Introduction
Western societies like Australia are living through times of rapid change. Revolutions in technology create new ways of living that in turn create new ways of thinking. Young people grow up in environments very different from their parents, and so often develop different values. This makes the passing on of biblical values from one generation to the next difficult. The technologies that shape our lives give us amazing freedom of choice, and relative independence. But this is creating a growing, transient, consumer-driven individualism in our societies.
Youth ministry acts as a shock absorber for the institutional church in this environment of change and individualism. Youth ministries’ ability to absorb cultural shocks and disperse them gradually through the institutions of the church has helped the church communicate to secular youth for 200 years. While it has had a pragmatic positive effect for our evangelism, it has helped to create more and more secular expressions of church that have led to a breakdown in continuity of discipleship for young Christians, thus leading to a reduction in their Christian identity. Now, as the pace of cultural change speeds up, youth ministry is trying to respond to pluralism, and is under great strain. This may mean we need to look for a new revolution in the way we pass on the gospel. This revolution may possibly involve building stronger, more stable local church communities to strengthen our witness and to provide a stronger platform for the proclamation of the gospel. It may also lead to the demise of youth ministry as we now know it.
The birth of modern youth ministry
The church has inducted young people into the ways of the Lord for thousands of years, obeying the command of Deuteronomy 4:9: “Teach them to your children and to their children after them”. But youth ministry (as we know it today) is only a recent addition to the strategy of the church. It began with the Sunday School movement, established in Gloucester, England, in 1780 through the efforts of a concerned layman, Robert Raikes. He started it out of compassion for the young victims of the Industrial Revolution. This revolution had resulted primarily from the invention of steam-powered engines, which, with subsequent inventions, changed forever the way people lived. Machines replaced people in the countryside. In the cities, new factories sprang up as machine-driven manufacturing became the biggest source of employment. Large-scale migration of people moving from the villages to the burgeoning industrial cities of England began. They settled in slums springing up around the new factories.
Once most young people were brought up in the knowledge of the gospel within the stable community of the village. They participated in the life of the community, which revolved around the parish church. Mostly, they were born, grew and died in the same village. The young were brought up to share the values of their parents. In turn, they would pass these values on to their own children. Now in a matter of decades, the social fabric of a whole nation was unravelling. The institutions of the church still had most of their infrastructure in the country, but there were not enough town churches to reach the new class of workers, the industrial poor. In the slums, a generation was growing up without the gospel community that once would have passed on the story of Jesus to them. They were cut off from God’s word.
The institutions of the church could not adjust quickly enough to these social changes. In the vacuum, concerned Christian lay people led a revolution of their own. Raikes and his friends began bringing poor children together, teaching them to read and write by using the Bible. This simple idea now took on the role which the whole village community had performed before the time of the Industrial Revolution. While Raikes’s model was not the only Sunday meeting for Bible Study, it became the archetype for modern youth ministry.1 It quickly spread around the world to become the church’s answer to the Industrial Revolution.
The secular age
The Industrial Revolution did not end with the invention of steam; it sparked an era of scientific and technical inventiveness that continues to this day. In this sense, the Industrial Revolution not only continues, but is gaining pace. As a result, it continues to create an ever-changing society. In fact, change is the only constant in what we call the modern era: new inventions give people fresh new options for life and work. New ways of living, in turn, create new values. This Industrial Revolution spread around the world, changing every pre-modern society it came in contact with.
The story of modernism, then, is the replacement of one type of society with another—pre-modern with modern, and then, as we shall see later, modern with a postmodern society. Machines created a new economic reality. In the pre-modern era, the generations needed one another. The old ones knew the traditions—when to plant and when to reap. The young, who had the strength to plant and bring in the crops, needed the knowledge and wisdom of their elders. The generations were interdependent because of economic realities. The philosophers of this age had ideas that were more individualistic, but they could not be put into practice fully while economics demanded interdependence in community.
The Enlightenment had begun a century before steam. Beginning with Descartes, thinkers even explored new ways of organizing society that were not derived from religion. Kant made great attempts to define society based on the individual, rather than beginning with the group. But Enlightenment ideas created revolutions in Europe and America. These nations were prominent in their attempt to write constitutions for their government that were not based on religion, but on a non-religious or secular system. Over time, secular forms of government would be adopted by modernizing countries around the world. But the ideas of a society made up of individuals needed another type of revolution.
The Industrial Revolution would eventually give people of means more economic independence and a far greater range of choice. The other change was that, for the first time in human history, new ideas were now demonstrably more powerful than old ideas. Modern society would become more and more individualistic, and successive generations would grow up more and more separated from each other. Pre-modern communities were becoming extinct. In the emerging society where technology changed lifestyles (which in turn led to changed values, with generations drifting apart and a lack of trust in old ideas), youth ministry would become the major strategy relied upon for passing on biblical values from one generation to the next.
Cycles in youth ministry
Mark Senter in his seminal book2 shows how the Sunday School movement set the pattern for all subsequent youth ministries. He applies Max Weber’s theory of grassroots movements to establish that developments in youth ministry would come in cycles. According to Weber’s theory, grassroots movements are begun by a charismatic leader during a time of change. In the establishment of Sunday Schools, Raikes was clearly the charismatic leader because he inspired others to get involved in his cause. As people join the cause, a movement grows. As it multiplies, the ideas it is based on are systematized by bureaucrats whom Weber calls the “priests” of the movement. This is a process of institutionalization, which allows the movement to spread widely because it no longer relies on the direct leadership input of the charismatic leader. The Sunday School became a system through its newspaper, and the model then spread across Britain, the USA and as far as Australia.
Even though a movement grows through institutionalization, it actually becomes less effective because it becomes less flexible. Not all the bureaucrats who led Sunday School groups had the same passion or understanding as the initiator. When another time of change comes, the now inflexible and institutionalized movement declines as it cannot adjust to the new lifestyles and values of young people. This is a pointed irony, for it was its ability to adjust to these forces that resulted in that movement’s emergence in the first place.
Senter argues that the period of growth, institutionalization and decline (i.e. a cycle) took 50 years in the case of the Sunday School movement. In time, the Sunday School led to work with young people symbolized by the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). The distinctiveness of the YMCA when it started was its relevance to its times: it added a social component to the study of God’s word. In addition to meeting for Bible instruction, the model gave, first, young men, then soon after, young women, a place to stay as they became increasingly mobile, along with some fitness instruction. The YMCA is similar to the Sunday School: it was conceived as a grassroots response to change, but then, as it institutionalized itself, it became unable to change, and eventually lost its effectiveness.
The second cycle Senter identifies is the Young People’s Society for Christian Endeavour, followed by the third, the model of Youth for Christ in the 1940’s. According to his theory, youth movement cycles in the secular age last for 50 years. So by the early 1990’s, we were anticipating the emergence of next the 50-year cycle (hence the title of his book).
The shock absorber principle
The city of San Francisco is built on a beautiful bay on the west coast of the USA. But that’s not all it is built on! The city was unintentionally built right on top of the San Andreas fault line. As a result, it is prone to earthquakes. One such quake devastated the city in 1900. Large movements of the earth’s crust like that occur along the fault every 75 years or so. Small quakes and aftershocks are a constant reminder that the next big quake is inevitably coming. Because of the ever-present danger, buildings in the city—particularly its high-rises—are specially designed to resist earthquakes. The skyscrapers are built with quake shock absorbers—foundations specially constructed to be able to move in case of a shock, absorbing most of the movement. The shock is transferred more gradually into the building above, and while the windows may smash and the walls crack, hopefully the building will still be standing after the earthquake has subsided.
In my view, youth ministry has acted as a cultural shock absorber for the institutional church in the modern secular era. It takes the form of a grassroots movement that can spring up quickly in response to a change in the culture, and it can minister effectively to a new and different generation of young people. Thus it absorbs the initial shock of change. Over a period of time, youth ministry institutionalizes itself—meaning that the lessons it has learned about ministering in a new cultural environment can be transferred into the institutions of the church more slowly, allowing for adaptation over a longer period. When youth ministry itself becomes an institution, the other institutions of the church can communicate more effectively with it. Most institutions are too rigid to adapt quickly to the speed of change in the modern world. As a result, the shock absorber function of youth ministry has become the mechanism by which the institutional church adapts in this rapidly changing social environment. Senter’s cycle theory of youth ministry suggests that great earthquakes in culture occur every 50 years or so. In effect, the building (the church) has 50 years to absorb and adapt changes from the youth ministry shock absorber before another major quake.
The example of the Sunday School movement illustrates the shock absorber effect. Raikes and his friends started their ministry long before the institution could react to the initial effects of the Industrial Revolution earthquake. At first, Sunday Schools were actually outlawed by The Crown because of fears that educating the poor might lead to the kind of revolution that was spreading across Europe. As the Sunday School spread and became institutionalized, it began to look like a ministry that the institutional church could understand. The irony is that not only did the model then gain wider acceptance, the Queen herself became the patron of the Sunday School movement. It was adopted as the common way to pass on the gospel to young people in every church in Britain and around the world. Most parish churches over a 50-year period now had a way to pass on the gospel to young people in the absence of a strong village community. In effect, they had modernized.
Youth ministry at once adjusts to change, and then passes on that change to the rest of the church because of the Weberian life cycle it follows. But there is a down side to the shock absorber. Youth work is about maintaining a culturally relevant ministry approach in the face of secularism in each new generation. Bur rhe approach that worked last generation needs to be replaced by a more modern approach in the next generation. While the church is modernizing through the shock absorber, it is also changing slowly. First, it takes time for a Christian response to be formulated after a change in culture. Then it takes time for that change to be transferred right through the institutions of the church. Thus the church modernizes, but it does so slowly. Despite its best efforts, the church is perpetually out of date, or, at best, just manages to stay in touch. The pre-modern institutions of the church eventually come into line with other modern institutions. Now sections of the church that are allowing the shock absorber to pass on changes to them are producing postmodern forms of church.
These changes are most observable in the public gatherings of the church. While some hold to pre-modern or modern forms, those most influenced by the shock absorber of youth ministry have transformed their gatherings into very postmodern forms. Is this a secular accommodation or is it simply the church adjusting to its cultural surrounds? After all, Christ does continually build, and rebuild, his church.
New ideas
The Industrial Revolution of the 18th century created the modern age of the 20th century. The increasing use of machines and the movement of people from villages into cities led to new social arrangements that allowed the ideas of the Enlightenment to take firm hold in the West. Biblical ideas were vigorously defended from within the church, but were increasingly marginalized. As evangelicals debated secularism and emerging modern values, those values found a back door into the church through youth ministry. After four cycles of youth ministry, the church had succeeded in becoming a modern institution. While it defended its pre-modern faith system, its expression of community had become modern. This expression in turn affected its value system. No longer was it necessary to have a village church from which to pass on the Bible from one generation to the next; now, the congregation could meet once a week on a Sunday in a style that suited their modern world.
This modern church was soon to be tested by another major quake. The 1960s created a second tremor of the same magnitude as the cultural upheaval of the original Industrial Revolution. Young people rejected modernism in favour of a new value system. Along with this, they rejected the church as a modernist institution. Youth ministry, again, was the church’s first response, in the form of the Jesus Movement.
The post-war economic boom
At the end of the Second World War, there was economic prosperity and the biggest baby boom in history. During this period, technology, again, dramatically transformed lifestyles. The car played a significant part, starting a new migration. The steam engine had caused a move from villages to the cities; now the car was the ready means for migrating from the cities to the suburbs. Once people live within walking distance from work, schools, church, shops and family; the car created a situation whereby people could live at a distance from their work, family or social support networks. People moved to the suburbs in droves.
Because of urban sprawl, Australia was now more in touch with the USA than Britain, as had been the case before the war. A symbol of post-war development in Australia was our country’s first home-built car, the FJ Holden. Every family, through its share in growing industrial-based wealth, aspired to own a car along with the great Australian dream: a home on a quarter-acre block in the suburbs, equipped with all the latest labour-saving consumables.
The changing social conditions were, in turn, another significant erosion of community. The Industrial Revolution eroded village life, however, in the cities, the extended family had remained relatively intact. But the car and the move to suburban living saw the nuclear family become the most common social unit. Despite increasing material prosperity in Australia, the sense of belonging to a community was further fractured. This was all seen as progress at the time because it was accompanied by greater material prosperity. Sheltering under the American nuclear umbrella and sharing its technology and culture, Australia looked to the United States for leadership. The great cultural changes that would shake US society came to our shores as a necessary consequence.
The baby boomer youth quake
It was not long before the baby boomer generation began questioning the American dream of material prosperity. During the late 1940s and 50s, countercultural groups, philosophers and painters had begun to deconstruct Modernism. In other words, they pointed out the inconsistencies in a value system that promised happiness purely through economic prosperity. Now in the late 50s and 60s, young baby boomers began a revolution that, at its height, turned the modern the world upside. The city of San Francisco featured. The Berkley campus of the University of California became a hotbed of student action—first, for civil rights, and then, for free speech. These protests were driven by a recognition that wealth-based success was not for everyone. They were picking up on issues of racial inequality highlighted earlier by the Beatniks from the 50s.
Rebellion was not restricted to student political action; other young baby boomers were questioning the status quo. From the beginning, rock ‘n’ roll music was viewed as dangerous by middle class white parents. At first, the new music was only recorded on black record labels and played on black radio. But soon white young people began tuning into the music late at night on their car radios. Again, technology was allowing new lifestyles to emerge. Young people did not have to listen to what their parents listened to on the radio at home; the transistor gave them a choice. Rock ‘n’ roll and, later, other music styles became significant disseminators of new youth cultures in America.
Rock ‘n’ roll had a broader appeal than student politics, and quickly defined a generation. But the ideas of the political activists influenced the words and message of the music. Young people embraced the new style and the emerging culture as their own. They had found a voice to challenge modernist and capitalist values, and an opportunity to establish their own ideas. New values regarding sex, drugs, style and lifestyle were broadly adopted by the generation. By the end of the 1960s, young people everywhere were recreating American culture. The growing difference between the Boomers and their parents was being called ‘a generation gap’. The concept of ‘teenager’ had been emerging slowly over the past 100 years, but the rock ‘n’ roll generation was different. In the past, those in their teens had looked and sounded much like adults; now there was the most striking contrast ever between two successive generations.
Social movements and the birth of postmodernism
The 1968 student riots in Paris inspired the American students in their continuing protests. By this time, they were focused on ending the war in Vietnam. This one issue galvanized youth culture across the western world. In San Francisco, the students at Berkley, the hippies who had taken the place of the Beatniks in the Haight Ashbury district and the young activists in the Black Panther Party joined forces. They created a formidable coalition that inspired young people all over the world. Alan Touraine has argued that, at this time, young people formed movements that changed the culture of the western world. The student activists were on the forefront of what Touraine calls new social movements— movements for free speech, civil rights, cessation of war, feminism, and gay rights—many of which emerged at Berkley, defining the second half of the 20th century with their fresh, anti-establishment ideas. While these movements challenged the power base of modern institutions, they were also the inherited values of the Enlightenment. The individualism behind Kant’s ideas fueled these new social movements, and the existentialism of Kierkegaard inspired young people to change their world through drug use.
This new era was dubbed ‘postmodern’. Postmodernism rejects the defined boundaries of the scientific approach to art, music, history, science, politics, economics and popular culture. The important relationship between ideas and technology would continue into the postmodern era. The car, the transistor radio, records and movies allowed the ready dissemination of a popular new youth culture. Soon the pill would give reality to the idea of sexual freedom, leading to the emancipation of women. Technology provided a generation with the opportunity to choose between the values of their parents and the freedom to create their own version of future.
The postmodern idea of society—an era of competing ideas—was beginning to take shape. Humans gathered increasingly around a common interest that distinguished them from other groupings. These groupings are the hallmark of new social movements: in the pre-modern village, people gathered out of necessity for survival in small intimate groups; in the modern era, these communities were being broken down into city hives. Here, people gathered around a new economic reality: the machine. In Marxist terms, they are classified as either proletariat or bourgeoisie. But now people gather around an interest in a particular kind of music, their ideal of civil rights, or marches to stop a war. This change in the definition of a group gathering together affected the church (in Greek, the word means a ‘gathering’). Can the church survive this new way of defining societal groups, which increase the power of the individual to choose how he or she wants to live?
Is God dead?
The way the church communicated Christian values was also seen as out of date. The generations looked and sounded like entirely different cultures in the same country. The most important dissemination tool of the church—its stable communication between one generation and the next, weakened by the Industrial Revolution—was now seemingly falling apart. In many Christian families, the core of church communities—that is, parents and their teenagers—were now in open conflict with each other over clothes, music, drugs, sex and lifestyle issues. Forms of youth ministry from the Billy Graham era could no longer be relied upon to fill the gap between the generations. The tent meeting format, popular a decade before, no longer attracted baby boomers as it did their parents.
Church attendance was in decline. Not all baby boomers fit the stereotype of the young radical, but enough had been influenced by the rock ‘n’ roll generation that they saw the church as a thing of the past. A new cultural shock—postmodernism—emerged to threaten the very existence of the church in the secular era. It was, potentially, the biggest threat since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This quake went to the core of community (the family unit), creating a generation gap that split families profoundly, and interrupting the passing on of the gospel from one generation to the next. Would Christianity become extinct as a result? It appeared likely. In 1966, Time Magazine ran as its cover story, ‘Is God dead?’3
How could the Christian church possible respond to a youth quake of such magnitude? Yet again a shock absorber would come into action. Another grassroots response arose to meet the challenge of relevance, expressing Christianity in a postmodern form. In 1971, Time Magazine ran another cover story that focused on the church in the newest secular era. The title was ‘The Jesus Revolution’.
Warning: Jesus still at large
The article’s author wrote,
Jesus is alive and well and living in the radical spiritual fervour of a growing number of young Americans who have proclaimed an extraordinary religious revolution in His name. Their message: the Bible is true, miracles happen, God really did so love the world that He gave it His only begotten son. In 1966, Beatle John Lennon casually remarked that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ: now the Beatles are shattered. 4
How did Jesus make such an unexpected comeback among a generation that looked set to reject him? It happened in same way other youth ministries had made comebacks in times of change in the secular era: the Jesus movement began, grew rapidly and then institutionalized according to the same formula laid down by the archetypal youth ministry, the Sunday School.
From humble beginnings
Most commentators position the origin of the Jesus Movement in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district with the opening of a street front mission called The Living Room. The first ‘Jesus People’ had grasped the scale of cultural change, seen church inaction and come up with a grassroots solution. Like Raikes, they emerged in the very heart of the cultural turmoil. The Sunday School started in city slums; the Jesus Movement started in the heart of the counterculture—just across the bay from the San Francisco university that had become the political centre of America’s youthful protest.
The Jesus Movement’s premise was that young baby boomers were less likely to listen to the gospel presented by their parents’ generation, and more likely to listen to a relevant message coming from their own generation in language, political terms and symbols they readily understood. The Jesus Movement created a Christian version of the prevailing youth culture, successfully replicating Christian versions of the commune, coffee houses, rock music, radio stations, newspapers, dress and language, and creating postmodern expressions in an easily recognizable form. In this, they struck off in a new direction on their own. They capitalized on their society’s desire to get back to something lost in the industrial world. Paganism and eastern religions were popular then. Interestingly, there was also a resurgence of interest in Jesus and a more authentic first-century Christianity—all this while young people continued to reject the modern expressions of institutional Christianity. Jesus the man was the object of interest, not a set of man-made traditions and regulations.
So while the values of baby boomers were full of sex, drugs and rebellion, youth culture had left a window open that the Jesus People were able to climb through. Young people began to open Christian coffee houses and communes. In many ways, these were indistinguishable from the secular counterparts which had inspired them. By 1971, Time Magazine reported that there were over 800 communes across the USA. Sharing the gospel on the street or in a coffee house stripped Christianity of its institutional baggage, and made the message more accessible. Rather than young people having to go to church to hear the gospel, the gospel was taken to them. The major way this message was shared was through the baby boomers’ own music: rock ‘n’ roll.
Larry Norman, the father of Christian rock, was one of the first of his generation to use that form of music to tell the gospel. Norman struck a chord, and became a new kind of preacher to his generation. His fusion of a traditional Christian message with rock music was extremely popular. Like the other Jesus People, Larry’s language was that of the contemporary generation. His music, and the music of the rest of the new Jesus rock industry, was promoted through festivals and concerts, recorded on vinyl and tapes, played on Christian radio stations, and performed by youth group leaders in their churches and youth groups
Growing and spreading
In his theory of cycles in youth ministry, Mark Senter predicted that a grassroots movement spreads because it has the ability to articulate the gospel into an emerging culture that does not understand previous expressions of Christianity. All the ingredients were now in place for the Jesus Movement to take off. They had a formula that was relevant and easily transportable. The American Jesus Movement spread around the world on the back of Jesus rock—music that gave the movement its enigmatic synergy of rebellion and piety.
Larry Norman and a number of other rock acts travelled to Australia. They helped to promote the movement here. There were coffee houses and communes around the country with names like ‘The House of the Purple Door’ and ‘The House of the Gentle Bunyip’. God’s Squad and the Christian Surfers Movement also started up at this time, their names blending the gospel with a hippie semiotic. Local artists also sprang up. Teenagers from church-based youth groups would visit the Jesus Movement coffee houses and attend regular concerts.
The Jesus Movement as shock absorber
The Jesus Movement was a Christian version of hippie culture. It gave young Christians the opportunity to be a part of their generation and be a Christian too. This was the youth ministry shock absorber principle in action.
The huge impact of the Jesus Movement should not be underestimated. It was able to syncretize the politics of the new social movement, and adopt the semiotics of the hippie rock ‘n’ roll culture. It was large enough to capture the attention of the popular media. Even in Australia, Larry Norman was interviewed on national television. The movement also drew attention from the Christian church. However, like the Sunday School, at first it attracted much opposition, as many mainline Christian leaders worried about its populist appeal and charismatic emphasis.
The Jesus Movement’s success, however, did reinforce the long-held view that, in the secular age, relevance was the necessary ingredient in youth ministry. This cemented the attitude that young people were best able to reach their peers with the gospel because they spoke the same language and understood their cultural symbols. The bottom line was that the Jesus Movement succeeded in explaining the gospel to baby boomers when the old forms had failed. The shock absorber had initiated a new cycle in youth ministry. The culture shock had hit the church, but the new grassroots youth ministry absorbed much of the shock by its speedy response. It was time now for the second part of the cycle: institutionalization.
Senter’s cycles accelerate
The Jesus Movement followed the same cycle of youth ministry described by Senter. But while he refers to the Jesus Movement, he does not recognize it as a new cycle in itself. This is because his theory is premised on 50-year cycles. For Senter, the Jesus Movement came in the middle of a cycle started by the Youth For Christ era. But, as already indicated, the Youth for Christ model of ministry was already out of date by the 60s, and was irrelevant to the counterculture of the day. According to Senter, a new cycle of youth ministry was due during the 90s. However, Senter is too rigid in his expectations: he has not factored in the ever-increasing pace of change brought about by the Industrial Revolution. In other words, as new technologies come online quicker and quicker, change happens more often. Cycles that were once 50 years apart are now coming closer together. Hence, the Jesus Movement occurred only 30 years after the Youth for Christ cycle because the forces that created the counterculture came quickly off the back of the Depression and World War II.
On to institutionalization
The hippie era came to an end, and with it, the Jesus Movement’s relevance. As the rock and roll generation moved on, so did the children of the Jesus Revolution. They were looking for the next step in their Christian expression. As Senter predicted, their success would result in the movement becoming institutionalized. Yet Senter missed the institutionalization of the Jesus Movement, and therefore relegated it to be a subset of the Youth for Christ cycle of youth ministry. The Jesus Movement did appear to evaporate as the 60s became the 70s. But it also lingered beyond the death of the secular hippie movement. As usual, the process of the shock absorber meant that the Jesus Movement (which had come after the original change in culture) did not pick the end of the movement as it came. Hippie-style music and events continued in some form right into the 80s. But the cutting edge energy of the movement faded as it institutionalized in a surprising way: the unsustainability of the communes became obvious, and when many Jesus People made the necessary journey back into the institutional church, they carried with them their reforms. For instance, they brought aspects of rock ‘n’ roll culture more slowly into the rest of the church, as the shock absorber had always done.
At first, they had responded to the problem of the generation gap by dropping out of the institutional church. But then the Jesus generation created the suburban postmodern church. They were drawn in large numbers to the charismatic movement of the early 70s. Calvary Chapel was one of the early promoters of Jesus rock. Larry Norman, Randy Stonehill, Second Chapter of Acts, Love Song and (arguably the most significant convert to the Jesus Movement) Keith Green all appeared there. Calvary’s leader Chuck Smith saw this youth movement as the work of the Holy Spirit. Charismatic churches around the world experienced a boom in the 70s and 80s. With less tradition to hold them back, they created a rock ‘n’ roll style, and focused their congregations on a personal relationship with Jesus in an informal setting. It was not as intense an expression as the communes had been, but it had the semiotics of the baby boomer generation.
For those Jesus People in Australia and America who rejoined the mainline churches, there was an added complication: these were the churches that had the tradition and style that the boomers had rejected in the first place. Whereas the mainline adult congregations were inflexible on the place of hymns, the baby boomers were inflexible when it came to rock ‘n’ roll. A compromise was then reached: many churches maintained a traditional service in the morning, and started a more contemporary youth service in the evening—choir and organ being replaced with guitars, drums and a song leader, just like the coffee house concerts. The two-service structure did not solve the problem of the generation gap, it just accommodated it. At the time, this made pragmatic sense as it had become widely accepted by baby boomers that their contemporaries would not come to a traditional service. So while preachers may have held conservative views, they redesigned their structures to weaken their community’s expression of that theology. The short-term gains in evangelism effectiveness seemed natural, but the implications for continuity of discipleship of young people was further eroded.
Before this, the Anglican church in Sydney had offered two services on Sunday with the same style: Morning and Evening Prayer allowed all the ages of a local church to gather together at the beginning and the end of the day. This gave young and old proximity to each other. Now old and young were separated from each other. The two generations of the postmodern secular culture had now been structured into the fabric of the local church.
Once this process began, it only grew more divisions within churches. As the 70s turned into the 80s, western culture only became more individualistic and plural. The original generation gap became intergenerational. Change was speeding up so that the distinctions became more complex. Young adults soon saw themselves as very different from teenagers who were only a few years younger. There would also be intra-generation gaps: youth culture multiplied as young people began defining themselves, not only as different from adults, but also different from each other. They developed tribes based on music interests (like pub rock or disco) or sporting activities (like surfing or football). This meant that the other institutional form of the Jesus Movement in the local church—the Friday night youth group with games, supper and a talk—became quickly outdated. A catch-all group for teenagers was problematic. A rock concert on a Friday night may no longer be relevant to those in the area into disco. The concept of Christian rock had lost its initial curiosity, and so became more uncool than no music at all. The shock absorber was not able to work quickly enough to respond to this plethora of cultures.
The church was changing with postmodern plurality, but not fast enough. When the baby boomers started having children, they found the move to a morning service more practical. However, rather than going to the traditional service, they started a new contemporary family service, which was a morning version of the youth service, complete with rock ‘n’ roll. Now there were three different gatherings in the one church. This had further implications for discipleship: by the 80s, many teenagers could not look forward to long-term discipleship; as their leaders married and had families and moved to the morning service, they would often hand over their youth leadership responsibilities to a new lot of younger adults.
The homogeneous principle reduces community
This process came to be known as the ‘homogeneous unit principle’. It involved designing ministry styles for different culture groups within a congregation, and was the consequence of seeking to be relevant to an increasingly pluralistic culture. But an unlooked-for consequence of this principle was an emphasis on individualism in the church. Christians were now growing up in churches that had different ministries for different generations. Individuals chose to attend services that suited them. This largely mirrored growing consumerism in western society. With more understanding of market segmentation, products are marketed at target groups with more and more sophistication. With a wide range of products (like Walkmans, video players and home computers giving access to the internet), individual choice increased. While a sense of community was eroded in the secular world, the church sought to emulate its appeal to plurality.
By the 1990s, the institutionalization of the Jesus Movement through the homogeneous unit principle had become quite sophisticated in churches big enough to employ this strategy. There were now distinctly separate ministries to children, youth, young adults, young marrieds, families at various stages, and the elderly. Christians moved through these ministries as if on a spiritual conveyor belt. Each time they moved from one group to the next, they usually lost contact with the group they had just been a part of. Secular transience in relationships was now built into the life of the local church.
Interestingly, Mark Senter actually sees the multiplication of ministries through homogeneous units (particularly with youth) as the next revolutionary cycle. By the 1990s, it no longer made sense to try to achieve a relevant ministry to such different tribes of teenagers. We were now seeing specific homogeneous unit youth ministries aimed at surfers, particular music lovers or sport players/supporters. I see this as the institutionalized form of the Jesus Movement—only, rather than being a new, more successful form of relevant grassroots ministry, it is an example of the shadow that the baby boomers continue to cast over the youth cultures of their children and grandchildren.
Making youth ministry a nexus
We may now already be in a post-postmodern era, but because of the shock absorber effect, the church will keep churning out postmodern expressions of church for years to come. However, what is not needed is yet another new form of relevant youth ministry for post-postmoderns, but rather a ministry to youth that is more biblical than culturally relevant—one that is radically obedient to the word of God, and able to provide evangelism and discipleship to young people. This model must not only move beyond the homogeneous unit principle, it must also break the rules of relevance to establish a more lasting approach. Beginning with a stronger, enduring community of youth leadership, we can build continuity through which the young people of a local church can grow. Although the local church sends out Christians on mission, it will always on mission itself—that is, a more stable village in the suburbs and cities of the west, as young adults stay on long enough to become sages for the young. The leadership of youth should involve adults of all ages.
This changes the postmodern emphasis on relevance, breaking the rules of modern youth ministry as we strive for more effective discipleship, leading to stronger Christian identity. Church would then become a place where young people are taught to be loyal to Christ, each other, and other outward-looking groups of like-minded Christians. Their heightened community awareness and global perspective will increase their mission effectiveness, giving them clarity and the kind of support that produces continuity in ministry. Such a ministry would become a nexus in the local church for creativity, aspirational direction, encouragement, dynamism, relational depth, fun and celebration, while at the same time challenging our comfort zones and fostering intergenerational and inter-cultural relating and identity in Christ.
Conclusion
While we defend our biblical authority in the face of secular ideas rightly, we have, in fact, allowed those very ideas to weaken our Christian expression of community. The way we conduct youth ministry today actually contributes to a breakdown in the ways Christian unity is expressed within the local church. We rely on youth ministry to keep finding fresh, socially relevant ways to pass on the gospel to young people. Youth ministry effectively invents new expressions of Christianity that fit with each new era of secular values. Lessons learned in youth ministry get passed on into the broad body of the church. But the unexpected side effect of this process is that this pragmatic search for relevance keeps coming up with expressions of church that are more and more secular, often weakening community in the process. I recognize that youth ministry has helped us survive in the secular age. The cost, though, is that we have become secularized in the process. Added to this problem is the pace of change in secular society speeding up; youth ministry may not be able to keep coming up with fresh expressions of Christianity fast enough.
Now is a vital time for us to explore how to find a new way of expressing community that will pass on the gospel to new generations, and also strengthen our Christian identity and witness. The next youth ministry revolution may not be a new enculturation. While some are looking for the best Generation Y youth ministry model, there is a revolution going on that is largely unnoticed—a radical counterculture that is looking to a more biblical and less pragmatic solution to the problem of passing on the gospel to changing youth cultures in a secular environment. Rather than relying on the shock absorber, there is a youth ministry that seeks to hold to conservative theology as it builds continuity of discipleship in a biblical community—a youth ministry that actually challenges the prevailing culture—a youth ministry that is not reductionist—a youth ministry that does not theologize reasons for leaving each generation by itself to discover what it means to live as Christians.
The next revolution may find ways of not reducing young people’s ministry down to a department within a local church. The homogeneous unit principle assumes that the best people to evangelize young people are young people, but, in the process, youth ministry and those involved in it have been devalued. Youth ministers are generally short-term cadet positions in the local church, with the expectation that the people filling these roles will go on to train for ‘real ministry’ in the future. The next revolution needs to discover ways to include the whole congregation in the bringing up of young people, giving them continuity, helping them to read the Bible for themselves, but also encouraging them to live it out more interdependently as servants in mission together (not as consumers of targeted ministry) as they reach out to non-church youth. It may look a bit more like what we lost over the last few hundred years while trying keep up with secularism.
As we proclaim and promote the gospel together, we may learn more about how to become who we have been made to be in Christ—reconciled to God through the cross and reconciled to each other in a body with Christ as the head. The next revolution may actually be a back-to-the-future revolution of radical obedience, replacing secular youth ministry with a countercultural nexus ministry to rebuild continuity in the badly eroded Christian communities of the West.
Endnotes
1 Sutherland, G, ‘Education’ in FML Thompson (ed), The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950: Volume 3: Social Agencies and Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
2 Senter III, M, The Coming Revolution in Youth in Ministry, and its Radical Impact on the Church (Wheaton: Victor, 1992).
3 Thomas, J, ‘Is God Dead, Toward a Hidden God’, Time Magazine, April 8 (1966) 82-87.
4 Wasser, J, ‘The New Rebel Cry: Jesus is Coming!’, Time Magazine, June 21 (1971) 56-63.
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