What is the Shock Absorber?
The Breakfast Club
Season 1, Episode 1
In the debut episode of the podcast, Joel and Stu dive straight into the Shock Absorber and how it can be a framework for churches to biblically adapt to the changes in society.
Examples of such cultural shocks are discussed before delving into how it all began for Stu back when he was a young adult.
Stu's favourite movie - The Breakfast Club
Episode Transcript
Let’s start with a bit of fun. What’s one of the films you’ve watched that perhaps has impacted you the most?
I really love films and because I'm getting on, I've got quite a long list I've enjoyed over the years. One that I really love is the The Breakfast Club. It was probably the most impactful movie on me when I was younger, and it's interesting that it represents something that I still think about today.
The concepts in the movie were really interesting. The whole premise of the movie, if you haven't seen it, is a bunch of teenagers in the eighties who are put on detention and they all have to stay back at school on a Saturday. What made the movie interesting was that they had to be on detention with each other despite the fact that they were all from different groups within their school.
There was the sporty kid, a guy who was portrayed as a bit of a criminal and all of the other different types of kids. The interesting thing in the movie was that each of these teenagers actually had less in common with each other than previous generations, but surprisingly they actually became good friends.
They embraced differences amongst each other rather than embracing sameness, and in a divided world where people tend to find their tribe, stick to it and not really mix with other people who are different to themselves, I loved the vision of a group of young people who were actually all different, getting together and overcoming their differences. It's my favourite movie actually.
Was there one of those kids that you particularly identified with?
Not really, I think I'm a pretty monochrome person. I didn’t fit into any of those demographics perfectly well. There was a nerdy dude who was on detention and when I was a teenager I was probably more nerdy than anything else.
We’ll come back to those themes in The Breakfast Club as we look at the Shock Absorber. We should clear up that it isn't about car mechanics. But what is the Shock Absorber? Can you give us the elevator pitch?
The Shock Absorber theory occurred to me when I thought about the church in a changing world, there's a number of cultural shocks that take place that the church must navigate.
So when you particularly look back over the last 50 years, in just in that period of time, there's been great deal of social change. There's a lot of movement in the broader culture around ideas, people have reshaped their thoughts on traditional values, things that the churches have taught and have taken for granted that people accepted for centuries.
So when looking at those cultural shocks, the Shock Absorber is a metaphor. It’s as if the church is like a car driving through time. As the car goes through time, it comes across bumps in the road. Those bumps in the road are cultural shocks.
How does a car on a road navigate a bump on the road? Through it’s shock absorbers. If a car doesn't have shock absorbers and it hits a bump in the road, then it's quite a jarring and crashy experience. But with a it’s shock absorbers, the car absorbs the impact of the physical shock, or in the case of the metaphor, the cultural shock. The physical shock is distributed more gradually across the rest of the car.
So if the church is like a car driving through time and the bumps in the road are like cultural shocks, what is the cultural shock absorber that the church has? I realised it was young people.
Young people are often at the forefront of cultural change. They are often the first to respond to changes because they're living in the world that is changing the fastest. What I've seen, and what other authors have talked about, is that young people are an experimental part of the church, where the church can try with new approaches to cultural changes. If young people come up with a new way of doing things in a new cultural environment, then the lessons that they learned can be translated more gradually throughout the rest of the church.
If we identify young people as the shock absorber of the church, my encouragement is that young people and old people can work together in local churches, rather than be separated by special interests or by differences, as per the movie, the Breakfast Club. In that movie, the kids didn't get on with each other, but the one thing they had in common was that they all hated their parents more than they hated each other. So that brought them together.
What can happen in the church is, unfortunately, the generation gap that's in our society is often present in our local churches. But if we listen to young people who can tell us about the cultural change then older Christians can bring the Bible and spiritual wisdom to bear in a conversation about culture and faith to create a dynamic flexibility in the church as it adjusts to cultural change.
When you're talking about cultural change, it makes me think of businesses for example, who don't adapt to the changing circumstances within their market and often fail. Is that applicable here? The church, in a sense, won’t die out, but it won’t be as influential in culture because it's not willing to adapt?
The challenge for the church, particularly the Protestant church that we're a part of in our context here at Soul Revival as an Anglican church in Sydney is that we want to pass on the ancient Biblical values that we love and hold to so deeply, in a changing cultural environment. It’s not about changing the message, but thinking about…
The delivery?
Yes. How do we hold onto our theology and come up with new and flexible strategies to communicate that theology to the world? We need to continue to preach the gospel and to declare the gospel, because when people hear it, that's how they respond to Jesus in faith.
What's interesting is that when you look at the cultural choices churches make sometimes, in attempting to hold onto theology, we canonise cultural expressions of that theology that have been helpful in the past. For example, within the Anglican church for many generations, the ministers would wear robes and collars at all services. That's a cultural expression of our tradition. Not that all tradition is bad, but we use the Bible as a reference point. We work out the traditions we want to carry on into the future, as we look at our culture changing, what are the traditions that are not necessarily something we need to continue? So in the Anglican church in Sydney, which is different to other Anglican churches around the world, more and more churches, the ministers aren't wearing robes and sometimes not even wearing a collar in church, and yet they're still preaching the same message.
Speaking of those robes, are they uncomfortable to wear?
They can be warm in a Sydney summer!
You talked about churches adapting to the cultural shocks that happen within society. What would be an example of that from the last 50 years?
One that most people would be familiar with, is the cultural shock following the invention of the iPhone. That was in 2008. Since then, many companies have copied the same idea and created different mobile phones. When there's a new technology, it changes the way people live. When people change the way they live, that creates new values. New values create new cultures.
Now, more Australians use mobile phones than landlines. It’s our preferred form of communication and when you look at the ability to communicate that it provides, and the opportunity to access the internet, we can see that more and more Australians have connected up with people in Australia and around the world. In one way, we're more connected to people than we ever have been, but strangely that hasn't led to a feeling of connectedness in the real world. So one of the cultural challenges that we have is how does the church adapt to the invention of the iPhone?
Sometimes we don't need to adapt. Sometimes we keep doing what we're doing, but that technology has created ministry opportunities and ministry challenges. My argument would be, if you see the iPhone as a cultural bump in the road for the church to navigate, my encouragement would be for churches to have a conversation between young people and the older people in the church. We can create spaces where they can come together to talk about what impact, if any, the smartphone has had on the culture of being a Christian, and how does that affect our Christianity? By having that conversation, we can actually be flexible in an environment that's changing.
What other notable cultural shocks stand out to you? I know you’ve spoken about the sexual revolution of the sixties for example…
That’s definitely one. The invention of the pill was a major factor in the development of the sexual revolution, which is continuing to evolve people's attitudes to sexual identity.
Even something banal as the mass production of the motor car in the forties and fifties. Everyone started purchasing mobility. Once upon a time, most people lived in proximity to where they worked and where they lived. But with the car, we created commuter suburbs where people could drive to work. Instead of people living in extended families in the cities, they migrated into nuclear families in the suburbs. That transformed the family unit and created a new need for more churches in the suburbs, but it also changed the way people were living.
Another example is the rise in house which will have an impact on how the church functions. Another one would be the increase of women in workforce from the fifties and onwards after the Second World War. That also changes the way the church operates, because for many generations the church was relied on female volunteers to help in a whole range of different things in the church. That can reduce volunteerism in churches.
We as the church have to respond to these changes. The idea of the Shock Absorber is that cultural shocks it will happen, but we can actually choose to use the Shock Absorber in a Biblical by having the generations of the church come together and think Biblically about each shock that we experience, and then think through together, what is the change in society? Why has that change taken place? What does the Bible have to say about it? Then how can we as a whole church, not just young people or old people, respond to that?
I remember you've also mentioned the Industrial Revolution before, that's a big one too…
The Industrial Revolution started the whole ball rolling. The invention of the steam engine meant caused mass migration from the villages to the cities. Before the Industrial Revolution, in the 1700s, most of the population of the world lived in villages, 70% in England for example.
But within a period of decades, all the jobs in countryside dried up and many people migrated in search of work. These extended families were actually finding that they were in a brand new situation and the church found that really difficult to adjust to.
You've also spoken on how youth ministries are an ideal way of adapting to cultural shocks. How does that play into the Shock Absorber?
Your question about the Industrial Revolution is a good place to start, because there's a youth ministry writer by the name of Mark Senter III, who wrote a seminal book in the early nineties called The Coming Revolution in Youth Ministry.
In that book, Senter goes back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and he sees it as the birth of modern youth ministry. Before the Industrial Revolution, young people were brought up as a matter of course in villages in England where the Industrial Revolution began. In those villages, the church was the centre of life. A lot of the rhythms of life revolved around the seasons and around people participating in the parish life of the church.
When the Industrial Revolution happened, the migration to the cities caused a lot of dislocation. A lot of young people were growing up without God and being forced to work in factories - or as chimney sweeps or in the mines. Added to that, kids who didn't have a job were left to their own devices on the streets. You might have seen the movie or read the book Oliver, which was all about that generation.
The kids, some of whom didn't even have families, still had a need for the gospel, but the church's infrastructure was still spread all across the countryside. It was difficult for the institution of the church to respond quickly to such a rapid change. Concerned lay people in the church, who started to see that problem emerging in their own communities, began thinking about what they could do about these young kids that weren’t hearing the gospel.
That lead to people like Robert Raikes, who started the Sunday School movement. He invited kids to just come around to his place on a Sunday morning. They had these big Bible studies in his lounge room, where he taught them how to read and write using the Bible. But he was also sharing the gospel with them. That Sunday School idea started as a grassroots expression and then they quickly moved to write a Sunday school newspaper, which captured the reality of what was happening in one location so that it could be spread all over the place. Within a few decades, it had become the biggest youth movement in the world.
Sunday Schools in America and Australia were started up off the back those newspapers. In fact, in Australia in the early 1800s, the first Sunday School was set up by the children of an Anglican minister in Parramatta for young Aboriginal and British people. It was a really good example of how a grassroots movement can be started by concerned lay people who see that there's a cultural shift happening and they have a new idea as a response to that.
Interestingly, a movement like that, if it's successful, eventually institutionalises. In other words, over time it gets so big that it starts to get presidents and treasurers, and they write procedures and manuals…
They start forget what it was really about, or it’s not as effective?
Right, those things are helpful for it to spread, but then people can start running Sunday Schools that don't have the original heart that Robert Raikes had for it. In some places, Sunday Schools just became about teaching good morals to kids, for example.
It misses the mark…
Misses the mark, yeah. More importantly Senter says that after a 50 year period, culture had changed so much that that original idea of Sunday Schools no longer had the same currency. It had been institutionalised. The movement was no longer able to change in response to the changing culture.
Senter's idea is clever, because he says that every 50 years since the Industrial Revolution, there's also a new cycle in youth ministry and each one follows the same pattern as the original Sunday School. The Sunday School was able to be flexible where the institutional church was not. After 50 years, the Sunday School was replaced by the YMCA, that was an expression that adapted to the newly changing environment. 50 years after that, Senter argues Christian Endeavour was the new approach, a grassroots movement that went through the same form again of a new fresh idea which became a movement and then institutionalised.
Was that due to the war?
The Second World War and The Depression meant that movement was no longer relevant. Billy Graham came along with his Youth for Christ model, which then actually became a new model of youth ministry as well. According to Senter, by the 1990s we were waiting for another cycle because he was strict on his 50 year cycles. But my contention is that as the Industrial Revolution has gone forward, change is occurring quicker and the cycles are getting shorter. I feel that Senter missed the Jesus Movement as a natural cycle of youth ministry in the 1960s.
At the moment I'm exploring how many cycles we have had since the sixties. When we identify a cycle, it’s new bump in the road, but also a new opportunity to bring the church together in a space where we can talk about that cultural challenge.
We often assume that the way we do church will always be the way it will be done until sometimes, the car gets so shaken up by the cultural bumps in the road that the nuts and the wheels start coming off the car, and that's when we stop to analyse it. I'm suggesting that, as soon as we identify a cultural change, let’s talk about it from the early stages, and speed up the process of adaptation. Rather than waiting for a youth ministry model to come up with a new way of doing ministry which then institutionalises, we might can make it quicker.
The reality is that the institutions of the church find it difficult to relate to movements. But once the movement has itself become an institution, that new idea develops language that other institutions can understand. So presidents of the Sunday School can talk to heads of the church, and all of a sudden you can see what started as a grassroots movement in someone's lounge room ends up becoming replicated in local churches all over the world.
We aren’t creating enough opportunities as a church forces us to talk about cultural change as it happens. Let’s start more conversations to identify new challenges to the church, or even new opportunities for the church as culture changes.
Is it a question of adapt or die? Can we go so far as to say the church risks becoming irrelevant if we don’t adopt the flexibility you suggest?
The gospel is going to maintain it’s relevance and grow in every generation. But when you look at our city in Sydney, you do see churches in certain areas where they have been set up to reach a certain demographic.
As in age, cultural background, families?
Or sometimes you'll see a church that in the 1950s, was bursting at the seams with a Sunday School of a thousand kids, say in the St George area of Sydney, where there's a big demographic Greek and Italian immigrants for example.
If that was originally very Anglo-Saxon and wasn't seeking to engage with some of the new migrant communities moving into the area, then what you can see today is, in some places in Sydney, these great big beautiful old churches that used to have hundreds of people going every week, now the attendance is dwindling as a result of the local gathering not starting the conversation early enough about cultural change and how it could continue to preach the same gospel but to a different group of people.
Often speaking to a different group of people will bring new opportunities and new challenges. That's how the Shock Absorber can help us because our society is changing in ways that we can sometimes see and sometimes we can’t see. My premise is, it's often young people that are seeing that change earlier than older generations.
The next question I then have is, has the church been set up for young people and old people with a safe place to regularly talk about matters of faith in a culturally changing environment?
You've been thinking about this deeply for a very long time and you're doing a PhD around it now. But where did this start for you? Where did it come from? Did you feel like you needed to solve a problem?
My experience growing up at Gymea Anglican Church in the 1980s was that all of my friends there, who were my age, ended up leaving the church by the time they hit 18. I was bemused by that, because there was about 30 or 40 of us attending the youth group.
Some of those young people went to other churches, but most of them ended up going up to the pub on a Sunday night instead of staying at church. I wanted to know, why is that happening? That was the starting point for me. In fact, there was one night at church where I was sitting in the pew where we'd all sat for years. I remember we’d all cram into this one pew together. We'd be passing notes and talking about the surf and talking about the football and things like that. Then the service would start and we'd all get into it. Then afterwards we'd all go somewhere to hang out.
One particular night I realised that no one else was going to sit there. I was literally sitting in the pew by myself. I remember thinking, where did everyone go? It was gradual, but that night was a watershed for me.
I started thinking that it might not only be a problem for my church. Maybe a lot of young people aren't hanging around at church. Not only that, young Christian kids who were brought up in Christian families were leaving the church and I hadn't seen many young people who weren't Christians come to church. So for me it was a double question.
After realising that, what did you do next?
At the time I was studying political science and sociology at university, so I had an opportunity to put some time aside to study and to work out why this problem was happening. That's what led me to Mark Senter and these ideas on how a changing culture means that young people and older people can have a disconnect. I looked back to the 1960s and felt we underestimated what a revolutionary time that was in our cultural heritage. It’s still impacting us today.
Before the 1960s it was a different kind of community that people lived in. In that decade, young people began to develop their own style, their own musical tastes, their own clothing, their own hairstyles, their own values around some of these new technologies, such as the pill. The sexual revolution began in the sixties, the environmental movement, the modern feminist movement, the gay rights movement. A whole range of these movements came out of a generation of Baby Boomers that were coming of age and they were looking to reinvent the world.
One of the side effects of that decade was there was a polarising of adults and young people where, even churches, starting from the 1970s, began to reform themselves around this newly emergent generation gap. Young people who liked drums and guitars in church had the youth service on Sunday night, and the oldies who wanted to maintain the prayer book service in the Anglican Church, for example, continued to attend a traditional form of church in the morning.
By the end of the seventies, these young people started having their own kids which meant they couldn't make Sunday night as easily. So they started a third service in some churches, which happened at Gymea Anglican Church. We developed a contemporary family service after a traditional service in the mornings and also maintained an evening youth service. So I noticed that while I was was growing up, there was actually three generational gaps in our church. We had the builder generation, the ones who had gone through the war. The Baby Boomers who were predominantly meeting together on Sunday morning, and then the Gen Xers, that I was part of, meeting in the evening.
There was this inbuilt transience within our church. Also it seemed to me that people were becoming more consumeristic about church and actually wanting to have a church expression that they related to. So that transience, along with the consumerism, was making young people more individualistic. If church didn't suit them, then they made a decision to look somewhere else for one that did.