Youth ministry mirrors what happens in the wider culture. If we look outside the church, we see youth culture has conquered most aspects of contemporary life. Now, adults, young people and children all share in a common, media-generated, consumer culture. Youth ministry hasn’t grown up. It simply has colonized the adult church, which has become more adolescent.
From Education to Entertainment
Historically, youth ministry was a form of Christian education developed to aid in passing on the faith to young and old alike. The expectation for youth ministry was that it should educate young people in the Christian faith. While education has remained a strong theme in many denominations, parachurch groups such as Young Life introduced a new pattern based on entertainment.
“It is a sin to bore a kid with the gospel,” said Jim Rayburn, the founder of Young Life, who also said, “If you want young people to come to Sunday School, don’t hold it on a Sunday, and don’t call it school.”
Youth for Christ grew from similar entertainment-based roots, holding spectacular rallies featuring celebrities and sports heroes that attracted tens of thousands of people. Both groups said ministry with young people should be entertaining and that evangelism among young people must find a way to reach them within their own cultural world.
As the historic, educational foundations of youth ministry gave way to entertainment-based models, youth ministry became more adolescent. Instead of youth ministers helping young people become more adult, the opposite was happening; youth ministers were becoming more like young people.
These developments became supercharged with the advent of the Jesus Movement in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when ministers began to adopt the style of the youth subculture. Christian publishers, record companies and bookstores quickly followed suit.
As youth leaders grew churches, they took their musical preferences and youth-orientated worship and preaching styles with them. This development is now so pervasive that we are locked into the round of the latest festival, the newest and hippest songs, and the coolest worship celebrities. We’ve become just like our kids.
Following the Drift
When we see retired guys buying Harley Davidsons and dressing in leather, and moms swapping clothes—or boyfriends—with their daughters, we shouldn’t be surprised at the developments in the church.
There was a time when young people wanted to grow up. Now, adults don’t want to be young again; they actually see themselves (and package themselves) as young. Christian adults have refused to abandon their youth-orientated Christian subculture, and they’ve taken it with them into the adult church.
Occasionally, there are signs that youth ministry is being reformed and renewed by movements that focus on historic practices of the church. I’m as excited as the next person about such efforts, including the emerging church.
What’s interesting, though, is how these developments are packaged and sold. We’re consuming and identifying with this new authentic culture in much the same way people visit small independent bookstores rather than chains or buy organic vegetables rather than supporting the local superstore.
My point is there’s no real escape from the cultural changes which youth ministry has set in motion for the church. We may tell ourselves we’ve come of age, but the truth is much more complex and disappointing.
Instead of selling the fiction that youth ministry has come of age, we need to come clean about our own complicity in dumbing down not only youth ministry, but also the broader church. We can’t lead believers toward spiritual maturity if we remain committed to infantilizing the church.
Pete Ward has been involved with youth ministry since 1980 and is the author of Selling Worship (Authentic Media), God at the Mall (Hendrickson) and most recently Gods Behaving Badly: Media Religion and Celebrity Culture (Baylor University Press).
