Navigating today’s youth culture can be challenging for even the best youth workers. Yet, no one can deny the impact that youth culture has on shaping youth, something that makes understanding it imperative for youth workers. To help us do this, we consulted four experts: Chap Clark, David Kinnaman, Dan Lambert and Christian Smith.

YouthWorker Journal Senior Editor Chap Clark is also a professor of youth, family and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary. Chap has used his extensive research to author several books, including Hurt: Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers.

A professor at John Brown University, Dan Lambert is passionate about teaching youth workers how to navigate the youth culture maze. Dan’s book, Teaching that Makes a Difference, is used in youth ministry programs around the world.

Author of the best-selling book unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity, David Kinnaman is president of Barna Group. He is also a frequent speaker about trends, teenagers and generational changes.

Christian Smith is a professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. His groundbreaking work, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, emphasizes the interplay of cultural influences, family and religious motivations in teenagers’ lives.

Youth Worker Journal: What is youth culture?

Chap Clark: Youth culture is a label used to identify the distinction between what kids and teens prefer over and against what adults prefer. The dark side of youth culture is that it became a tool of marketers to hone their products to increase their sales and to exploit kids in an already fragmented society.

Dan Lambert: Youth culture is everything that adolescents are exposed to and participate in that has to do with their friends, society, media, school and family.

Christian Smith: Culture has to do with the norms, values, symbols and moral outlooks of groups of people. Youth culture is a subculture entailing distinctives pertaining to youth. The emphases in terms of lifestyle are to have fun and not fail. Morally and theologically, the challenge is one of relativism and pluralism.

YWJ: What are the biggest factors influencing youth culture?

Chap: The abandonment of kids. As each decade goes on since the beginning of adolescence more than a hundred years ago, there is less adult support. Kids are more on their own to figure out how to become a unique self, with the razor sharp teeth of marketing perpetuating a separation between kids and adults.

David Kinnaman: With some teens, family is the dominant influence; others are more influenced by peers. Teenagers go through periods of development when family, media, technology, peers and education take on a greater or lesser role. As a youth worker, the most important skill is to discern when a student needs to be pushed toward a new horizon. Can you recommend a book, movie, magazine or Web site that connects to their spiritual questions? Do they need more time with their parents? Are their peers helping or hindering their spiritual development?

Christian: The culture-shaping power of mass consumerism. That drives a lot of educational imperatives, career aspirations, family decisions even views of romance. Life is about succeeding in a career to get money to spend to have fun. People are essentially consumers. Society is redefined as a big market. Religious faith is, at best, a consumer commodity to enjoy or not. Technological and media influences are part of this but secondary.

YWJ: How do media and advertising impact youth culture, and how should youth workers respond?

Chap: On the macro level, there are adept marketers of all stripes, including media. They are adept at reading cultural trends they can exploit. On the micro level, media don’t have influence unless the relational influences have abdicated their roles. The primary relational influence in a teen’s life is the parent. The second tier is an involved non-parental person. The third tier is a non-involved, non-parental adult or peers. Media is a fourth-tier influence. If the first two tiers are doing well, the third and forth tiers don’t have a lot of impact.

Dan: Advertisers know more about teens than anyone else in the nation because they spend millions of dollars every year studying teens, trying to shape their demands. Youth workers have to be familiar with what kids are being exposed to and see that as teaching opportunities. Teaching kids to avoid things isn’t really teaching them. From a very early age, we have to teach kids how to be wise consumers of culture. We need to teach them to take in messages, analyze them and critique them based on biblical teaching.

David: Media and advertising increase skepticism among teens. They are marketed and advertised to death, so they become savvy and jaded. They know when you’re trying to sell them something. Be careful not to promote a talking-point faith, in which all the answers and ideas are simple, formulaic and rehearsed. Help youth see beneath the advertising to how it makes them react and then realize how the gospel addresses this.

Christian: Media and advertising narrate for youth who they are, usually in ways that compete with the story of the gospel. They create consumer and identity desires and form stories and persons to fit those. Youth need to be taught who they really are in view of Christ. They need to be given b.s. detectors to see the lies in media and advertising. They also need to be helped to see the good, challenging, insightful, beautiful and truthful aspects in some media, especially better films.

YWJ: Child and adolescent development expert David Elkind believes that adults have forced children out of childhood and into a premature adulthood. How has this impacted youth culture and how can youth workers respond?

Chap: Elkind’s view of rushing youth into adolescence is a form of abandonment. It’s not letting children go through the process of being children. This forces them into this time of wondering who they are, what kind of power they have and where they fit. For years, we’ve used the 5:1 ratio in youth ministry—one adult for every five kids. Now we need to have a better theology of church. We still need to have 5:1, but rather five adults for every one kid. We need to mobilize adults to care about the body of Christ. Communicate to empty nesters they’re not done; they need to choose two or three teens to pour themselves into. Encourage small groups to raise each other’s kids. The goal is not individual discipleship of teens but helping them to follow Jesus amid a group of saved adults.

Christian: The values of the adult world are pressing down into younger ages. Kids aspire to be like teens. Teens aspire to be like young adults. Young adults aspire to be self-sustaining and indulge the freedoms of not being fully grown up. We have youth who are at once more sophisticated and worldly, yet at the same time immature. It’s important to see teens in a larger cultural context, to see how they are products of our adult society, in which many Christians are comfortable. We must not “other” (or ostracize) youth. They are us in so many ways.

YWJ: How does—and how can—youth culture influence teens’ understanding of who they are?

Dan: The task of adolescence is identity development. Our culture is telling kids who they ought to be and what they ought to look like. Our task is to help kids be comfortable in their own skin, to counter the messages they receive in culture—take the emphasis off clothes, hair and outward appearance and emphasize the personality God has given them. As youth workers, we can help the church and community learn how to do that.

Christian: Mainstream culture tells youth they are individual consumers; their job is to succeed and have fun, to consume and enjoy life; and religion may or may not help toward that end. The ultimate issue is which story is the one that forms our lives? Youth workers can help youth see that people are out to get their money by appealing to images, emotions and identities. Youth need to see that cultural lies do not help them but hurt them, that believing false stories is not in their own interests.

YWJ: In light of today’s youth culture, how can youth workers help ensure their messages are heard and understood by youth?

Chap: Quit focusing on righteousness and teach kids to trust Jesus in every aspect of their lives. All sin is the unwillingness to trust Christ. Discipleship is being reminded that their identity is rooted in theology. Who they are is answered by letting them know Jesus particularly created them, died for them and called them. He does all of that while they’re located in community. Trust Jesus, and trust the people Jesus calls His body. As we do that, kids will discover who they are. Their identities will be formed as beloved children of God.

Dan: Each person who touches the life of an adolescent needs to understand he or she is shaping that teen’s life. It’s part of a holistic effort to raise a generation of kids whose values are in the right place. Rather than trying to reshape culture, we need to be reshaping kids, one at a time.

David: Use media to help communicate. Allow youth to participate in the process of learning. Engage teens to teach. Even if you’re the most gifted communicator, if you’re an adult, you start out with a disadvantage in trying to connect with youth. Much of what you say will be forgotten, but the way you construct the experience of learning will make a difference.

Christian: Get out of seminary and church populations and talk to different youth. Inquire. Probe. Ask for clarifications. Do informal interviews beyond traditional social networks. In the end, it will be personal relationships of care, investment and time spent that will make the most impact on the lives of youth.

YWJ: Anything else we should know?

Dan: The focus needs to be on discipling kids, not on preaching about the evils of culture. As we disciple teens, have an impact on their lives and attempt to shape their faith journeys, we reach a critical mass that will then impact and shape culture. When we focus on this, ultimately we’ll have the impact we want to have on culture.