Moving Beyond the Shock Absorber - Part 5
Part five 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 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. But the 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.