When God Shows Up ()

A History of Protestant Youth Ministry in America

Senter, Mark H., Clark, Chap

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781441207685
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

For more than two centuries, youth ministries have either strengthened teenagers after a special encounter with God or tried to retain them until such a moment when God shows up. Here veteran youth ministry expert Mark Senter provides the first substantial history of the phenomenon of American Protestant youth ministry. More than a history, this book highlights the evolution of adolescence and adolescent spirituality, outlines three distinct cycles in the history of youth ministry, describes the major shapers of youth ministry over the last century, and helps readers understand trends and changes in youth ministry and their connections to broader church life.

part 1


Birth of Youth Ministry Jazz

The Context

Jazz is America’s classical music,” commented my friend Bob Ligon as we rode to high school one day. The idea stopped me short. Jazz? Classical? How could the two genres be mentioned in the same sentence?

We were sophomores and sophomores know everything, so I had to argue. But Bob stopped me short. “Think about it,” Bob challenged, “what makes a piece of music qualify as being classical? It is primarily because of its ability to endure, its distinctive structure, its reflection of the context in which it was created, and the quality of the musicians to whom it appeals.” He went on to explain how jazz music satisfied all four criteria.

I don’t know where Bob got his definition of classical music, but it made sense to me. The conversation was short but it left me with an entirely new perspective on that distinctive American contribution called jazz. It seems fascinating to me that fifty years later I am using jazz as a metaphor for understanding the development of Protestant youth ministry in America. Like jazz, Protestant youth ministry has proven to endure, has distinctive structures, has fit into the culture of the day, and has attracted an outstanding cast of leaders.

Basic to this classical theme in Protestant youth ministry is the theology that ties a biblical understanding of God as present but not yet in evidence in the lives of humankind. The book primarily deals with how Protestant churches lived out the conviction that God would become a part of the lives of young people in a meaningful, and in a majority of cases, permanent way.

In this first section of the book, I will place the history of Protestant youth ministry in America into four contexts. The first chapter has to do with the widely-varied manner in which young people experienced their lives prior to adulthood. The various sections of the country as well as the changing dynamic of the American experience imprinted youth in very different ways.

The second chapter explores the meaning of adolescence. While the reader may assume that adolescence has always applied to teenagers or perhaps persons between the ages of twelve and twenty-five, for much of youth ministry in America the word hardly appeared. Some now question if adolescence can accurately describe the differences between later stages of childhood and an ever-extending period of young adulthood.

The third chapter looks at the history of spirituality as it has been applied to the lives of Protestant young people in America. Grounded in various traditions of pietism and connected to a broad cross section of Protestant churches, the common denominator appears to be the conviction that God would be active in the lives of young people and Christian people had the obligation to provide opportunities for this to happen.

The fourth chapter describes the distinctive characteristics of three cycles of youth ministry that stretched across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This description provides the structure upon which the history of Protestant youth ministry is built.

1


Newsies

A Survey of the Diverse Experiences
of Youth in America

The 1899 strike of the newspaper boys in New York City shocked the city. Boys could fight with each other, but they were not expected to challenge authority figures, no matter how corrupt. These news boys were quite different from the classic ideal of family life formed by the middle of the twentieth century. Few enjoyed the safety of families, schools, churches, and communities that prepared them to participate in the American dream.

The 1992 movie Newsies captured some of the dynamics of the era. Jack “Cowboy” Kelly, an orphan, and David Jacobs, who needed to support his family due to a job-related injury experienced by his father, typified many youth at the turn of the twentieth century. “Cowboy” was a hustler who did not worry about ethics when selling newspapers, while Jacobs was an educated Christian boy with organizational skills. The two found themselves pitted against the political and newspaper business establishment of New York City. Publishers William Randolph Hurst and Joseph Pulitzer vie for profits at the expense of the newsies until the lead characters rally the news boys to strike and, with the help of Governor Theodore Roosevelt, gain some degree of justice for their peers.

The strike was noteworthy since it was one of the few times prior to the twentieth century when young people came out on top. For the most part young people of their day had no rights, no protection, no access to political leaders, and no resources other than what they could muster through their own efforts.

Protestant young people in early America also experienced a surprisingly diverse set of life circumstances. The dynamics of the teenage years varied widely based on region of the country (not everything was like New England), ethnic background (not everything was English), religious conviction (not every Protestant was shaped by Puritanism), and economic position (not everything was economic middle class).

While youth ministry gained its earliest notoriety in New England with the birth in Portland, Maine, of the Society of Christian Endeavor in 1881, Brooklyn had provided a focal point for youth ministry experimentation thirty years earlier. Yet the nation was populated with a wide variety of young people for whom Protestants shaped by regional differences shared concerns.

Growing Up in America

The experience of people in their teenage years varied greatly as the American expansion shaped a wilderness into a nation. The contrasting opinions and experiences between Anglicans in South Carolina (where the passion for wealth trumped all other concerns), Puritan families in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (where Christian convictions commanded the attention of civic leaders), and the Dutch Reformed Church (supported by the Dutch West India Company–financed schools in New Amsterdam [New York]) created enormous disparities in attitudes toward education and religion in the lives of young people. French Huguenots in the Southern colonies, German Lutherans in the Midwest, English Quakers in the mid-Atlantic colonies, and English Wesleyans up and down the East Coast all brought their concepts of Christian formation of children and youth to the new world.

The role of youth in American society varied not only regionally but also according to the period of history being considered. Joseph Kett indicates three distinct periods for youth: (1) in the early republic, 1790– 1840; (2) toward the age of adolescence, 1840–1900; and (3) in the era of adolescence, 1900–1977.¹

The three-volume Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History divides its study of public policy toward children and youth into three somewhat similar periods: (1) from the earliest English settlements to the close of the Civil War (roughly 1600–1865), (2) Reconstruction to the New Deal (1865–1932), and (3) the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt to 1973.² While the foci of the two works differ (the former on understanding adolescence; the latter on public policy), the dynamics of the youthful experience discussed in them are very similar. Since Kett’s purpose is closer to the purpose of this work, I will follow his periodization, with the exception that I give more attention to colonial life before the early republic.

Colonial Period and Early Republic (1600–1840)

From the time British people first settled in Jamestown or the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock, American society has abounded with young people. Many of the settlers in Virginia were the younger brothers of British noblemen. Of the 102 passengers aboard the Mayflower, thirty-one were children. The average age at the birth of the republic was under thirty-five years. Yet in 1800 the median age was only sixteen.³ This meant that if all people living in the newly formed United States of America were lined up according to age, a sixteen-year-old would have been exactly in the middle of the lineup.

To put this into perspective, the median age in the United States as of the 2000 census, was 35.3 years. With such a high proportion of the population being young in the early years of the American experience, life for young people differed greatly from the youth culture of the twenty-first century.

Life for youth in the thirteen colonies spread along the Atlantic seaboard, though differing according to the colony in which a young person lived, had one common theme: work. When a child was big enough to contribute to the family or community, he or she began to work. With the exception of children from the few wealthy families, young people were needed to enable the family to survive, and so without regrets they worked. The problem that faced young people was not self-esteem but survival.

For many, maintaining a lively spiritual life proved to be difficult in America; the survival of the soul of the rising generation became a pressing matter. Protestant dissenters from the authorized churches of Europe (Church of England, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, and Reformed Church) came to the New World in search of religious freedom. Quickly they found that their newly-found freedom put their children at risk. The persecution experienced in Europe forced a spiritual solidarity on families; but the enemy in America became freedom and the spiritual apathy that it engendered.

Leaders of the various colonies, and especially church leaders, took responsibility for training young people to contribute to the common life. Maintaining spiritual convictions was a key aspect of local communities. The ability to read provided a minimal spiritual and intellectual training for youth, enabling them to know the Scriptures, while skills for providing food, shelter, and safety sustained life. Exactly how the leaders prepared youth varied according to the section of the nation in which the young person grew to maturity.

New England

By far the greatest influence on young people outside their families came from the American educational system, which was birthed in New England where Puritans stressed education as a means of cultivating values of righteousness in children beset by their sinful nature. Reading and understanding the Bible formed the cornerstone of education for Christian families. Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted legislation demonstrating governmental concern for schools and providing taxation for supporting public schools. As early as 1642 and 1647, laws required the teaching of reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion in vernacular schools.

From these beginnings grew the common school movement championed by James Carter, Horace Mann, and Thaddeus Stevens that resulted in legislation in 1827 supporting common schools by means of compulsory taxation. Governmental institutions needed literate voters to make decisions in order for the American democratic experiment to be effective. All citizens needed to be educated.

This shift from education in the home to the public schooling necessary for the building of a democracy began a process of removing the Christian Scriptures from a central place in education. In some communities Protestant parents and clergy sensed the need to train young people in Bible knowledge and application. In others, clergy felt a lack of parental support for their concerns for encounters with God and lives of personal holiness among youthful attendees, so ministers sought to create methods for attracting and holding the youth of their day.

The family-church-school symbiosis may have seemed simple, but young people in New England differed from one another in a multitude of ways. Unlike the ideals of economic middle-class America in the twenty-first century, families seldom functioned as depicted in a Norman Rockwell painting with father going off to work, mother taking care of the house, and children splitting their time between play and school. Life in early America was hard. Virtually every person above seven years of age worked to contribute to the welfare of the family. It was commonly understood that children owed their parents the labor they could render.⁴ This was not a violation of child labor laws since such laws were nonexistent. Child labor was a necessity of life.

In poor Massachusetts families life was especially harsh on children. In 1672, Boston Commissioners ordered that poor families “bind out” their children as servants in order to satisfy family indebtedness.⁵ Orphans in England endured even harsher treatment. At a merchant’s bequest, three hundred pounds were “employed in the taking out of the street or out of the Bridewell (London’s house of correction) twelve fatherless and motherless boys and eight girls from seven years old and upwards and for furnishing them with necessities and paying for their passage to New England and for being bound apprentices to some such as will be careful to bring them up in the fear of God and to maintain themselves another day.” Though more common in other colonies, these youth and others, including the unruly sons of English gentlemen, were sent to Boston primarily because of New England’s reputation for piety.⁶

In fact, life was so hard that the health or physical condition of many parents suffered due to working conditions to the extent that many times children provided a bulk of family income. Frequently children essentially skipped adolescence and functioned as adults before entering their teenage years. Churches seldom had special meetings for young people because there simply was no time or energy for extra activities when life hung by a thread.

The more mouths there were to feed, the greater the difficulty parents had in making ends meet. Yet every additional mouth meant additional labor to help the family survive when the children were old enough to work. With a high level of infant and child mortality, less than half of the children survived until adulthood. Families had to be large merely to guarantee that the family would perpetuate itself.

If children survived into their teenage years, two customs of the day removed many from their homes. For girls, marriage was not uncommon soon after menarche, which occurred at age fourteen or fifteen. For boys, the common feeling was that in their early teenage years, sons should be placed as apprentices in the homes of other families. The reason most frequently given was that another father would have a better chance of properly disciplining and training the lad than would his biological parents.

As an example, Benjamin Franklin was the tenth son of a Boston soap maker. His father, who eventually had seventeen children, could only afford one year of schooling for Ben, and so at age twelve Ben was allowed to be an apprentice in his brother James’s print shop. He never lived at home again. Unlike some apprentices whose master craftsmen were church-oriented, Ben’s teenage contacts with the church were negative. He and his brother engaged in a feud with Puritan ministers Cotton and Increase Mathers over the use of smallpox vaccine in Boston (not a typical youth group discussion topic). At age seventeen, a...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• SERIES PREFACE
• PREFACE: GOD SHOWS UP
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PART 1: BIRTH OF YOUTH MINISTRY JAZZ: THE CONTEXT
• PART 2: YOUTH MINISTRY JAZZ: THE PERIOD OF ASSOCIATIONS (1824–75)
• PART 3: SHEET MUSIC JAZZ: THE PERIOD OF YOUTH SOCIETIES (1881–1925)
• PART 4: MODERN JAZZ: THE PERIOD OF THE RELATIONAL OUTREACH (1933–89)
• PART 5: JAZZ FUSION: COMBINING OLD AND NEW (1990 AND BEYOND)
• EPILOGUE
• NOTES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY