I don’t know about you. But I’ve just about had it with people telling me that youth ministry is over.
It’s not over.
But it is changing.
A brief look back at the history of youth ministry
Examining youth ministry with a historical lens will allow you to see more clearly where we are and where things seem to be headed. For those who didn’t read Marko’s Youth Ministry 3.0, this is covered there pretty well.
Era 0: Early ministries (1870s – 1940s) Before we really had adolescence we had ministries working with children and young adults. They have a legitimate claim to saying they started youth ministry. But their practices were dramatically different than we commonly see today. Some of these organizations still exist today… Christian Endeavor, Boy Scouts, Boys Brigade, YMCA, to name a few.
Era 1: Parachurch dominance (1940s – 1960s) Younglife, Youth for Christ, and a few other ministries essentially invented the youth ministry practices we use today. The 3-fold youth group night of worship, games, and teaching came out of this. It’s important to point out that the catalyst for these ministries was first that adolescence as we know it today was born. And second that the church was horrible at responding to the needs of this emerging subculture.
Era 2: Church dominance (1960s-2000s) The success of the parachurches eventually trickled into the church. In the mid-to-late 1960s churches began to hire Younglife/YFC staff to serve at the church and basically copycat what they were doing for the church without actually integrating with the church in a wholesale way. But as time has gone on youth ministry has trickled into the adult church. (Casual worship music, teaching styles, skits, media use… these are all inventions of church-based youth ministry that graduated into “big church.”) In fact, it’s the “big church” vs. youth group mentality that created the tension we are in now. Some places describe church-based youth group as an organizational island while others coined the phrase, the One-Eared Mickey Mouse. Either way… that tone and some recent research has lead to a lot of church-based youth workers in vocational trouble.
Era 3: Missional dominance (2000s – ???) As I wrote about in January 2011, we are continuing to see a trend that big churches are getting bigger, little churches are getting missional, and medium-sized churches are feeling the pinch in the middle. But if you think about it all three are just getting missional and being more true to who they are. As churches (and parachurches) realize that the One-Eared Mickey Mouse isn’t helping young adults make the transition from adolescent faith to adult faith they are wrestling to discover how to best minister to the adolescents in their communities. This is leading to big churches getting better at what they do and growing numerically. Smaller ministries have realized that they can’t copy the methods of the big churches and have started to adapt adolescent faith development and evangelism into new ministries which meet the needs of the communities students.
The sky isn’t falling on youth ministry
I don’t want to minimize what many people are going through. It certainly feels like their sky is falling. One result of this transition is that a huge amount of long-term professional youth ministry staff people are losing their jobs.
As the church dominance era is coming to an end there are lots and lots of people who vocationally left in the cold. So the sky feels like it is falling on them as churches (and parachurches) wrestle through the reality that they might need to do youth ministry differently. Unfortunately, when many church boards look at their one-eared Mickey Mouse, they see old Pastor Adam and his youth ministry department and decide that in order to shake things up… they are going to need new leadership.
But you need to know that there is no less interest in youth ministry. In fact– there is much, much more church-wide.
The exciting flip side of all of the tension/drama/pain is that we are in an incredible period of innovation, invention, soul-searching, research, and discovery in youth ministry as we all try to figure out, “What’s next?“
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