Closing the Chasm

As a youth pastor and life-long youth worker, I’ve always tried to be a student of culture. So much of what we do in youth ministry is missional in its approach and missionary in its activity. Youth ministry has been shaped for well more than 15 years by words like incarnation and transformation, and more recently by words like postmodernity and emergence. This has led us to an openness and innovation that, at least from where I stand, is able to be more fluid and flexible than other ministries in the church.

As a result of this, though, a chasm has grown that is not good for our students or the church. In an attempt to create relevant ministries that reach students, we at times have allowed that to replace a more comprehensive wrestling of the church’s relevancy with our culture-at-large. We have created little “ghettos,” to use a phrase coined by Kenda Dean and Chap Clark. We have become segregated by removing our students from key adult influencers. This has led us to a crisis in the church.

I think for at least 10 years youth workers and youth pastors have been rethinking and evaluating our long-term effectiveness. In our search there is a growing desire to be comprehensive and integrative with other ministries in the church, but we just haven’t known how to get there. This is evidenced by the following that was found in an article written by Kenda Dean and Paul Yost.

“Literature from within the field of religious education has argued for more than two decades that young people should be integrated into the total religious community, rather than ‘ghettoized’ into discrete religious youth ‘programs.’ By and large, current models of religious youth work do not reflect religious educators’ concern for adolescents’ integration into the total religious community, with the discrete religious youth ‘program’ being the norm for religious youth work.”
(Dean and Yost, pg. iii)
This statement seems just as relevant, if not more so, today than when it was first reported to the Carnagie Council in 1991. Much of what is done in youth ministry revolves around what we do in our programming. Adjustments to deal with their greater question, like they say in this quote, have been left unaddressed in many churches. In the defense of youth ministry, we are on the front lines many times, trying with all we have to reach a generation with the message of the Gospel. It was said that the best chance to reach someone with the Gospel was before they turned 18, and now recent stats tell us that has dropped to 13. There has been an 85 percent drop in those who have made a decision after their 13th birthday. That has created a sense of urgency in youth ministry, a try-anything-at-all costs mentality for the sake of this generation. In light of that, though, there are a couple of things from Dean and Yost’s statement that jump out at me.

1. The date, 1991. The date itself presumes that this conversation has been going on since the early ’70s, a time when youth ministry in the Nazarene church as a profession was just showing up on the radar screen.

Their statement seems to have been prophetic, a clarion call to the church to adjust or pay for its lack of apparent response to the issues at hand — that being disconnection through the segregation of the age groups. Much of the clamoring we are hearing from various corners of the church today, including the Emerging Church movement, include a move back to a more integrated, multi-generational model of ecclesiology for our children and adolescents. A call, given evidence in this article, that is almost 20 years old. Yet they notice this trend happening as early as the mid-’70s.

I realize these are not new questions for the church. The church has always been embattled with keeping its youth “awake,” so-to-speak. Remember the story of Eutychus in Acts. But when held in the light of youth ministry and its growth into professionalism, with the longevity and educational systems now in place, some of the issues we are facing seem new to us, and are just now, almost 20 years later, being addressed. You’ve heard and seen, like I have, firsthand reports of students who graduate from high school and church at the same time. There is an outcry to stop the bleeding, but no real attempts to address the greater issue: the segregation of our students from adults.

2. That leads to the second point, that being the lack of response then and now to their concern.

In his book, Hurt, written in 2004, Chap Clark talks of where teenage “ghettos” have taken us in our churches, our schools, and to a greater extent, our culture-at-large. It’s what he calls, “the world beneath”; that place created by high school students that is their “zone,” the place where they learn to live and survive, mostly separated from significant relationships with adults.

Let me quote from his book to help us further understand his perception of the problem, as well as what he sees as a part of the solution.

“The most vital things those close to individual midadolescents [his word for high school students] can do are first, understand their world, and second, provide boundaries for them in a way that will keep them from making seriously negative choices even as they attempt to navigate this difficult developmental phase of life … This help is at its best when an adult, or better yet, a community of adults seeks to truly understand what life is like for contemporary adolescents and then lovingly surrounds them with support, nurture, and authentic care.” (Chap Clark, pg. 70)

These words aren’t new to most of us; we’ve heard them said in different ways, but they can serve as a reminder of the missionary task that is ours in reaching the youth culture-at-large. The further away in age I am from adolescents, the more work it is for me to understand how they think and why they do what they do. I’m not sure I’ll ever fully understand, since I’m not sure I understood why I did what I did when working my way through that stage of life. Regardless, it is one of the tasks of the church and youth ministry.

At this pivotal time in their lives, the church has the potential to become one of the most age-integrated groups that you can find anywhere in our culture; but unfortunately, for many it has become age-segregated instead. Youth churches are springing up throughout the country in our larger ministries. But even in medium-sized churches we are choosing to provide our own worship services that create a “vibe” we’re comfortable with, whomever the “we” is in that particular location. This division usually happens because of generational differences in what one thinks “worship” or “church” is. Both the congregational and youth leadership are not addressing the larger issues related to ecclesiology. Where will students go when they graduate from the youth group if they feel there is not a place for them in the church?

I remember as an adolescent being surrounded by a host of adults as I sang in the choir, worked in the nursery, taught a second-grade Sunday School class, and worked in our VBS helping with everything from athletics to teaching the Bible classes. As I went about the business of the church, I was at the same time surrounded by adults who were mentoring and modeling for me what life and ministry was about. I attended small to medium-sized churches all my life — some of the very fabric of the life of those churches rode on the backs of the students who were a part of the ministries there. We were significant contributors. We were needed.

I wonder if the same could be said today. With the fragmented family, it seems even more important that we move toward an integrated, multi-generational ministry in our churches. By fragmented, I’m not just talking about divorce and broken homes, but also students who come to us from non-Christian families, or are displaced from their extended families by distance. There are many students who come into our churches who quite possibly have never had meaningful contact with an adult. They don’t come with their parents, nor are they greeted by aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins. They need surrogate parents and grandparents, adopted relatives, who fill in the gaps left by the absence of their spiritual parents and extended families.

So the question for us to wrestle with together is: Where do we go from here? We face the pressure every week of coming up with something that is age-appropriate and relevant to the spiritual development of our students. We are understaffed, underfunded and short on resources when we try to do things alone. But if we were honest, every ministry in the church would be able to say the same thing.

We can be confident in knowing that there are others on this journey with us — our senior pastors, church boards, church staff members, youth staff, Sunday school teachers, small group leaders — and we’re all looking for some of the same answers. This is a church issue, not just a youth ministry issue.

So, here are some questions for us to chew on together as we work to close the chasm. I'll look forward to continuing the conversation in the Disucussion Forum:

Discussion Starters:

1. How are you seeing evidence of the ministries in your local church functioning as segregated entities? Does this segregate age groups?
2. Do you see this creating silos and turf wars when it comes to areas like facility use, budgets, shared resourcing for special events, etc?
3. What are some ways that your ministry teams work collaboratively?
4. How are you students used as a support role for your children’s ministry? Worship arts ministry? Senior adult ministry? Support ministries of the church like ushers, greeters, etc.?
5. How committed do you see your church when it comes to making room for students to be involved in significant ministries?
6. What changes can you begin to talk about that would move your student ministry to a more collaborative approach with other ministries? Who are the key stakeholders in that?
7. What changes would you have to make in your student ministry to begin to see this through?
8. Would you be willing to write an article for this website on family ministry and how it is being used to connect ministries and age-groups? Contact Mark Holcomb at epworthpulpit@olivet.edu if you are interested, and be sure to mention the topic you would want to write about. We would love to hear from you.

References
Clark, Chap. 2004. Hurt, Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers. Grand Rapids, MI. Baker Academic Publishing.

Dean, Kenda Creasy and Yost, Paul R.. February 1991. A Synthesis of the Research on, and a Descriptive Overview of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish Religious Youth Programs in the United States. The Carnagie Council of Adolescent Development, Washington, DC.