To Be or Not to Be?
Technology and Youth Ministry

Have you ever wondered, “How can I make my youth meeting like “Saturday Night Live” or MTV’s “TRL”? Maybe you wish you could have a youth meeting with the stage production of a U2 concert.

With the trend in many churches moving toward multicolored lighting, screens with moving imagery, and movie clips to supplement sermons as part of the worship service, many youth leaders are eager to incorporate the advances in technology into their youth ministry, as well. However, these great technological innovations also represent and cultivate great cultural shifts.

“Winds of change are blowing all around us,” says M. Rex Miller, futurist and communications expert. “Computer technology and the Internet are changing our world more than most of us realize. They are certainly shifting things in the church—whether we acknowledge their influence or not.”

With this in mind, YouthWorker Journal sat down with three leading authorities on the promises and perils of technology, its impact on youth culture, and its implications for youth ministry: M. Rex Miller, futurist and author of Millennium Matrix: Reclaiming the Past, Reframing the Future of the Church; Spencer Burke, youth consultant, founder of theooze.com, author of Making Sense of Church: Eavesdropped on Emerging Conversations about God, Community, and Culture; and Andrew Careaga, youth minister and author of eMinistry: Connecting with Net Generation, share their insights on technology and youth ministry.

YWJ: Rex, you say, “The medium is the message,” referring to the changes in technology and its implications for us. What does that mean?

Rex: Any medium creates boundaries or borders you work within, and every medium has strengths and weaknesses. You may have the same content, or message; but when you have different mediums for communicating that content, the medium affects the content itself. So we have to be context, or medium, sensitive as well as content, or message, sensitive.

YWJ: You talk about the interactive component of digital media as the development that makes our age so vastly different from previous times. Why is that?

Rex: When you look at teenagers today who are heavily involved in gaming, whether it’s just with the game itself or multi-user based, their interaction actually changes the outcome, changes the experience. It adds an element to the experience that is drastically and fundamentally different form the broadcast form of communication, where someone stands up front and we, the audience, accept it passively. You might be involved in standing up or clapping in a broadcast setting, but you’re not impacting or significantly changing the direction the service or meeting or message is going. To make a parallel, it’s more like improvisational theater mode. There are certain themes that come, but the audience members determine the form or direction of that theme. Young people growing up in an interactive digital age are not going to be satisfied simply sitting in pews and writing a few notes and applauding. They want to deconstruct the message, they want to share what others have to say, and they want a kind of feedback-like experience. Things tend to go through several evolutions before they cycle back around to the original source. Those evolutions change and filter and add more content and flavor to the message. Another venue that is more similar to an interactive mode is what advertising firms or animation firms do when they storyboard, or brainstorm, something—it’s a divergent form of thinking where the audience is involved. It’s a deconstructive process where you’re rethinking the case. It’s like a “living-lab” encounter versus the lecture form or print message, as in a broadcast form of presentation. Now youth ministers have to get used to the fact that we have an audience who can and wants to talk back.

YWJ: In the discussion about youth ministry and technology there seems to be a dichotomy with two opposing camps, so to speak. One group is convinced that the only way we can hope to reach this postmodern-digital age is with technology; the other group feels that technology is irrelevant and inconsequential with regards to reaching young people.

Rex: Technology is definitely key. It’s the primary world that our young people are living in. They have text messages, chat rooms, gaming, DVDs, and iPods. For example, with [Johannes] Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, one of the things the church began to do was to teach literacy as a fundamental skill, necessary in order to function, accept, and have access to the gospel. When the invention of the television made broadcasting possible, the church failed to teach that generation the literacy of broadcast, how to understand the format of a script or screenplay, and techniques of creating different emotional impacts; they never taught them about the medium and language of broadcast. I think today it’s essential that we help young people learn the grammar of the multimedia environment, the language and structure of an e-mail world, and what gaming entails and how one interprets gaming. And what about the music? How do you deconstruct and evaluate the meanings of songs and whether they are truthful or not— not merely, “If it’s on a Christian label it’s good, and if it’s on a secular label it’s bad.” We have to teach our young people the grammar and syntax of a multimedia world. That’s where youth leadership can have the most impact. More than just lecturing and telling young people what is right or wrong, we need to equip them to make wise choices. It’s not confrontational; it’s dialogical. When I was growing up, my youth leaders would tell us, “Don’t listen to rock ’n’ roll because it’s bad for you.” But we’d still listen to it.

Spencer: I believe fundamentally the top 10 percent of our quarrels in church are really style issues. Style has to do with whether we pass the offering plate or have baskets at the back, whether we have strobe-lights and the fog machines or a gothic cathedral with coffee and candles, whether we have a DJ or a choir. These do not deal with the essence of why we gather as the church. My concern lies in what churches, that consider themselves to be “emerging” or “adapting,” may be doing. If we don’t ask deeper questions we may think that money or other people’s models or programs will solve deeper problems that are actually occurring in church itself.

YWJ: It’s interesting that you draw that distinction with the digital culture because it appears there’s an apparent disparity: You have young people who during the week are interacting in the message boards, chat rooms, and Xbox games with multiple competitors, but they come to church where we are still doing the lecture form. In fact, our very understanding of youth groups and church is that the guru is on stage dispensing information to the passive audience. Could it be that we need to totally redefine our concept of church?

Rex: Completely. It’s no different than when Gutenberg created the first printed Bible and Martin Luther put together his 95 Theses, which completely redesigned what church was—the message, the structure, the type of leader, the music, the art. This is due in part to the fact that the brain gets rewired in absorbing the world through the printed form versus an oral world or absorbing the world through television versus print. It creates a new worldview that brings about kinds of structures to facilitate living in that environment.

YWJ: I find that very significant because in my understanding and experience it seems that young people come together for youth group, the youth leader presents whatever he or she has prepared, and there may be very little interaction. But it sounds as if the idea with interaction is that the leader cannot manipulate the conversation as much.

Rex: Right. As a youth leader you should ask yourself, “Is my involvement with the audience like that of a ‘prop,’ or is there interaction in creating the direction of the lesson? Am I capable of facilitating the conversation rather that being the center of it?” This is a different skill set altogether.
  
YWJ: Andrew, in your book you record the fascinating accounts of people who have come to faith through the Internet, chat rooms, et cetera, by establishing online friendships. Why do you think there is such a gravitation toward the Internet with spiritual questions?

Andrew: The Internet can be a very personal and intimate communications medium. It’s interactive. It’s two-way. Whereas traditional broadcast television and radio are often one-way, where people are told what to think or how to act, online people are able to have two-way communication in real time. Also there’s the anonymity factor. You can go into a chat room and no one knows who you are or what you look like. You can essentially create an identity that may not be remotely related to who you really are. Because of the anonymity people are much more willing to spill their guts in cyberspace, talk about issues they may not talk about face to face, or explore spiritual questions with a complete stranger—things they would never talk to a youth minister about.

YWJ: Does that mean that as youth ministers we haven’t created the environment where young people feel comfortable sharing their deepest questions and concerns?

Andrew: I do think that is the case. They’re emerging into adulthood; they’re testing the boundaries and asking, “Why do I believe what I believe?” We need to create an atmosphere that allows them to do that because they are going to ask those questions somewhere else if we don’t provide that opportunity for them.

YWJ: Does that mean the traditional broadcast method of communicating is no longer viable in a digital context?

Andrew: People no longer rely on hierarchical structures as in the past. Truth and authority are no longer handed down from on high; they are discovered through the search, through dialogue and recommendations from friends and even strangers—bloggers, et cetera. A network is developing. In the past, the church hierarchy was the final say on issues, but now people are looking at other alternatives. They have this vast network of knowledge available to them, so they don’t have to rely on what is being handed down by religious authorities. It’s similar to what took place with the Reformation and the printing press. Martin Luther and his colleagues were able to produce flyers and handbills that put that information in people’s hands. They no longer had to rely on the traditional methods of communication. People no longer trust the top-down institutions. And it’s because people can now get information elsewhere that could contradict and differ from our views. Other views and voices that are not traditional are being listened to; and it’s happening with the media, the government, and education. We are so bombarded with information and messages that we have to act as our own editors and sort through information. Young people have been marketed to all their lives. They can detect when the messages or voices are authentic and when they’re not. There’s more of a questioning and cynicism on their part.

YWJ: What does this mean for the role of the youth leader?

Spencer: We need to move from being lecturers to being facilitators. It can happen best with new tools, which is why I feel it can be “both/and.” It is awesome to think that if we can communicate and explore theology together, it can now be shared across the world without centralizing, censoring, and filtering institutions. Also, it’s taking a young person on a mission where they taste, touch, and feel the reality of what’s happening. I used to take my youth to the conference A Journey in Worship, and I would have them lay on their backs in the grass. We would read the creation story, and they listened to God’s amazing desire to be in relationship with each one of them. Then I would tell them to walk in silence with the creator. Now there wasn’t a strobe light, fog machine, or amplification; but it created an experience that facilitated the opportunity for them to learn.

YWJ: Spencer, you say in your book we should move from a “tour-guide” style of leadership to a “fellow-traveler” type of leadership. It sounds like the difference is that there is a deep relationship rather than a superficial one where the youth leader talks down to the teens.

Spencer: Yeah, it definitely is relational; it’s vulnerability in the relationship, as well. There’s no separation, like when Moses came down the mountain with this glow and everybody had this sense of wonderment—youth leaders tend to put up a veil. If they consider us leaders and we see them as people to care for, the veil breaks and there is a vulnerability factor. As a fellow traveler I’m saying, “I don’t think you’re going in the right direction, but let’s figure this out together.” In the past, we’ve been trained to, as soon as we don’t know about something, put up the veil and try to hide behind it. If youth leaders are going to continue to hide behind the veil of technology, it will become one other way of hiding from people. I’m worried that leaders will keep the bad instructional habits, which will not really help our situation.

YWJ: In many cases there is an awe around the youth minister; they are regarded as super holy, super spiritual, and totally different from the youth. It seems the veil is still up in place in a lot cases.

Spencer: I have a saying: “If I’m not a little bit embarrassed about what I said yesterday, I probably didn’t learn something today.”

YWJ: That’s quite humbling.

Spencer: It’s either humbling or honest. I’ve tried for many years to keep up the façade; and I used to feel I was failing other people if I didn’t keep it up. I think now I’m realizing more and more that staying behind the veil is failing my walk with Christ as much as it is failing anyone else. What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world—whatever that world is, whether it’s prestige, or the biggest youth group in America, fame, et cetera—if he loses his soul? Are the people you want to follow really people of stature you can’t touch or see or hear or understand or believe in; or is it somebody you feel is open and vulnerable? Spiritual growth needs to be less about being a hero and more about being a flawed human seeking God’s will. It gets back to technology: If we’re trying to create heroes and infomercials for Jesus, we’re lost; but if we find ways to capture the imagination of young people and create powerful stories that people can engage in, then I think technology really has some great answers for us. We shouldn’t aim to use technology for propaganda; rather, we should use it for art and expression.

YWJ: Do you think the “tour-guide” approach is still very much in place versus a “fellow-traveler” approach?

Spencer: I think there are some things that trap us. In the “tour-guide” approach you’re looking at externals; so vulnerability in a small groups is done through a checklist: “Have you looked at pornography? Have you lied to your parents? Have you taken drugs?” Whatever the externals are in that case, you can just lie. To think that these true or false questions with God or our friends create vulnerability is unwise. Vulnerability can only happen when we are prepared to be vulnerable with ourselves in the presence of the Spirit. Take, for instance, the story where the rich young ruler asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. He had followed all the rules since he was a kid, but he followed a checklist. He trusted only in his wealth, though he fooled everybody with his impressive checklist.

YWJ: It seems there is a developing trend among many youth leaders that the only way they can reach this generation is through the excessive use of technology. Do you feel this is appropriate?

Rex: I think that’s mistaken. I think young people want to deconstruct what we have built up and are hungry for a truly interactive, dialogical structure. There was a book some time ago called MegaTrends by John Naisbitt, and he said the more high tech you become, the more you “high touch” you need to become. This means the more you use technology, the more you have to balance that with a human-centered, or relational, format. The danger is in becoming overly enamored and dependent upon the tools and forgetting the relational need and character of the new medium.
 
Andrew: I’m not a big proponent of the spectacle. We tend to go for the spectacular, but I don’t think we can realistically compete with the spectacle of secular organizations doing just that. You have car companies who are now hosting raves for young people to show off their new cars. The church does not have the money to compete on that level—and we could certainly invest money in more worthwhile endeavors than trying to be glitzy like the stage production of a U2 concert. We need to focus on the important things. I might excite them for a little while and might whip them up into a frenzy; but after the lights go out and the music stops, what do you have left? Technology is worthwhile, but to trying to wow young people with spectacle is a futile effort. I don’t think we’re really wowing them as well as Madison Avenue or MTV. To communicate the message is the most important thing. What we are sometimes doing with technology is making the stage glitzier with lights and a fog machine and movie clips, but what’s changed? Technology should help us become more interactive and engage them more effectively—less marketing but more real discussion.

Rex: You’ve got this little bubble they come to during the week—very stimulating, very meaningful—but it has no adhesive to hold them together over a sustainable period of time.

YWJ: Rex, you’ve mentioned in your writings that given the advances in technology and the resulting differences in the generations’ views of the world, it’s a miracle we can communicate. Does that mean there has been a marked breakdown in family relationships, or specifically parent-to-child relationships?

Rex: It’s huge. Our sense of time—24-hour news in real time—and scope—the size of the world—have changed our sense of identity in this context. There are distinct worldviews.

YWJ: Does that mean young people are starved for maternal and paternal relationships?

Rex: Oh, absolutely. Young people travel in packs now. I was on a plane with an advertising executive, and he handled the Nike account and the Sony account. Their marketing studies showed that a 15-year-old in Beijing, China, has more in common with a 15-year-old in Los Angeles than they have with their own parents. The American Family Institute studies have shown that when kids reach the age of 13 or 14 they have no more than 34 minutes per week of conversation time with their parents, excluding scolding and correction. So where do they go? They go to peers. That’s where the chat rooms and message boards come into play.

YWJ: How can youth ministers meet that need and rise to the occasion of meeting students’ desires for meaningful relationships.

Rex: Bring young people together around a common identity that’s bigger than they are. Whether it’s through mission, service, or outreach projects, use interactive tools as vehicles to teach. Don’t let some prescribed content come through, creating a “living-lab.” In that context you’re creating relationships, you’re communicating values, you’re talking practical stuff. You take the youth, and they’ll come up with things they are interested in. Those experiences become the vehicle for learning and mentoring instead of this abstract idea that everybody comes and we teach them a Scripture verse or two. The young people set their agenda, but you have a framework and certain goals. Now the leaders become advisors and facilitators and mentors. The leaders become the dad or mom, because they’re passing along identity and accountability and affirmation as opposed to just information and a pat on the back every now and then. It means that the youth minister is much more deeply engaged in the lives of the individual youth members. It’s the difference between foster care and adoption. Foster care provides the basic needs, but it doesn’t provide the depth and ownership and security and intimacy that adoption does. If you’re just a temporary support for these youth, you’re a foster care system; but if you’re really talking about transformational programs, then you’re looking at adoption. More than simply looking up to youth leaders, young people want to be recognized and affirmed. We’re looking for someone to parent us and have substantial knowledge of who we are.

YWJ: What would a youth leader who seeks to be more interactive and engaging look like?

Rex: Someone who leads by example, is a positive role model, and is accessible. To have the tipped-colored hair, the shirt un-tucked, an earring, and a little goatee is simply not the solution. It’s OK for the leader not to have all the answers. It’s a carryover of the broadcast culture where the leader is up front and has to look too good to be true. The youth are realizing that the leader is just like everybody else; so they’d rather see authenticity, involvement, care, and concern than simply having the leader be the wittiest, funniest guy around.

YWJ: You mention in your writings that young people are suspicious and untrusting of pre-packaged brands. How does that affect evangelism? Isn’t the gospel pre-packaged?

Rex: If it’s the relational, networking form, it tends to be more word-of-mouth interest versus mass mail, slick brochure, “Come-to-the-concert” approach. I don’t think the gospel is necessarily pre-packaged; it’s highly contextual. That’s the difference in looking at it as a concrete message versus something that is contextual. For example, in the Bible the kingdom of God came through stories and different situations and circumstances. It was different for the rich young ruler than the woman with the issue of blood or man who was blind. Presented with different emphases depending on a person’s situation, it’s highly contextual. In the broadcast culture, the approach is: You get someone, you corner them, you ask if they’ve accepted Jesus, they say, “Yes,” or “No,” and, if not, we give them the four steps to do it. That may be the old message, but it’s not presented that way in Scripture.

Andrew: We need to realize it’s much more of a process and much less of a hit-and-run event than it has been in the past. That means you might not see the results as quickly. It’s much more of a discussion and exploration as a community. Youth are easily going to question us and have information that contradicts what we say, and we have to be prepared for that. This generation has been marketed to death; they’ve been hearing sales pitches all their lives. They want to see something authentic and real. They have a lower tolerance for the sales pitches; the images and language of marketing have become trite and cliché to them.

YWJ: Many churches are caught between wanting to be more engaging and relevant to young people and wanting to maintain traditional principles. They are afraid that if they incorporate technology more, they will alienate older generations. It seems that most of the Christian community wants to preserve the family aspect of going to church.

Spencer: I would say the Christian value there is that we honor each other and hold each other in high esteem and listen to each other. I think it’s very rude for a church that has a group of people who prefer a certain style of worship to simply say, “We’re going to do away with the organ, and we’re only going to try to reach young people.” Instead, we should say both can be honored. I don’t think that youth are necessarily saying, “Either/or.” They might be saying, “Both/and.” We don’t have to think in terms of one group winning and the other losing. It also means the parents must be open to newer styles and the youth must be open to more traditional styles. It also begs the question, “What is the church?” Is it an event once a week, or can church be at a local soup kitchen? Can’t the family go there and serve in the name of Jesus and do that together?

Andrew: I think it helps to take baby steps. Many churches have separate services for different preferences that worked rather successfully.