[The following is an extract from Rebooted.]

There is a magic word, known throughout the Western Church, for youth work – a word that magnificently summarises the complex needs and rich desires of the Church towards young people. That word is ‘something.’

“We need something for the teenagers.”

“Can we hire someone to do something with the kids?”

Something, however, doesn’t demand a vibrant tapestry of theology, or really any Biblical knowledge. Something doesn’t require us to undergird our youth ministry with a foundation of well thought-through, Bible-driven principles. Something – at its most monstrous – creates a youth work that develops independently from the church, and independently from the Bible.

Something can be a youth ministry that has developed around an understanding of the particulars without any foundation in the essentials. Often, the signs of this are youth ministries that changes shape every six months or so as one idea is exhausted, and another is needed to stoke the fires of novelty. Novelty is like a stone skipping on a pond: It will bounce for a while and maybe travel quite a way, but eventually it will stop and sink.

I want to contend that this relentless drive for something has made us a little woolly around the edges. We need to be honest and wake up to the real implications of proof-texted daily readings, spoon-fed Bible stories, and broadly low expectations for God’s work in teenage work in Church environments. If today’s Youth Workers were yesterday’s youth, then we clearly have our work cut out for us nurturing young people who can build tomorrow’s church. ‘Something’ just isn’t enough.

The Missing Bible

The Bible is like a large cavern filled with gold coins, jewels and priceless valuables, and we as Christians have been given shovels, wheelbarrows, and JCB excavators in order to mine its depths and take home its treasures. Every time we delve into the Bible, we are the richer for it.

When it comes to the practice of Youth Work, however, the Bible can easily become conspicuously absent. When we dive down and uncover the foundational principles that drive and undergird our youth work, the substance of it isn’t always there. The essentials are missing, or they are based on something other than the Bible.

It’s not that the Bible isn’t in our youth ministries at all, but sometimes it feels like passages have been sprinkled on later as an afterthought, or simply wedged in to add some mildly relevant proof-texts. It’s as if youth ministry’s foundations were assumed to be so glaringly obvious that we simply couldn’t miss them. The truth, however, is that youth ministry is fraught with exactly the same dangers as any other kind of ministry, and young people are not waiting to suddenly flower one day while we keep the seeds safe for that day. Young people are growing roots everywhere and they’re looking for solid ground – both spiritually and practically.

Nothing about youth ministry can be assumed or taken for granted; we must search the Bible for our youth ministry just as we do for our own growth, and as the church does for its own identity and direction. We must undergird everything we do in youth work with the Bible.

This difference is prepositional: Do we add the Bible to our youth ministry, or does our youth ministry emerge from the Bible? If we were to pull a loose thread, would we find the scriptures woven into the entire fabric of our practices, right through to the initial conception and underlying strategies? Or would we, perhaps, find a basically humanistic approach to youth ministry, shunted into a slightly different direction with some Christian ideology thrown in?

Let’s be clear from the start: ‘youth work’ or ‘youth ministry’ isn’t strictly in the Bible. You won’t find a plethora of youth clubs, summer camps, lock-ins and nerf wars in the pages of Scripture. Please don’t shut this book just yet, however, because all the component pieces that make up the youth work essentials are in the Bible! Principles like age-specific groups, relevant teaching, one-to-one discipleship, small group work, partnering with parents, developmental formation etc., are in the Bible. The Bible is the best youth work guide there is!

A Biblical Famine

It’s not that we youth workers don’t love or use the Bible. Of course we do! We know in theory just how good and enriching the Bible can be. But the question remains, do we actually know and understand enough of the material ourselves to build consistently on it, and point clearly back to it in all that we do?

Biblical literacy has fallen significantly and — if the statistics are to be believed — we are now facing the first generation of biblically illiterate youth workers. A study by LifeWay Research^[i] in America found that 55% of regular church attenders didn’t actually read their Bibles more than once a week, and 1 in 5 never read it at all. The story is similar in the UK. A ComRes survey^[ii] found that only 35% of church-goers read their Bibles every day and a YouGov report^[iii] found that only 14% of young people could properly differentiate a Bible story from other Children’s stories and fairy tales.

Amos, on point, says

“Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord GOD, “when I will send a famine on the land— not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. [Amos 8:11, ESV]

Throughout chapter 8, God’s people were warned of a great lack. Worship songs would turn to wails of pain (vv.8, 10) and the people will be lost and aimless (v.12). This is because God withdrew his voice (v.11). The presence of God was known through His voice and losing it was like losing access to all that brought life. There was no greater fear, pain or loneliness than the loss of the voice of God.

We, however, have full access to His voice – the words of life in the Bible. We should hunger and thirst for it daily more than anything else. Settling for the crumbs under the table when there is a fully cooked feast is just crazy! If God’s people from the book of Amos could see us now, using the Bible so sparingly and timidly — rather than drinking deep from the well — what would they think of us?

Consider that reading the Bible in a year is seen as quite a spiritual feat, but in reality, it only takes three 5 minute sittings a day. We spend four times that eating and drinking, and nearly eight times that on social media.

What about knowing the whole biblical drama so thoroughly that we can place any story or character or idea into its larger context, understanding the links and history that support it, and applying it relevantly to the 21st Century? This is surely a worthwhile venture, and a reasonable expectation for any Christian minister charged with teaching others.

The effect of this famine can be horrific. A couple of years back I was editing a Bible Study for a well-known and widely used youth resource on the story of David and Goliath in 1 Sam. 17. The session was great! Well balanced, good fun, creative, participatory, and with clear formational ideas. All the things good youth work teaching should be! When it got to the text however, everything fell apart.

The writer said, ‘David defeated Goliath because David was strong, David was skilled, David was able, and David knew who he was!’ There was no mention of God at all. Imagine teaching the story of David and Goliath and ending up with self-help and humanism! I’m all for teaching on the clarity of identity – but the story is not about David’s skills, prowess, or great strength; it’s about God; his honour, his glory, and his ability to use the rejected and the unexpected. This is definitely a ‘just look at how epic God is’ passage with an ‘he can use anybody to accomplish amazing things’ application.

One of the causes of this famine can be found on our bookcases. Take a minute and go to a popular daily study guide – either on paper or online. I’m guessing it will begin with a single verse or a short story from the Bible. This might be followed by a much longer explanation, perhaps a reflective activity and, (I imagine) an almost self-help focus on you, the individual. Many Bible studies and youth study resources follow this pattern of proof-text with explanation and reflection with a broad focus on making you feel good: very gently challenged, yet still comfortable. An ordinary Bible study guide can be read in 5 minutes and — with fuller reflection — is usually over in 20 minutes.

Bible study has become an exercise in convenience, helping you to quickly fit it in with your busy lifestyle. It requires require little from the reader and contains limited material that actually needs us to dig deep into a passage. The shovels, wheelbarrows, and JCB excavators are left collecting cobwebs. We leave with trinkets, but miss the gold. It’s now possible that we’ve become so used to the trinkets that we just don’t know what we’re missing.

If you’re interested in this issue – and want to know what we can do about it – grab a copy of Rebooted for yourself.

^[i] LifeWay Research: Americans Are Fond of the Bible, Don’t Actually Read It. http://lifewayresearch.com/2017/04/25/lifeway-research-americans-are-fond-of-the-bible-dont-actually-read-it/

^[ii] ComRes Research commissioned by The Bible Society: Taking the Pulse. http://www.biblesociety.org.uk/uploads/files/our_work/taking_the_pulse.pdf

^[iii] YouGov Report commissioned by The Bible Society: Pass it On. http://www.biblesociety.org.uk/uploads/content/projects/Bible-Society-Report_030214_final_.pdf

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

There’s a desire among some quarters of the church to be ‘prophetic’. Now, at first glance, that’s not a bad thing – 1 Cor. 14 tells us to eagerly pursue prophecy after all! The problems sneak in, however, when we equate the New Testament call to prophecy with the Old Testament office of Prophet. They are simply not the same thing.

Prophets in the Old Testament

An Old Testament prophet was a specific category of person, a divinely appointed office. They rarely enjoyed it, took great pains to avoid it, and we’re often lambasted for it too! Ezekiel lay on his side for 430 days, Isaiah walked around naked while preaching for three years, Hosea was told to marry a prostitute, Balaam had to compete with a donkey, Nehemiah went on a rampage—mostly pulling people’s hair, and Jeremiah wasn’t allowed to wash his pants. Does this sound like a glitzy job description? Prophets were unique, very rare individuals who were called to speak into specific times within the developing drama of biblical history.

Apart from some eccentricities, you can tell an Old Testament Prophet because they consistently did three things: they clarified the past, interpreted the present, and they predicted the future(s). This is a formula that’s unique to the Old Testament Prophetic office. The uniqueness of their office is underlined because their words carried enough divine inspiration to be able to say with no irony: ‘thus saith the Lord.’ Put another way, their words were infallible, beyond question, and subsequently could be added to the Bible.

It’s my belief—and as rare as this is for me, it’s the belief of most of the Christian Old Testament scholastic community—that the office of Old Testament Prophet no longer exists. If they did, then we’d constantly be adding to the Bible, and there’re all kinds of reasons that that’s a bad idea. However divinely inspired I might sometimes feel, I wouldn’t dream of boldly suggesting that my words are infallible or beyond question, and that there should be a ‘book of Tim’ in the Bible … well, not another one anyway! If you’re interested, I think the last ‘Old Testament-style’ piece of prophecy was Peter’s speech at Pentecost in Acts 2.

Prophecy in the New Testament

Now prophecy in the New Testament is a different thing all together. There’s some overlap, but not in the most obvious places. First, it’s important to understand that within Paul’s epistles, the English translation of the word ‘prophesy’ doesn’t cover all the contextual nuances of the Greek. In some contexts, it’s clear that all Paul actually means is ‘preaching’ or even just speaking some kind of gospel message. The puritan William Perkins wrote an entire book on preaching based on this simply called ‘The Art of Prophesying.’

Under that definition, which we unfortunately easily miss through the limitations of English translations, we should understand prophesy to primarily mean something like the movement of an edifying message from a speaker to a hearer. As pretentious as that sounds, it’s the best I can come up with to explain the concept without just saying ‘preaching’, which would be too narrow.

So, the broad umbrella of prophecy is simply sharing God’s word and truths with each other through preaching, talking, edification, and encouragement.

Who actually receives the gift?

Right now onto ‘noetic quality’. This was what 19^th Century psychologist and philosopher William James called the idea of obtaining information in a way you wouldn’t have known otherwise, or ‘hearing directly from God.’ This is what we tend to mean when we use the word prophecy. Prophecy certainly can have noetic quality, but this is not the central feature of it, and is not even required of it. In fact, like most spiritual gifts in 1 Cor. 12, we have interpreted the preposition for this backward. Let me see if I can explain.

Take ‘gift of healing’, for instance. We assume if person A prays for person B, and person B is healed, then person A is the one with a ‘gift of healing.’ This is why we say some people are ‘faith healers.’ But that doesn’t make any sense logically, and it’s not supported textually. Logically, the person who is healed certainly seems to be the most obvious recipient of a ‘gift’, not the other person praying for it. I’ve I’m healed, then I received a gift of healing from God, right? Textually, almost every English version of the Bible makes a basic translation error: It should read gifts of healings, not gift of healing. It’s two plurals, not two singulars. That makes it gifts and healings.

So, prepositionally, the person who receives the effect receives the gift—and this makes sense contextually too, as the verses all around it are about mutual edification, not mutant superpowers. It’s about building each other up, not coming to grips with our individual tool-belts.

As a quick example, my young people often ask me to pray for their exam results. If they do well, they don’t then tell me I have a ‘gift of good grades, as they understand they are the recipients of those grades.

A deeper dig into 1 Cor. 14

So, who receives the gift of prophecy—the one who speaks, or those who hear? And what is the gift? Is it noetic quality, or just clear gospel truth? 1 Cor. 14 can help us out with both.

Who receives it? It is the collective church who should eagerly desire prophecy (14:1), as the church needs to mutually hear God’s word. The person who prophesies (v.3—and note it is in third person plural) does so for the strength, encouragement, and comfort of the whole body, and edifies the church (v.4). Prophecy is a gift for the church (vv.12, 22).

What is it? Throughout this whole chapter, Paul is contrasting prophecy with tongues. It’s the longest explanation we have of prophecy in the whole New Testament, and not once does Paul even mention noetic quality. Instead, he talks about speaking intelligible words to instruct others (14:9, 19). Words that clearly set out the gospel (v.24). If anything, it’s the gift of tongues that actually holds noetic quality (vv.5, 16). Paul does mention revelation in v.6, but that is not the same as prophecy either (he says or).

However, there is possibly one spanner in the works for my interpretation here, as Paul says, prophecy will ‘lay bare the secrets of the heart’ (v.25). This verse might need a second look, as on first glance it sounds like a public revelation of someone’s personal secrets using the noetic quality of prophecy. Widely regarded as one of the best commentators on 1 Cor. Anthony Thiselton says this is not noetic, but is the natural result of clear gospel preaching. He says, ‘the words of the prophets bring home the truth of the gospel in such a way that the hearer “stands under” the verdict of the cross.’ And even Gordon Fee (who was immensely charismatic in his theology!) says that this refers to the Spirit’s accompaniment to gospel teaching—so the Holy Spirit reveals sin directly to the listener through conviction—not through the open public revelation of a ‘prophet.’

The problems with claiming to be a ‘Prophet’ today

The reason this is important to clear up is there are a lot of voices in the contemporary church who claim to be prophets, or to have the gift of prophecy uniquely or keenly—and by that they almost exclusively mean noetic quality.

This bothers me for a few reasons, but first a caveat:

I believe God can and does reveal truths to people who pray, and those truths can and sometimes do have noetic quality. I believe in that continuing phenomenon in the church today. I think praying and asking God to speak directly to us is a good practice for the church.

I don’t believe, however, that prophecy is a gift that only some people ‘own’ individually, or that it is specifically attached to only certain people. It might manifest itself at certain times or places or even people as the need arises, but it’s not a ‘skill’ or ‘tool’ that God bestows on someone for all time. The gift is receiving the message, not being the messenger, and often it is sharing the gospel or even just reminding people of what God has already said. I think this is available to everyone through prayer as need arises – which is why Paul tells the whole church to eagerly desire it, not just a few selective people.

So, what’s my problem? My issue is when someone says, ‘I am a Prophet’. Usually, they have in reality mixed some Old Testament office theology with some misunderstanding of the New Testament concept and wodged together a job description for themselves. There are several ways this can manifest is itself, and all of them I think are unhelpful.

How does this manifest itself in the church?

It can manifest as a person or a group of people who seemingly have ‘extra knowledge’ or ‘special revelation’ in the church that exist as a separate power-base to the pastor, subtly (or not so subtly) undermining the pastor’s shepherding of a people.

It can manifest as pride or even manipulation of those around, coming with a sense of ‘God prefers me’ and ‘others must do what I say.’ This can lead to all kinds of abuse and a broad lack of accountability.

It can manifest as street preachers who think they are divine inspired and are impossible to talk to. These come with a sense of misplaced authority, and a shocking lack of understanding of both preaching in the Bible, and how to communicate effectively.

It can manifest as competing revelation—with each other, and with the Bible—so if they say something different to somebody else, or to the Bible, then who has, ultimately, the true ‘infallible’ revelation.

It can manifest as unhealthy church plants, missional organisations, or ‘apostolic’ ministries, where a ‘prophet’ refuses to connect with a church, and continually isolates themselves, or they just surround themselves with similar (or susceptible) people.

Prophecy is a beautiful thing. It’s not a power to be harnessed and wielded like a sword, but a Spirit-filled sharing of God’s word together across the entire church. Let’s ask to receive it together, not try to ‘own’ it for ourselves.

So, should we want to be Prophets? No. But we should eagerly desire the gift of prophecy!

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Youth Ministry gets a lot of mileage out of the concept of “innovation”. We like to think that we do things differently; that we dodge, weave, and adapt. But do we?

When you think about it, how may truly and fundamentally different styles of Christian youth work have you seen? Clubs, events, detached, drop-ins, lock-ins… when does your list stop? And if you visit a whole lot of these across the country, how many of them feel significantly alike?

When I first left home, I discovered IKEA! A wonderland of affordable design. I decorated my crib with flat-pack Billy bookcases and Ektorp sofas. It took some real thought, and I believed that by using these tools I had come up with something truly unique. Then it transpired, however, that all my mates had done exactly the same thing. They picked different colours, and put things in different places, but when I was walking around their flats, I felt eerily like I was in my own. I thought I was being innovative, but really, I was just reconfiguring the norm.

Do youth work projects feel a little like this to you, too? To what extent do we truly innovate—by which I mean design a project ground-up and grow an expression of youth work that is deliberately and directly responsive to the specific needs of a local area. Or, to what extent do we just decorate a flat-pack and reconfigure the furniture?

I spent last week teaching youth work models at a theological college. We tracked the historic development of youth ministry styles and compared them to each other. When it comes down to it, there really are very few main approaches—and even those significantly overlap with each other. One of the fun questions I like to ask in these sessions is, ‘well, what else could we do?’ Or ‘What other model could we invent with a blank slate?’

As youth workers, we love this question—but in truth, it’s harder than we think.

We love to innovate… ish

Youth worker personality types can often be very creative and pioneering. This is why we go to conferences, read books, watch videos, and explore all new the latest ways of doing youth ministry. It’s probably one reason you read this blog. We love new project ideas, new resources, new forms of practice, strategies, and recruitment plans.

We love the new and we like to do things differently.

The problem, however, is that youth work sits in a very particular context and that context is inhabited by some strangely firm and surprisingly subliminal ideas. There are quite a fair few entrenched ideologies and practices that are almost always present in youth ministry projects, no matter how innovative it seems on the surface. This means that with these ideas and practices intact, there is, in reality, very little scope to truly be different.

If we want to challenge how youth ministry is done, therefore, and seek to be truly innovative—so a ministry that is properly adaptive to the specific cultural needs of the local area its serving—then we need to dig under these hidden layers and ask if they are as essential as we’ve allowed them to be.

So, what are they? Let’s do a thought experiment:

If I were to say to a group of youth workers, ‘okay, design a new youth work project. Be innovative, throw the book away, do everything from scratch, it’s all on the table…’ I wonder what they’d come up with. What would you?

Very quickly, however, I imagine they would start talking about where it would meet. What they would call it and what the logo would look like. Which elements it would use from the pool of ‘games, music, crafts, teaching, etc.’. How it would be advertised and to which types of youth culture would it target. What night of the week would it meet and which leaders would they need?

It’s hard to come up with a new project that doesn’t begin with these questions as de facto elements to re-order. However, names, branding, logos, teaching, attraction, coming-in, relevancy, youth culture, venues, games, leaders, etc. are all bricks that are pre-packaged and pre-understood. These are many of the baseline assumptions—the furniture that we’re just reordering.

You might be thinking, ‘no Tim, that’s just the bits and pieces that they’ve got to consider. Where it’s going to meet isn’t an assumption, it’s a practically.’ But that’s just not true. Maybe your youth ministry project isn’t actually a meeting. Maybe the ‘where’ is a red herring that’s shutting down a whole world of other ideas. Maybe your youth ministry project doesn’t need a name. Maybe without one, you would explore a whole range of other approaches to belonging and community. True innovation comes when even the tools and materials are suspended.

True innovation

To be truly innovative, you don’t begin with just re-ordering common building materials. You might evaluate these bricks, and you would probably make new ones, but you don’t just vary the place and size of what you already have available.

It’s not all that weird to challenge these basic assumptions either. Let’s go back to the idea of a youth group needing a name. Have you ever seen a youth project without a catchy (or at least cringy) name? But do they need one?

Think about it this way, almost everywhere else young people gather has a purely functional name. Football clubs, for instance, are named after the street or town they’re in. Classrooms are named after the subject they teach. Cadets and Scouts are named after areas too. Forms are usually some kind of code involving the age bracket and school year. Names are not necessarily normal for youth gatherings.

What is normal to have catchy names, however, are products—or places where there are customers like nightclubs and festivals. The assumption that every youth project needs a brand name comes from a marketing world where you’re trying to sell something and create clients. And we wonder why youth work is so consumeristic? So maybe your project doesn’t need to be named or branded after all? What other ideas could you explore without one.

I’m not saying don’t name your project something brandable—but I am saying don’t assume that you need one from the beginning. This is an example of the type of subliminal assumptions that we need to challenge if we’re going to be truly innovative.

Starting with a blank slate means a blank slate.

Where do these assumptions come from?

What I’m saying is that there is so much built into the fabric of what youth ministry is that if we always begin with those assumptions, then by the time we get to innovation, there’s not a whole lot that we can vary.

Even our age ranges invariably follow traditional transition patterns. Often all we end up truly varying is the surface level of the project itself, not the very heartbeat or foundations. In reality, this means that we inevitably end up serving some very particular needs of a certain stereotype of young person, rather than truly creating something for the specific needs of our area.

Variations on a theme, after all, is not truly innovation. We need to learn to innovate again!

I’ve been a youth worker for over 15 years, and I can generously think of maybe 12 or 15 styles of youth work or project models and—even with different names, different leaders, different orders of elements, different venues, mildly different age brackets, and a huge spectrum of difference in quality—I’ve seen very few truly innovative youth work approaches.

I think youth work as we know it today has learned these patterns from the late 1940s attractional parachurch models, and the mid-1990s incarnational and festival resurgence models. That’s not a lot of history, but it basically covers everything we’ve ever seen or read in youth work. That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s the only way.

We need to be courageous in our thinking, shake off these entrenched assumptions, and truly look at the very basics. Innovation begins with the roots, not the fruit—and certainly not with the packaging the fruit comes in.

Case study

Early last year my wife and I started an intentional online community class for young, introverted, and mostly home-schooled girls who were all trying to get fantasy novels published.

We connected them with creative writing coaching and discipled them through the medium of imaginative writing activities using the fantasy genre. We also borrowed from a postgraduate research community writing technique called ‘shut up and write.’ We helped them think about publication submissions, set up an online critique mechanism, and we connected them with a young author who has just been through publication. This project has several expressions including a gathered writing time, individual feedback, and coffee-shop days out. We’re also starting to connect with local bookshops about late-night writing sessions.

This writing project saw a local need. It identified and specified it clearly and then responded to it directly. It used locally available resources and developed a specific intentional community which then galvanised around a common need. It has since overspilled its original format and organically grown into something so much more. This is what I mean by innovation.

Although this project began with a name, we haven’t used it for almost a year now because it just doesn’t need it. We don’t advertise it either. It has no logo and no branding. It gains its identity (and an incredibly deep sense of community) from the project itself.

To be truly innovative, we need to go back to basics. This is why I harp on about youth work history, base-line theology, and supra-cultural traits. It’s why I poke us about what we really mean by relevancy, and why I think youth workers need to think more about the wider church and community.

I often hear pitches for large youth events that groups want to run in my area. They always claim to be innovative, but there’s very little to tell them apart and even less to demonstrate that they know anything about the particular young people in my area. In fact, other than some of the styles of music and technology, there’s little to tell them apart from the events I went to as a teenager in the 90s. Arguably, there’s very little fundamentally different to the youth rallies of the 1950s either.

We don’t want to be different for the sake of being different, but we do want to innovatively connect with the specific needs of local young people—and if we’re doing it right, then that’s always going to look different.

Let’s be truly innovative.

Starting with the youth worker

One of the key themes of my book Rebooted is we should stop referring to ourselves as ‘youth pastors.’ A ‘youth pastor’ is one of these subliminal assumptions that we bring to our youth ministry models in the same way that we want names and venues. It comes with the idea that we are somehow in a pastorate, and that these young people are under our spiritual care and guidance in the same way a church pastor is over church people. In my opinion, that’s very poor theology.

The pastor is the pastor of the church—and that means the people in it, including the young people, and us, are under their care. We’re not the pastor of a mini-separate church with a hyper-homogenous congregation. Some of you might recognise this as the ‘one-eared mickey mouse problem.’ We identified that back in the 1980s and yet we’re still living with it today.

What if our youth ministries, and particularly our full-time youth workers, orbited the idea of enabling a wider body of people to do the youth work, being facilitators rather than the direct deliverers of it? That, I think, would be massively innovative!

I think that there’s far too much pretend innovation that happens in the youth work world. Repackaged, flat-packed, and dragged and dropped into widely different locations with incredibly different needs without a second thought.

It’s about time we dug under the surface and found out how to truly develop the best and most useful expressions of what it means to bring God’s love to young people today.

If we’re going to be innovative—let’s actually be innovative.

So, how do you do it?

1. Start by knowing your area. Look, watch, read, talk, ask questions of everybody! Sit down with teachers, families, the police, politicians, local charities, health care groups – everyone. Do you know your local Mind workers? How about Social Services or foster groups? Know your area.

Discover what the local needs are and be able to articulate them specifically. I want every youth worker to talk in depth, intelligently, about the unique needs of young people in their location.

2. Know your resources. Find out the gifts, skills, and passions of those you connect with. Look at other local groups and what they’re doing well. Have an encyclopaedic knowledge of your town or city and what is offered there uniquely. I’m not kidding. A missionally-minded youth worker should know as much about the young people in their area as an MP should.

Discover the local flavours and cultures. Where are the bus stops, gather points, popular corner shops, most travelled after-school walks home? Know as much as you can about your area.

Start to overlap specific needs (1) with specific resources (2), and then ask how you can facilitate that relationship and propagate a community in that intersection as church. This is not the whole story—but it’s a great start!

Let’s be innovators.

Photo by Octavian Rosca on Unsplash

We’ve all heard it said until our ears bleed that ‘church is not the building.’ Great. Sure. Fine. But if we truly believe that then why does the rest of the world think that it is? We’re clearly not getting the message out there. So, do we need a new PR approach, or could it just be perhaps, that we still place too much emphasis on our buildings?

The big problem, as with most entrenched ideologies, is history. The historic weight of our practices, and the long stories that precedes our entrance to the stage, bear greater influence over our attitudes than we might think.

Moving from victim to victor

Throughout the entire Christendom era, the Church has asserted itself onto the landscape by imposing centralised places of worship. Right at the beginning of this time, Christian-converted Roman Emperor Constantine not only enabled Christians to worship publicly, but he also gave them resources to do so. He returned property that was confiscated during Diocletian persecution, he granted massive tax exemptions to Christians, and he built Christian basilicas throughout the Empire. These were often financed by pillaging pagan temples.

For any victim to suddenly be inundated with wealth and resources, especially when these are taken from their oppressors, there is going to be some significant and sudden personality changes as a result. The Church was no exception, and – in many cases if not almost entirely throughout Europe – for a time, very much enjoyed its special legal protections and favouritism.

Over time then (although, not that much really), ‘Church’ became synonymous with buildings rather than the gathered body of believers. There was an implicit idea that to meet with God meant you must go to church, and to be a Christian, therefore, was to simply be a regular church attendee. In fact, for most European Christians, this assumption has been the case for the vast majority of their institutional history.

That’s not an easy character arc to shake off.

Follow the money

The infamous link between church attendance and faith is also evident in Britain specifically. One place we can see this is in the amount of money tied up in the inherited church’s resources. The Church of England is one of the wealthiest landholders in the UK, with a £2 billion property portfolio and 100,000 acres of which makes up a significant portion of their £6.7 billion in assets. The amassing of this wealth can be traced back to early Christendom, which appropriated the Jewish practice of giving alms for the remission of sins. As Peter Brown said ‘even the most humble members of the Christian community were involved in this perpetual mobilisation of wealth.* This ensured a continual flow of wealth to the church, which – although diminishing quickly – continues to this day. The cultural conception that “church just wants our money” comes from a quantitative reality; one that is arguably an easier position to demonstrate than “church serves the poor.”

Throughout the Middle Ages there was a stark contrast between the wealth within and the poverty outside these imperialistic church buildings, and even today the steps of Cathedrals, especially in larger European cities, are still peppered with the poor. In 2015, Housing Justice lobbied the Church of England to sell its underused properties to respond to the housing crisis, issuing a report stating, ‘The Church cannot speak out on this or any other issue without putting its own house in order’. The legacy here is that church attendance was so tied up with what was considered ‘faith’ that most resources were channelled into the buildings rather than mission and serving the poor.

Again, this is not an easy identity to just shake off.

Is it a building, or a momument?

Church buildings today rarely connect with those outside and often serve as a monument to an apparently dying religion. In 2015 the Church of England reported 1926 closed buildings, making the God who resides inside seem irrelevant, inanimate and diminishing. They are often crumbling structures, which are locked for all but an hour a week, surrounded by smaller memorials to the deceased.

Inside, older British churches have uncomfortable, formal and awkward interiors that do not exist in any other public building save perhaps a courtroom, theatre, or classroom – each designed to give credence to just one voice at a time.

Problems increase when examining the symbols used throughout the older buildings, many of which is in memory of someone other than Jesus, including the often-imposing wall of military paraphernalia. The cross is sometimes absent, replaced with coded monograms such as IHS or XP. The absence of the cross uncovers darker problems as some cultures it represents conquest not self-sacrifice. These buildings and their symbols easily alienate society from the gospel message.

As much as the historian, artist, and contemplative-practitioner in me loves old church buildings, from a purely missional and service point of view they – when not utilized well – create a plethora of problems for the relationship between church and society today. They misrepresent gospel values, exhibit irrelevancy, disable participation, and are a testimony to imperialistic exclusivism.

Even if they ever were at the height of relevancy, the aesthetically beautiful and imposingly grand structures spoke to only parts of God’s character and allowed for very limited expressions of worship. Although newer church buildings are less of an issue, they are still often built with the same values, and may therefore still trigger the same responses in society.

Turning monuments back into movements

Addressing irrelevant and imperialistic buildings in a way that rediscovers mission requires church to consider gathering for worship in natural community spaces instead and repurposing older Church buildings as gifts to the community.

Different to the inherited church, many smaller groups are becoming demonstrably more successful within regularly used community spaces (parks, halls, pubs, schools, homes), than traditional church buildings. Familiar community spaces are usually easier to access and understand, they are usually more modular and better equipped for smaller community gatherings, and they don’t carry any stigmas left behind by Christendom. This reorientates church around people’s lives, making faith a natural and relevant part of their world. The best thing about this, however, is it leaves older church buildings available for other purposes – and to be a gift for the community.

Church buildings can be repurposed to become safer, more recognisable community spaces. Often large, central, and visible, churches can work well as cafes, art galleries and performance areas. Buildings can be a generous gift to an economically struggling society when the primary emphasis is taken off formalised worship and onto relationship building. Moving away from church buildings for expressions of church represents a go rather than come ethic, and repurposing buildings redeems the idea of a Christian from simply being a ‘church attendee.’

Moving church into natural community spaces while repurposing buildings, as a gift to the community should be a healthy way of responding to the imposition of irrelevant buildings left behind by Christendom. This again reconfigures church as a movement rather than an institution, with a clear, more consistent message delivered in accessible spaces.

Photo by Stefan Kunze on Unsplash

* Brown, P. (2013) The rise of Western Christendom: triumph and diversity, A.D. 200-1000. Tenth Anniversary Revised Edition Hoboken, N.J.; Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell; John Wiley [distributor]. (The making of Europe), p.69

Have you ever had a conversation with a young person that goes like this:

‘So, what are they teaching you about Christianity in school?’

‘Oh, that if you go to church and eat wafers then you’re going to heaven.’

‘Wait, they’re teaching you what?!?’

It’s natural to get outraged when someone minimalises or misrepresents something that you care about and understand well. It must be similar if you work in pharmacology and your friends are debating vaccines, or if you’re a mechanic and your mum wants to buy a mid-90s Peugeot!

When people mistreat knowledge that they think they have earned, they might be guilty of something known as the ‘Dunning-Kruger’ effect.

You might not know what you don’t know but think you know what you know… y’know?

In the early 2000s, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger described a bias that lower-ability people have which overestimates their knowledge or skills to be higher-ability than they truly are.

Let’s say every fact you could learn about a thing is numerated, and you try to learn all the facts about that thing. You might believe, then, that there are 100 facts to be learned about a subject, of which you know 70, and that would make you quite knowledgeable about that subject. However, what if one of the things you haven’t learned yet is that there are, in fact, 200 things to learn about the subject? In which case you are far less knowledgeable about the subject than you thought you were. This would give you a bias of higher knowledge about a thing, when in reality it’s actually lower.

I think I’m pretty knowledgeable about Formula 1, for example. However, a few years ago I met British racing legend David Coulthard – and frankly he has forgotten more than I’ll ever know!

Put another way, we don’t always know enough to know what we do not know.

This is one of the reasons, for instance, why postgrad students are often more nuanced than undergrads. Or why research scientists are more cautious with their claims than popular scientists. It’s also why those who know are often the last to speak.

Fighting soundbites with spreadsheets

I’ll never forget that line in the West Wing when political operative Lou said to campaign manager Josh, ‘that’s what you get when you fight soundbites with spreadsheets.’

What are we more likely to remember (and by default assimilate), a long list of complicated and nuanced information, or a pithy one-liner? Even though there’s more information – and thus true power – in something like a spreadsheet, a cutting soundbite is like bringing an armoured tank to a knife-fight.

On the flip side, it’s easy to think that we’re learning how to knockdown an argument when all we’re truly doing is making the other person look silly. This is what a soundbite does. Donald Trump is a master of this kind of soundbite. When he doesn’t like a fact, a question, or a suggestion, he mocks the person he’s speaking to and then reduces their source into ‘fake news’ or something similar.

It doesn’t have to be this on the nose. A soundbite could simply be a memorable piece of analysis that we have taken out-of-context, not understood the nuances, and not earned the understanding to properly wield. It’s similar to ‘a smart person said this, therefore it’s true’, but it’s more like, ‘a [I think] smart person knows this, I have read it therefore I know it too, and I know it just as much as they do.’

It’s like if you scroll through Facebook and see a real expert in a field debating with someone who is posting multiple Daily Mail stories as evidence for their view. It’s a little cringy.

A slightly less flattering way of putting this is that this is what happens when you try to speak reason to stupid – or pick a fight with a drunk or a fool.

When hyper-focusing provides a false confidence

Feeling self-righteous yet? Me too. But we shouldn’t, because as Christians we can be even more guilty of this than most. I have been there enough times myself (and been wrong plenty) to know I’m probably still doing it too. Maybe even in this very piece.

When I was a first-year theology undergrad at Bible College we all had to study a module called ‘Christians in the Modern World.’ For the whole year we went through various philosophers, mostly from the Enlightenment, and deconstructed any potential part of their thinking that would stand in opposition to a Christian worldview.

I found the course immensely interesting, not least because I had always loved philosophy! And there were many interesting titbits of information and I’m sure that the professor knew the subject well.

However, I have since done two things: First, I have studied philosophy with Oxford University. This has given me a more grounded knowledge base of the subject we were studying. Second, I have revisited all the notes from my first-year class almost seventeen years ago to see what was missing.

We were presented most if not all these thinkers dramatically out-of-context from the broader movements in Philosophy, and from the particulars of what they more widely thought and added to their various disciplines. We were given the very worst of Hegel, Kant, Rousseau, etc. by hyper-focusing on aspects that we found distasteful. Not all of which were immediately applicable to our task either, but in some cases were just used to draw attention to the more questionable aspects of their characters.

Now, in one sense, understanding the broad landscape of philosophy, and placing all these thinkers into that wasn’t the purpose of the class. We were being ‘armed’ to speak into the philosophical roots of a modern culture where it is hostile to our faith. You should, after all, only usually get upset by something that misses a target it wasn’t aiming at.

However, two things. First, it did what we constantly criticised others for doing when they pluck aspects from the Bible out-of-context and focus in on what offends them. Second, for years I thought this class represented accurately who those thinkers were and what they thought. I had over-estimated my knowledge and left the course with a somewhat arrogant confidence in what I thought I knew.

Absolute truth vs absolute facts

As Christians we – I think rightly – believe we have an absolute truth. However, there is a significant difference between knowing Jesus, who is the absolute truth, to thinking this gives us some magic right to all the absolute facts about everything.

Knowing Jesus gives a matchless and rightly placed confidence. We don’t then need to know everything else better than anyone else. We, at no point, are called to know all the facts about everything – and nothing in our knowledge of Jesus should give us the right to assume we have a greater grasp of the possible facts.

I think, like in any other worldview, that our relationship with Jesus should naturally and rightly lead us to question things and challenge facts when they diverge from that worldview. That’s an important thing to do. However, our confidence in him should not be contingent on us winning every argument or knowing every fact. This is not only supremely arrogant, but also supremely ignorant. It’s not a good look.

I wonder how many people look at us talk about things we don’t really know about – or watch us when we overestimate our knowledge in an area – and then roll their eyes like we would a schoolteacher who reduces Christianity down to going to church and eating wafers.

Don’t be “that guy”

Youth worker, pastor, colleague; don’t be “that guy.” Don’t be the guy that has to correct everything all the time because you’re sure that you know better. Don’t be the guy that sends young people back to school with a half-assed, ill-equipped soundbite that’s just going to make them look silly and leave them exposed. Don’t be the guy who thinks he knows more about vaccinations than experts because he read something on a fundamentalist Christian website. Don’t be the guy who argues about the shape of the earth because he heard another guy said he did some research on it and ‘found’ that everyone else is wrong. Don’t be the guy that calls other passionate, knowledgeable people ‘liars’ because their worldview doesn’t line up with their own. Don’t be the guy that everyone rolls their eyes at.

Why? Because that’s doing your faith no favours! We’re given two significant commandments, a commission, and a tip.

• The two commandments are to love God and love people (Matt. 22:36-40).
• The commission is to tell other people about Jesus (Matt. 28:16-20).
• The tip is to always be ready to tell people why you hope in Jesus (1 Pt. 3:15).

Be that guy. The one who loves people, clearly loves God, and leads with that love and compassion over an insatiable need to always be right. Be the guy who tells people about Jesus – who He is, what He did, why He matters – over arguing about every picky socio-political-scientific issue. Be the guy who has a confident, quiet, firm, solid security in what he believes – over displaying a painful need for everybody to think exactly his way. Be that guy.

Why? Because you’ll be following the commandments you were actually given, you’ll be more loving, you’ll have more tangible faith, you’ll look more like Jesus, and you’ll share Him much much much more effectively.

It’s ok to not know everything! It’s not ok for you to pretend you do. Don’t be “that guy.”

(partially written as a ‘note to self’)

Photo by Jesse Martini on Unsplash