Moving Beyond the Shock Absorber - Part 10
Sony Walkman
Part ten of a 10-part series from an article by Stuart Crawshaw that appeared in The Briefing in 2008 titled: Moving beyond the shock absorber: The place of youth ministry—past, present and future
The homogeneous principle reduces community
The 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 recognise 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.