Moving Beyond the Shock Absorber - Part 2
Robert Raikes
Part two 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 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. It quickly spread around the world to become the church’s answer to the Industrial Revolution.