For the history-nuts among us, I thought I would put out a readers-digest of the history of modern youth ministry. This includes a few significant social-historical events that have genuinely influenced the direction and shape of Western Youth Ministry that we see today.
Have fun!
18th-19th Century
Age-specific ministry began during The Industrial Revolution when children worked six-day weeks instead of receiving formal education. In response Robert Raikes developed Sunday School, an age-segregated environment that taught religion and literacy. Sunday Schools replaced the larger ‘children’s church’ meetings that existed, streaming them into smaller age groups.
When state-mandated midweek education took over teaching in the 1870s, Sunday Schools became purely Bible focused.
Following this, The Society of Christian Endeavour (SCE) was founded as a participative, relationship-oriented gathering to help older children transition into church. SCE meetings tended to be large, sometimes multi-denominational, mid-day gathering of young people into their twenties with Bible study around a meal. It grew quickly and was well integrated into the life of the church.
Pre WW2
The SCE movement grew until the 1940s when it was overshadowed by parachurch organisations. This was the beginning of the end of the SCE meetings.
During this time, psychologists had just presented the ground-breaking concept of Adolescence (G. Stanley Hall, 1941), which became more potent in the zeitgeist as drafted young people left home to fight in wars.
By the close of World War II, increasing secularisation was drawing adolescents away from the church, resulting in the need for a more dramatic and intentional missional response to young people.
1940s – 1970s
Denominationally-specific youth fellowships tried to do this with mixed success. It was the parachurch groups Youth for Christ (YFC) and Young Life (YL) that took centre stage. By this point the SCE movement had been totally replaced and had all but disappeared from churches.
YFC led contextually accessible rallies for thousands of young people. YL, however, focused on individual relationship-building. They emphasised ‘winning the right to be heard’, by which they meant ‘gain[ing] the friendship and respect of students before expecting them to listen to the claims of Christ’ (Mark Senter, When God Shows Up, 2010, p.220). This was the first instance of incarnational youth ministry. It was in the 1950s that YL first used that term.
Going back to the 1910 Edinburgh World Mission’s Conference, two Missiologists referenced something called the missio Dei as part of the Church’s mission. Missio Dei, or ‘the mission of God’, reconfigured mission from being church-based (they come to us) to being culture-based (we go to them). This use of missio Dei came to prominence in the 1960s and both YFC and YL grew up saturated in its convictions.
By this part of the 20th Century, the Salvation Army began using choruses on the streets in evangelism, which soon developed into songs in their own right. By the 1950s, these choruses abounded. This – mixed with a sudden evangelical mission to young people in Britain and the Jesus Movement’s desire to embrace the music of culture in America – created entirely new forms of Christian music. This music fashioned an early bridge between the Charismatic renewal of the 70s and the Restoration movement of the 80s, culminating in the ground-breaking and ecumenical hymnbook, Songs of Fellowship. Off the back of this came the rise of Christian bands and alternative youth sub-culture. D.C. Talk were perhaps the most prolific of this kind in America.
1980s
Youth ministry in the following decades developed depersonalised programming in tension with personal relationship-building. Often these represented different strategies and clashed when they came together.
By the late 80s, John Wimber’s visits to St. Andrew’s Chorley Wood gave rise to New Wine and Soul Survivor alongside the already popular Spring Harvest. These festivals gathered a broad range of traditions together and united them through music. They showed that music was a relevant factor in unifying diverse Christian groups, and that it was essential in engaging specifically with the culture of young people.
These large events across Britain (Spring Harvest, New Wine, Soul Survivor) echoed the contextual attraction of early YFC rallies. The ‘worship leader’ became the hero of youth ministry and mission culture, and especially in the UK was supported by popular bands such as Delirious and The World Wide Message Tribe.
In the 80s and 90s, the techniques of these organisations were emulated in some wealthy churches, which then eventually trickled down to the rest of us, creating the modern church-based ‘youth pastor’. These youth pastors developed much of the standard project templates that we use today.
In 1988, Resolution 43 from the Lambeth Conference called ‘the closing years of this millennium a “Decade of Evangelism” with a renewed and united emphasis on making Christ known to the people of his world’.
1990s
by the early 90s contextual church planting, rather than youth-driven initiatives had become the accepted approach to local mission. Building on Resolution 43, the report Breaking New Ground established church planting strategies to ‘underchurched’ areas (1994:9) to ‘attract those who do not normally attend worship’ (35). It was the first widely reported Anglican document that grappled ‘positively’ with how postmodernity might affect how we ‘do church’.
During this time ‘Missional Church’ entered vocabulary, and George Lings began to document examples of contextualised, missional church planting in the Church of England to inspire others in Encounters on the Edge (1999-present). This all sowed early seeds for Fresh Expressions.
In the mid 1990’s with contextualized, relational mission now firmly in the church zeitgeist, there was a resurgence of detached relational work. In America this was driven by the work of Andy Borgman, and in the UK, it was Pete Ward. This represented the ‘second wave’ of incarnational youth ministry with a greater focus on culture.
In the late 90s, early proponents of intergenerational ministry began to publish as an alternative to the two most popular models of the time; incarnational and funnel youth ministry. They (perhaps unknowingly) were recreating some form of the SCE movement. This was a direct response to what they saw as an increasing segregation between ‘church’ and ‘youth’.
2000s
Fresh Expressions – most notably Messy Church, and Café Church – began to gain traction across a few mainstream denominations. A decade after Breaking New Ground came the 2004 Mission-shaped Church [MSC] report. Where Breaking New Ground saw church planting and early forms of fresh expressions as ‘supplements’ to Anglican life which sustained the parish system (Bayes, 2006:10), MSC saw them as entities effectively separate to the governing life of the parish (2004:xi, 12). This — along with supporting Bishops Mission Orders (2007; updated 2008, 2012) — gave Fresh Expressions recognition as authorised ‘expressions’ of the Anglican Church and therefore the ability to define liturgy, leadership, and practices outside the usual confines of Anglican Law.
From MSC came the officially branded Fresh Expressions movement. This was an ecumenical approach to British mission that included six major denominations and three well-known charities as partners. This was the far reaching and widely embraced result of a five-decade paradigm shift. Youth Ministry – as we know it today – largely grew up in this context. It became to be seen by many circles as an informal and broad form of Fresh Expression. This is important considering its projects had pioneered many of the practices largely adopted by the wider spectrum of Fresh Expressions.
Moving our focus back to America, in the 2000s new thinkers revisited incarnational youth ministry with some fresh ideas, most notably Andrew Root and Kendra Creasy-Dean. This was the third wave of incarnational youth ministry. The missional perspective of the church as a whole, however, started to shift its focus to ‘the missing generation’ of 20s and 30s. This was arguably the generation failed by the last decades of youth ministry. Because of this, these key incarnational authors started to branch out, and – especially in the case of Root – began writing to the wider church, rather than simply youth workers.
The popularity of the festivals of the 90s continued into the 2000s and became increasingly blended with an aim to reach young people while engaging with youth culture more specifically. This development was been influenced by modern recording-house based project churches such as Hillsong, Bethel and Jesus Culture.
The Emerging Church Movement of the late 90s and early 2000s took brief centre stage and saw the church as a poor representation of what it was supposed to be. They said it had, as a result, produced shallow or false Christians. Figures like Rob Bell had a strong influence on youth workers – thus youth ministries – across America and the UK.
The last decade
Youth ministry back in America still enjoyed a vibrant training and resourcing market, however in the UK, the number of youth ministers lasting beyond one contract dropped dramatically, and many churches stopped raising money for it. Conferences came and went, and the church started to look with renewed vigor at new missional ideas such as pioneering ministry theory and Fresh Expressions (which in this decade developed partnerships among almost all major denominations in the UK).
There are fewer youth ministers in the UK and fewer people in youth ministry training in the UK than there was ten years ago; however, it must be noted that there were many more ten years ago than there were twenty years ago. We haven’t seen an exponential drop, but rather a spike alongside the missional renewal of the 90s.
There are still great charities and groups offering quality resourcing (Like Youth for Christ, Youthscape, Urban Saints etc.), but the local church youth pastor – upon the models of the last few decades – is certainly struggling.
The future?
Youth Ministry today is a very different beast to it was in the mid 90s, which in turn was different to the 60s-80s, which was also different to the pre-1940s, and different again from the industrial revolution. All these, however, have played an important part in the almost-Frankenstein’s monster of youth ministry approaches we have in the UK today. It is a rich historic tapestry indeed!
Change certainly needs to happen. Youth Ministry needs sounder theological foundations, a clearer relationship with church, a realistic approach to mission, a bold stance both within and outside culture, and a much more solid united identity. It’s still very tribal, a little bit ritualistic, very segregated from the wider body, and (at least in my opinion) is in many cases as deep as a teaspoon.
I’m encouraged, however, to know that as a movement, Youth Ministry is still very young, so there is still lots of clarity to be had, and growth to happen. We are infants, but growth comes with growing, not just groaning.
We don’t have things like the Reformation to look back on as a melting pot for healthy practices to emerge and be challenged by. We don’t have hundreds of years of trial and error to perfect the ultimate ‘lock in.’ We don’t have ancient ecclesiastical giants to look up to as archetypal youth pastors (with perhaps the exception of Mike Yaconelli!). We’re still babies.
Although ministry among young people was happening in some form before the 1940s it was largely part of a broader whole; over-specialisation and the unhelpful compartmentalism we experience today are largely traits of the 20th Century. We may need to go back a little to go forward a lot.
If we want youth ministry to thrive, and for there to be serious competition in the positions we create, then the whole church collective needs to work together towards biblically solid foundations for its future. We need to pull together, not keep looking for tribalized wedge-issues to separate us. There is nothing less than the glory of God and the salvation of young people on the line. Let’s do this together!
I imagine in the years to come that youth ministry will be largely supported by ‘tent-making’ jobs, and (I hope) will learn towards a facilitation model where the worker’s main responsibility will be the enabling of the wider church to do mission and ministry among young people. The future will tell!
