Chapter Seventeen: Have We Lost the Plot?

Deconstruction, the Gospel and the Social World of Young People (Part One)

Photo by Kevin Grieve on Unsplash

“Barely 1/3 of white and Hispanic teens, along with 2/5 of black teens, say they are likely to continue to attend a Christian church in the future, while they are living independently of their parents” [George Barna, Real Teens: A Contemporary Snapshot of Youth Culture (Glendale, CA: Regal Books, 2001), 113].

“Why don’t all challenges occur when we’re seventeen and know everything”?

(Anonymous)

Introductory Preamble

Mary, the mother of Jesus, most likely gave birth to him when she was around 15 or 16. You could no doubt hear the incredulity in Joseph and her parents, as she explained that she was pregnant even though she had not had sexual relations. In a contemporary Western context, she would almost certainly have been offered a reality TV show.

Giving birth to the saviour of humanity would be a weighty burden to carry, even for the most mature and confident woman. For a newly betrothed teenager, I shudder to think what went through her mind. It would not be the first time that God had laid a heavy load on very young shoulders - just think of Joseph, son of Jacob, the prophet Samuel, King David or King Josiah. At some level, no matter how rudimentary, we must acknowledge that God’s redemptive economy is deeply invested in young people. It would seem to follow that, correspondingly, we should be also. Just consider the following appraisal from an article written about teenagers in the 80s:

In an age when teenagers are confronting “adult” problems such as broken families, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, and sexuality, Christian youth workers say traditional ministry tools and training are losing their effectiveness. “Kids are not the same today as they were 20 years ago,” says Dave Lambert, editor of youth books for Zondervan Publishing House. “The world is changing very rapidly, so much so that—as Alvin Toffler says—change has changed. Although the biblical principles for youth work haven’t changed, the techniques of youth work from even 10 or 15 years ago are not very useful today” [Steve Rabey, “Helping ‘Adult’ Teens Face the Eighties,” Christianity Today, 32:3 (1988): 50.

This article is from 1988 and addresses concerns relating to the 1980s. Yet its salient points could easily have been written in any year since then, right up to today. The issues facing the youth are not too dissimilar - they have merely developed along with key social trends, technology, the political climate and local/global legislature. Kids are still not the same as they were 20 years ago - Generation Alpha are very different from their Millennial counterparts! As we will discuss here and over the next few posts, anything resembling traditional Christian youth ministry has largely been outmanoeuvred by changing social trends. Techniques that might have had purchase two decades ago are far less effective today. Very different questions are being brought to the table and must be navigated with a reinvigorated sense of vision.

Missiologists, theologians, youth workers and ministers will broadly agree that the Gospel itself hasn’t changed, but the world into which it is proclaimed is unrecognisable even from as little as 20 years ago. Instagram only launched in October 2010 and TikTok in 2018 - in other words, both are less than 20 years old, and yet they have totally revolutionised the communication highway, affecting not just how young people connect and publicise their lives, but how they form romantic attachments, make career choices, access education and interpret global events.

The essence of the Gospel is no different today than it has ever been, but this is not the world that I grew up in. If you have Generation Z or Generation Alpha Children, this is their world. It is potentially a confusing place; like every age, however, the message of Jesus is apt to help disambiguate the confusion, illuminate the pathway and instil an inner peace. Like every age, those who are charged with teaching and preaching the Gospel have a responsibility to renegotiate the landscape, think through the Gospel afresh and consider how a new generation of people can meet Jesus and be embraced by his perfectly healing warmth. Although in reference to a very different set of contours, the Lord’s dictum holds true – you cannot put new wine into old wineskins (Mark 2:22). What then are the new wineskins the church must acquire? This is, of course, the $64,000 question, and one we will need to carefully, slowly, thoughtfully and prayerfully (re)consider.

In this and the next series of posts, I wish to assume a position alongside a young person deconstructing the experience of youth ministry. I am fully aware that this is a big ask; everyone’s experience of being a young person in a Christian context will be different. For some it will be profoundly positive, and for others far less so. Some will be the children of pastors and ministry staff. Others will have parents who are not even believers. For some, there will be stories of wonderful Christian camps, friendships that became lifelong relationships and a true feeling that church was home. Alas, some youngsters will have suffered abuse, dislocation, judgmentalism and religious authoritarianism. This is not merely intended to be my amateurish attempt to diagnose a problem. This is an appeal to every stakeholder within Christian community to understand that youth ministry must be grounded in a robust theology, which is adaptable, Spirit-filled, committed to listening and dedicated to honesty. I do not think that youth ministry is a special ministry detached from adult ministry. Both ought to be committed to embracing and being embraced by the love of Jesus Christ.

The Landscape

The Barna Group are the standard bearers for examining trends in churches and social trends which impact the church. According to them, the principal challenges facing young people today are:

1. Mental health struggles and emotional wellbeing

2. Feeling misunderstood and relationally disconnected

3. A search for meaning, justice, and purpose

4. Doubts, questions, and unanswered spiritual issues

5. Declining engagement with traditional religious institutions

6. Parental stress and lack of support systems

If you are the member of a Christ believing community, irrespective of which brand of Christianity to which the community subscribes, I want you to think through the list above and ask yourself what percentage of the sermons, teaching programmes or annual church study themes directly or indirectly intersect with any of the above. In my own experience, I would suggest that the percentage is notably low. Without wishing to be presumptive, it would not be a huge shock to discover that engagement with the above ideas in most western churches was similarly low and I don’t think one has to look particularly far to discover why. Experience and conversation with people of all ages has shown me the following regarding why 1-6 above are low priority in church spaces.

- The feeling that these are modern secular problems. A number of the populist movements attempting to promote social justice in the world in the last decade were routinely met with near disdain in many, especially conservative evangelical, religious spaces. Whatever we might think of “Black Lives Matter” or the #MeToo movement, both of which are admittedly ripe for critical scrutiny, they were reflections of very real problems in society, vital to our social cohesion and were particularly significant to young people. Teenagers and twentysomethings across the globe, were deeply invested in the pursuit of social justice, and they had a close and somewhat suspicious eye on institutions. What would be the response from governments, schools, justice systems and churches? Without probing the granular details, there is evidence that the response from the Church was considered less than encouraging by many. By way of corroboration, a Pew Research Centre survey (2020) revealed that 62 percent of Black Americans considered “political topics such as immigration and race relations,” important issues for churches to address, including 23 percent who thought it essential. Only 36 percent of white Americans thought sermons should be concerned with such issues, of whom only 8 percent reckoned it essential. If Christians divide the world into areas of secular concern and areas of spiritual concern, this unhelpful dichotomy is established. Social justice is reduced to a secular issue, divorced from Christian ethics, theology and worship. The business of the church is seen only as soul winning, whilst it is the business of secular institutions to think about justice. When this mentality takes over, it is rightly said that Christians become so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good!

- Deep rooted suspicion of secular disciplines. The modern church has had a traditionally unhealthy relationship with disciplines such as psychology, psychiatry, counselling (unless it is very specifically Christian counselling), therapy, transcendental meditative techniques and even theology when taught in non-confessional institutions (something which I have personal experience of). The reasons for this suspicion are complex and multi-fold, and not always without some justification. There are those who simply divide the world into the sacred and the profane, for whom any practitioner whose foundation is not Christian is untrustworthy. Others link secular disciplines with left-leaning liberal ideas, lacking Christian boundaries and, therefore, adjudged to be over sympathetic to issues of gender identity, sexuality, equality and race. Such people will typically associate this kind of thinking with critical social theories (critical race theory, critical gender theory, etc.), held by critics to be incompatible with the Gospel.

- Institutional Christianity is seen as inauthentic and performative. Young people are highly attuned to inauthenticity and image-management. Too much of church language translates as formulaic, scripted and out of touch, rather than honest. Worship services often feel emotionally manipulative and disconnected from suffering. The days are gone when trying to make Christian music that resonated with current trends in popular music was considered an effective tool to win the minds and hearts of young people. The entertainment gospel had its day, and whilst it was certainly effective in filling stadiums, it barely made a dent when it came to generating transformative discipleship. Inauthentic Christianity is exacerbated when leadership appears defensive, always needing to be right and muting contrary voices, rather than being self-critical, open to conversation and secure enough in God not to take an adversarial stance with people who disagree with them. Young people will go where they find presence, depth, and truthfulness. They are not interested in Christianity’s utility, but rather its authenticity.

- A fear of complexity. There are some in the Christian world so wedded to the idea that Christianity should be simple, that it results in complexity being anathematized. I would personally agree that the essentials of doctrine as it pertains to salvation are straightforward. Indeed, I have been even criticised for suggesting that much beyond the details of the creedal formulation in 1 Cor. 15:3–7, not much is required to have a relationship with God. However, to develop, mature and blossom as one walks with God requires depth, hunger, curiosity, longing, exploration, commitment, contemplation exegesis, poetry and passion. Maturing is pilgrimage, and genuine spiritual pilgrimage is a meandering process of self-discovery and God-discovery. Jesus is the culmination of the journey, but the journey is unique to every Christ believer and only ends when Christ is eventually revealed at the end of everything.

- Impatience about doubts. A sure-fire strategy for alienating young people is to demonise doubts. From their playgrounds to their university campuses to their offices, to their interactions with people engaged in non-Christian forms of spirituality, young people will be exposed to a plethora of spiritual, religious, and even theological ideas of numerous stripes. Some of the ideas they will hear will have interface with Christian thought; others will be wholly incompatible with the Christian narrative. These interactions will naturally generate questions and if youth who are interested in the Christian faith, or indeed are believers themselves, find themselves in environments where questions and doubts borne of such interactions are met with impatience, subtle directives to simply shut up and believe or a sense that such questions are simply an impediment to the real spiritual business of saving souls, it will almost inevitably breed suspicion, resentment and a sense that those in Christian leadership are hiding things.

- Young people today are not asking traditional investigative questions. I recall being rather irritated when someone said to me that they were attending “Facebook church”. One irritation was that I had no idea what that term meant; perhaps, the more particular irritation was the notion that I could probably work out what it meant and that I would be right!!!!! However, there is a broader issue. It is not simply that people were meeting on a live Facebook stream as opposed to fellowshipping face to face, but rather that the notion of social media church was reflective of the fact that different questions were being asked. My generation were interested in questions of truth and how one is “saved”. Gen Z was asking, “Who am I? Where do I belong? Is there hope in a collapsing world? What do I do with anxiety, injustice, and climate grief”? Facebook Church was apt to address these questions; more traditional liturgical spaces were completely out of their depth. James K. Smith, in his work Desiring the Kingdom, proposes that people are principally “lovers” and only then thinkers (rather like David Hume’s notion that passion precedes reason). For Smith, the Church has over-focused on beliefs at the expense of formation, desire, and imagination, contending that our most deeply held desires are cultivated not just by “beliefs” but by the practices we participate in daily—what he calls “cultural liturgies”. Once more, if we divide the world into spiritual things and secular things, we compromise the power of the Christian Gospel.

Initial Conclusions

Christian theologians and missiologists generally agree that young people are not simply rejecting “faith”, but are disengaging from particular forms of church, authority, and religious imagination that no longer feel truthful, hospitable, or life-giving. Drew Dyck helpfully observes six different kinds of young church “leavers”:

1. Postmodern Leavers, who have abandoned the “certainties” of their religion for a spiritual exploration of their own mapping.

2. Recoilers who harbour hurts of negative childhood and teenage experiences and abuse from professed Christians.

3. Modern Leavers who have been persuaded by the recent wave of aggressive atheism as represented by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, etc., among others.

4. Neo-Pagans, many of them enamoured by Wicca, witchcraft, new age spirituality and paganism. Interestingly, many if not most of such practitioners were raised in the church.

5. Rebels, who are hedonistic party-goers. Some are moral rebels while other are spiritual rebels, insisting on self-determination.

6. Drifters representing “the enemy within” who sit on the sidelines and eventually drop-out. [Drew Dyck, Generation Ex-Christian: Why Young Adults Are Leaving the Faith. . . and How to Bring Them Back (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2010)].

These sorts of analyses are helpful because they critically engage with different kinds of people who are turning their backs on traditional Christianity and force us as older generations of believers to be clear that we are dealing with a complex issue which requires faithful, patient, perseverance. There are too many examples within modern Christendom of attempts to simply fit young people into convenient religious boxes. Worse still, they are simply the boxes that we were fit into 30, 40 or even 50 years ago. We don’t need new boxes; we need new wineskins, which will hold the precious cargo of the Gospel, and minds, hearts and ears which are attuned and attentive to what our youngsters are saying. This is especially true of those who are on the verge of abandoning the faith - whether they are recoilers, rebels, etc.

So then, have we, as my title implies, lost the plot? Almost certainly yes, but as I hope has become reasonably clear, this is not really the problem. The plot is unstable; generations change, trends come and go, ideas develop and technology opens unpredictable doors. It is inevitable that we will lose the plot, because the plot keeps changing. What matters is that we are apt to reposition ourselves to interact with a new plot. The plot is unstable, but the Gospel is not. Jesus is the same eternally. The church is certainly in need of a reset, but if we think that we can simply act as analysts and directors of new church programmes, we are quite likely in for a rude awakening. Young people themselves need to be the ones with their fingers on the reset button; older folk must sit and listen with humility, and then be ready to support, encourage and guide these precious young sheep in a discipleship that is committed to continual growth and development. The clearer the picture of Jesus that these young folk attain, the less likely they are to repeat the mistakes of previous generations and the more likely they are to have the wherewithal to negotiate the challenges that face their children.

With these musings as a point of departure, I ask you to join me in engaging in the social world of young people within the context of Christian thought. This is likely to get messy, for the plot is unstable. Remember, however, that the Gospel is not. Jesus is the same eternally.