizing that throwing money at the problem hasn't worked. Yes, wonderful things have been done, and some youth workers have been legends; but the full-timers haven't arrested the decline. The same is true in America, where professionalized youth ministry has a much longer history: according to a Pew Research Center poll this May, only 56% of those born between 1990 and 1996 would claim any Christian convictions – a 29% drop from the previous generation – although eight out of ten of those surveyed grew up in Christian homes, and a large majority must have passed through Christian youth work.
Our church youth groups are no longer an appropriate place for them to learn about Christian faith, make friends with Christians, be discipled into a living relationship with Christ.
Jay Kesler, one of the most original youth work thinkers ever, once said that we work with ‘A kids’, ‘B kids’ and ‘C kids’. The ‘A kids’ are those who come from Christian homes, and are familiar with our language, at home in our culture, experienced in our activities. The ‘B kids’ don't come from Christian homes, but from families whose values and outlook are not remarkably different; these are the young people who will become Christians without too much difficulty, and integrate reasonably readily into our groups. The ‘C kids’ are further away. They come from families which have had no meaningful influence from the Christian church for at least one or two generations. They will not fit easily into our structures, and they do not quickly see the point of what we are telling them.
Kesler commented that ‘A kids’ will bring ‘B kids’ along – and with these groups, the old adage that ‘teenagers are the best evangelists of teenagers’ has a lot of truth. But ‘C kids’ are a different matter. They are not looking for a peer group to belong to. Typically, they are looking for young adults (or even older adults) who will take them seriously and model for them what successful, fulfilled adulthood can look like.
Now the problem we're facing in Britain is that the proportion of ‘C kids’ is increasing all the time. Our church youth groups are no longer an appropriate place for them to learn about Christian faith, make friends with Christians, be discipled into a living relationship with Christ. The great majority of our youth enterprises are based on a model which works with the shrinking population of ‘A kids’ and ‘B kids’...but not with the majority of British young people now.
So Martin Saunders is absolutely right. We need a debate, a colossal re-think. We need an army of untrained but visionary adults in our churches who are willing to make youth work once again the high and holy calling of their lives. We need new structures which aren't geared towards shoring up the teenage numbers already within our churches, but instead reach out in new, daring directions to meet and work with the young people who at present can cheerfully ignore us for their next fifty years. It will be messy. It will be misunderstood. But we won't survive without it.
John Allan is a retired school chaplain and church leader from Exeter with no plans to retire from youth work.
