Is youth work a sinking ship? How to face the fear of church decline

As a small boy, I was oddly fascinated by gardening (I was a strange kind of child). I was particularly fascinated by the idea of cuttings: take off a fresh shoot of growth, pot it up in a little bit of soil and – as if my magic – it will begin to sprout roots and you will have a new plant. I found the process infinitely interesting.

Unfortunately, 11-year-old David was not the most patient of souls. And so, instead of leaving the new shoots to sit in the compost for a few weeks whilst nature did its thing, I used to pull them up out of the soil every day (sometimes several times a day) to check to see if roots were beginning to form.

Inevitably, the plants failed to thrive with such heavy handed ‘love’.

Why busyness is bad for young people

In my previous blog post, looking at what Charles Taylor’s concept of a ‘Secular Age’ means for youth work, I channelled Billie Joel’s Vienna to look at what the constant urge to be busy and to do more did to us as youth workers. ‘We need to make youth group attractive and entertaining’, I said, ‘otherwise people might not come.’ And I looked at how that could be crushing to our own souls.

I want to look at this theme again here, but looking not at what it does to us as youth workers, but what it does to the young people that we are called to love and minister to. In his book, Faith Formation in a Secular Age, theologian Andrew Root puts youth ministry on the psychotherapist’s couch. He shows how we as Christians are often telling what he calls a ‘narrative of loss’ – in effect, we are looking back at how much cultural ground has been lost in the last few decades and are worried about the future of the Church. It was all better back then – even nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.

A story of loss often produces a great amount of busy work. If you are telling yourself that the boat you are sailing in has a hole and is sinking, of course you are going to dedicate a lot of your energy to bailing it out. In the same way, if you have a story that tells you that churches are haemorrhaging young people, you are going to become nervous. This is why, Root says, we often try and counter-act this loss with more: more strategies, more programs, more activities, more mission trips, more mission trips, more parental involvement: ‘These approaches seem appealing, because they promise action in the anxiety of loss. When valuable things are racing toward the drain, quick action is preferred (p. 99)’.

"Through our crowded, frantic activity, maybe we risk bulldozing over the space in which God will work, in his own sweet time and at his own speed."

Root moves on to begin to argue that maybe this narrative of loss isn’t such a good diagnosis after all. But I want to linger here for a little bit. Particularly, I am interested in this idea of the anxiety that this narrative of loss creates. Fear, as I have written before, does strange things to us – and I think the fear that the boat is sinking, that the next generation is about to disappear, can be a particularly potent fear. Maybe we also feel the others’ fear projected onto us: the PCC that seems to hold us responsible for keeping the teenagers in church (but not too disruptive) on 12 hours a week and £4000. Whilst building a team from the ground up…

A narrative of loss?

What does a narrative of loss and its associated fear do to those to whom we minister to? I’m not sure if you have ever been on the end of a hard sale – perhaps whilst walking down the high street, or in a phone conversation. You know – one of those conversations where it is difficult to say ‘no’, even if you don’t really want to buy a life-size replica of Theresa May or insurance against chickenpox or to support endangered goldfish in the Gulf of Mexico. It feels quite oppressive, right?

I wonder if we sometimes communicate a similar feeling to our teenagers through our well-intentioned strategies, programmes, and ministries. Are we sometimes maybe like 11-year-old David – constantly pulling up the shoots of potential new growth to see if anything has taken root?