Has youth work forgotten how to innovate?

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