Christian Youth Work

The definitive book on Christian Youth Work

Mark Ashton, Phil Moon

• Publisher: 10Publishing
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781906173548

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"The Definitive book onChristianYouth Work." Ian Fry

The statistics are brutally clear. One thousand teenagers a week are leaving the church. Support among young people is decaying fast. For every church that has a flourishing youth group, there are three more that have none. Mark Ashton and Phil Moon, both experienced youth leaders, put forward a strategy for youth work which is both radical and biblical: 'Christian youth work must be different from all other forms of youth work. It must be distinct in its aim, because Christians have a unique view of what it is to be a human being… We want to give Christians a renewed vision for young people, a new confidence in what they can do for them, how they can do it and why they should do it.'

1. Gray’s Anatomy, Michelin Guide or Instruction Book?

The biblical basis for youth work

Youth decay

The bishop listened intently to the church’s steel band. Clearly, the racial mix of teenagers playing their animated West Indian rhythms had captured his interest.

‘Do they come to church at all?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes, and we have a Bible study meeting each week as well,’ the youth leader replied.

‘You mean these young people actually read the Bible?’ The episcopal eyebrows were raised in astonishment.

The Christian church is not doing well with teenagers. There is quite a bit of work with children, but after thirteen, most local churches of whatever denomination (or none) find it hard going. ‘Youth decay’ is now setting in earlier than ever before. We used to be able to keep them until they were fourteen. Now, if they make it to fourteen we reckon we’ve done well, and we’ve then got a reasonable chance of keeping them through their teenage years.

These feelings are supported by Peter Brierley’s statistics. Previously, it was clear that many teenagers are leaving the church: ‘13 per cent of English teenagers attended church in 1979, only 9 per cent were doing so in 1989. In 1979, 960,000 young people aged 10–19 attended church. In 1989, this age band of young people were 10 years older, and in the 20–29 age band only 490,000 attended church, a forty-nine per cent drop in church attendance.’¹ In the last decade this problem has intensified. Despite a population increase the attendance of young people at UK churches has continued to drop. And there appears to be no arrest in the decline. The projected figures for the coming years predict that by 2016 the number of those under fifteen attending church will be as low as 225,000.²

Youth decay sets in. For every church fellowship that has a flourishing group of teenagers in its membership, there are three with no children’s or youth work at all.³

So is the whole teenage subculture becoming a no-go area for the Christian faith?

There has been no shortage of thought and energy expended in the attempt to reach young people with the gospel. Youth culture has been analysed and infiltrated by Christians. Pete Ward, formerly of Oxford Youth Works, wrote: ‘As a Christian youthworker I live in two worlds. The first world is created by young people themselves. This is the continually changing bright and alive world of youth culture . . . The other world that I live in is similar; it’s the world of the Gospel.’⁴

Much has been written about youth culture, and some of us reckon we are beginning to understand it. In the world of music, arts festivals, road shows, magazines, sport and the media, excellent work has been done. We know how to relate to teenagers. We know what they like and what they don’t like. We know how to amuse them. And sometimes we think we know how to reach out to them.

For over four decades the attention of the churches has been drawn to the disadvantaged young people of the inner cities. Open youth projects, outreach programmes, skills centres and community work have been organised and run by Christians. Christian pressure groups have been set up, aiming to change the structures of society in order to help those young people who are alienated from the world in which they live. The plight of rural young people, with their special problems of isolation and limited resources, has not escaped attention either. And the drive to work with the under-privileged continues. Youth for Christ (YFC), in its strategy for the nineties, stated:

YFC will move out from a primarily youth ministry role amongst those currently reached by the church, to working amongst the vast majority of young people who are outside the church. YFC will move from the grasslands of youth ministry to the dark jungle of youth culture. This will mean a bias to the poor, the needy and to the under-privileged in society.⁵

So why, with all this effort and activity, does the outlook remain so bleak? Are the churches being bypassed by the Spirit of God? Is he now at work in ways and in places that we find hard to perceive? Or do we need to redefine the gospel in order to make it more relevant to young people in the twenty-first century?

Or is it just that the Christian faith is actually on an irretrievable decline in the western world – a decline most apparent among young people? Has the sea of faith finally ebbed away, and must we now find new ways of defining and speaking about God? Or has our Christian thinking been so infiltrated by secularism, materialism and post-modern thinking that we are blind to the will of God for his people and to his plans to establish his kingdom?

The challenge

Perhaps some of the answers to the Christian faith’s decaying impact on teenagers may lie closer at hand than we think. The existence of a youth-orientated popular culture is so recent, so brash and so dominant, that it is easy to see it as an entirely new phenomenon, posing questions that have never been asked before. It is tempting to believe that the youth decay of the church springs from a failure to understand this new culture, rather than a failure to understand the faith.

But the most serious weakness in Christian ministry among teenagers today is not a failure to understand our culture. It is a failure to take the Bible sufficiently seriously.

There are two fundamental necessities in Christian communication. One is that we take the world we live in seriously; and the other is that we take God’s revelation to us in the Bible seriously. If either is missing, the communication will be ineffective.

However, either of these necessities may become all-absorbing. We can strive so hard to be relevant to young people that we immerse ourselves in their culture to a point where the distinctiveness of the Christian message vanishes. Or we can be so concerned to be faithful to the Bible that we forget that the culture of the Bible and the culture of our world are miles apart. We then drive an unbiblical wedge between evangelism and social action; or we throw up our hands in horror at the thought of using rock music as a medium to communicate the gospel – the ‘They didn’t have it then, so we can’t possibly use it now’ syndrome.

However, if we have to err on one side or the other, we must not lose our hold on Christian truth. The simple message of God’s love for sinful humanity and of his forgiveness of our sins for the sake of his son has extraordinary and immense power: our incompetence as communicators is not able to destroy its ability to reach non-Christian young people.

That is why some Christian youth work is characterised by two apparently irreconcilable extremes. On the one hand, it is massively irrelevant to any young person. Yet, on the other hand, it does, undeniably, change human lives.

There is other Christian youth work though, which is earnest, sincere and sacrificial, that seems to be popular with young people and certainly relates to their culture, but nevertheless produces few, if any, changed lives. It has no permanent effect on the world in which it takes place, and seems to achieve little of eternal significance.

Why is that?

The answer

The cultural distance between the world of the Bible and the world of our own day should not be minimised, but to tell young people about the God who made them and loves them, in a way that they can understand, demands a close attention to what that God has revealed about himself. Here is the foundation for Christian work with teenagers.

The Bible, however, does not contain a systematic theology of youth. There is no mention of the ‘teenager’ or the ‘youth worker’. Adolescents were not regarded as a significant category of society in the ancient world in the way they are today.

Clearly there are problems of ‘cultural transposition’ in looking back into the Bible to find guidelines for modern youth work. It is necessary to discover the principles that underlie their practices in order to transfer those principles from their culture and apply them to our own culture. We may not wear phylacteries or write texts on our doorposts (Deut. 6:8–9), but those practices may have expressed an important principle for ancient Judaism which we should not ignore (and for which we must find contemporary applications).

For this search to be successful it must be expectant and humble. We come to the Bible expecting to learn from it and willing to learn from it. It must be allowed to speak for itself – however uncomfortable, unfashionable, or alien its voice may sound at first.

It is often those things with which we are least comfortable that have most to teach us, because they pave the way to new insights and do not merely reinforce our present attitudes and opinions. This is an important principle of study if we are to hear God speaking to us through the Bible. Otherwise we may peer deep into the well of truth, only to see a reflection of our own faces. This principle has other important implications too.

For example, it will guard us from despising the youth work of older generations. There can be a dangerous contemporary arrogance which looks down on earlier patterns of youth ministry as though God never guided or spoke to our predecessors, and has reserved his ultimate revelation on this matter for today. The archives in the CYFA office contain photographs of ‘CYFA Rallies’ at the Royal Albert Hall in the 1970s, where the singing is led by several hundred teenagers playing six-string classical guitars conducted by a gentleman wearing a white suit (who is now an Anglican bishop!). We would be appalled to put on an event like that today, but it was appropriate then. And what will they be saying in twenty years time about our youth work today? Don’t despise the youth work of older generations.

This approach will also keep us from making the interpretation of the Bible an intellectual achievement. It is important to study the Bible carefully, particularly when there is such a large cultural gap between adolescence in the ancient world and adolescence today. But God doesn’t reveal his truth to the learned and conceal it from the simple. Rather the reverse. We set out to master the Bible in order to be mastered by it. The will of God is not so much discerned by an understanding of such theological niceties as ‘the new hermeneutic’, ‘dynamic equivalence’, or ‘redaction criticism’, as by our willingness to obey him whatever the cost.

This humble and expectant approach to the Bible will avoid the attitude of arrogant detachment, which sees the biblical material as an interesting basis for discussion, but no more than that. Such an attitude resorts to subjectivism (‘I think . . . I feel . . . In my experience . . .’) at any point where the Bible contradicts previous opinions and prejudices. ‘Feeling’ has very little to contribute in the search for God’s remedy for the church’s youth decay.

So we begin this search humbly and expectantly in the pages of the Bible.

The God of all ages

The ancient world knew nothing of the ‘teenager’, and Eli bringing up Samuel in the temple must be virtually the only biblical account of a ‘youth worker’. If that really was the forerunner of our youth groups, it is particularly encouraging. It has one member, who keeps falling asleep. It has one leader, who is antique (although admittedly a valuable one), and half blind. And they meet in church, without any other facilities at all. Your group’s not so bad after all, is it?

But actually the Bible has a great deal to say about God’s dealings with children and young people. In fact, the Bible is insistent that God is the God of the child. This is particularly striking because children counted for little in ancient society.

With high rates of infant mortality, the child had few rights and low status. Children were a marginalised and disadvantaged social category. When Matthew records Jesus’ feeding miracles, he writes: ‘The number of those who ate was about five thousand men, besides women and children’ (Mt. 14:21), and ‘The number of those who ate was four thousand, besides women and children’ (Mt. 15:38).

This reflects the lack of social significance of the women and children. However, the Bible also contains several indications of a different attitude. In Leviticus 27 there is a valuation of persons ‘vowed to the LORD’: a male from twenty years up to sixty years old was valued at fifty shekels of silver (a woman was valued at thirty), while a male from five years to twenty years old was worth twenty shekels (and a girl ten). From one month to five years old a boy was valued at just five shekels and a girl at three shekels. This suggests that Jewish society did accord a certain status to the child, even if a limited one. Children, and particularly sons, were God’s gift to a man and a sign of his blessing:

Sons are a heritage from the LORD,

children a reward from him.

Like arrows in the hands of a warrior

are sons born in one’s youth.

Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.

They will not be put to shame

when they contend with their enemies in the gate.

(Ps. 127:3–5)

Similarly, the ‘fatherless’ are a category to be protected by law, along with the stranger, the widow and the poor (Ex. 22:21–24). Orphans were to be cared for by God’s people, in an age which tended to exploit them.

The Old Testament also suggests that an index of what is happening to a society is provided by what is happening to its young. The violent death of small children is an indication of extreme calamity (Nah. 3:10), or the worst of curses on an enemy: ‘Happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us – he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks’ (Ps. 137:8, 9).

The happiness and well-being of the young are signs that God has visited his people: ‘The city streets will be filled with boys and girls playing there’ (Zech. 8:5); ‘How attractive and beautiful they will be! Grain will make the young men thrive, and new wine the young women’ (Zech. 9:17).

One of the most abominable of all the Canaanite practices was the worship of Molech, involving children being burnt alive. Any Israelite (or any stranger living in Israel) who offered a child to Molech was to be put to death and to be cut off from among the people (Lev. 20:1–5). The very lowest point of degradation for the people of Israel would be when they themselves resorted to eating their own children (Lev. 26:29). In the blessings and cursings set before Israel in Deuteronomy 28, the ultimate consequence of rejecting God is that the nation will be afflicted to the point where women will eat their children and even their afterbirths, jealously guarding them from other members of their family. This is a horrific picture of the lowest depths to which the life of a nation could sink.

The welfare of the young was an important factor in Israelite society because God dealt with the young. He begins his deal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Foreword
• 1. Gray’s Anatomy, Michelin Guide or instruction book?
• 2. Oak trees or beansprouts?
• 3. It’s life to life
• 4. It’s people, people, people
• 5. The anachronism of the century?
• 6. Going, going, gone
• 7. Hope for the future?
• 8. Getting down to it
• Recommended Further Reading
• Index of Resource Agencies