Mending the Gap

This article first appeared in the Church Times Autumn 2008 www.churchtimes.co.uk

Creating the Gap

There's a quote often used at the LICC by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz: 'culture is the ensemble of stories we tell one another about ourselves.' As good a description as any but does that then mean that 'youth culture' is the story young people tell about themselves or is it a story that adults: the media and academics have spun? And why do we have 'youth culture' but not 'geriatric culture' or 'thirty something culture' what is it about the story of youth that fascinates us? Why are we often obsessed with it? Why does the Church in Britain employ around 9000 full time youth workers?

It was those questions in particular that inspired the thinking and research behind Mend the Gap: Can the church reconnect the generations? It seemed fairly obvious that the distancing between young and old in society had a huge impact on the church: young people had started to tell their own story and older generations inside and outside of Christian culture struggled to connect with it. This happened both for some startlingly obvious reasons and some that are only discernible with a good deal of hunting around. So here's one root cause for you: a rapid acceleration in the pace of cultural change meant that certain generations were always going to get left behind to a degree.

And one of the biggest 'agents of change' the cultural catalyst that crowns them all was the advent and growth of information and communication technology and it still is. Television was one big advert for a society on the move and one that had a huge influence on the young. For instance teenagers the world over in the fifties and sixties would see how people their age responded to icons like Elvis and The Beatles on the box and would do the same, mass hysteria over rock gods became a youth culture 'norm.'

TV and technology was a Pandora's box upsetting age old traditions. 'Listen with mother' became 'watch without mother' - children have grown up with their values being formed just as much by the presence of the teletubbies and the teenage ninja turtles than they have their parents. Think also of further technology advances today where young people in the home do not have to turn to older people for advice but can text a friend instead. 'Wisdom' is no longer passed down from young to old as in traditional cultures but is jostled about as part of the communication exchange between peers.

Blurred Boundaries

We've also had to deal with a lot of blurred boundaries. Once upon a time the transition to adulthood was easily marked, when you became economically independent i.e. got a job, got married, got a mortgage you became an adult. Now people 'settle' down much later in life: because of financial pressure many university leavers return to the nest and more people are having children much later. We also associate childhood as a period of identity formation through play, but in a society obsessed with leisure entertainment thirty and forty something's still find themselves dedicating hour after hour to game play be it X-Box or Nintendo. Games sales now outstrip movie box office profits the world over. Does this make us 'perpetual adolescents' Peter Pan figures who refuse to grow up?

Passion, wisdom and a Bonfire.

So how does the generation gap and different ideas of what it means to be 'adult' affect the Christian community? Looking at different expectations over how teaching should happen in church illustrates it clearly. Our conventional way of teaching looks like one 'specialist' standing up front and 'passing' down wisdom - the traditional preach. The way that most churches are set up are geared for this style of teaching even elevating the speaker above the heads of the rest of the congregation in the pulpit. The physical set up of churches alone says a lot about who has permission to speak and who can contribute. Now we've 'cracked' this with the Alpha- we get people to chat around a meal and everyone has permission to ask questions. The model still requires a teacher, someone who can give an answer but it's a far cry from a forty minute sermon.

And when we look at the Bible we find that this type of wisdom exchange - where questioning is invited - is normative. Look at the instance of Jesus in the temple age 12 in Luke 2, eager to ask questions he stayed behind to the ire of his parents to pump the experts for knowledge. The experts in turn were 'amazed' at his understanding - the interchange of wisdom meant that both young and old grew that day.

It reminds me of the example of a Church in the North of England that has created an interesting rite of passage in order to meet the generation gap head on. Older men from the church take all the fifteen year old teenage lads on an activities based weekend in the woods. They do the Ray Mears thing and learn how to skin rabbits and light fires. After they've made their own bonfire they bask in the accomplishment and sit around it whilst men in different life stages share their stories. One man newly engaged, a first time father and someone married for over forty years all tell their tales.

A beautiful 'tradition' that exemplifies the passing on of both passion and wisdom. It's also a perfect lead in to one of the great truths of 'intergenerational' ministry that also happens to be an African proverb that's become popular of late 'it takes a village to raise a child.'

This means that discipleship cannot be done by delegation, one of the greatest missteps of Church culture over the past thirty years has been to become overly dependent on professionals to spiritually nurture the young. A quick look at the back of most Christian magazines will tell you that many churches believe that the answer to reaching youth is to employ a youth specialist. Now this opens up a can of worms: should we employ youth workers if it means that the rest of the faith community becomes 'lazy' in their disciple making responsibilities? The answer is yes and no. 'No' if the only reason we're employing youth workers is to 'maintain' our young people - the youth worker becomes simply a moral guardian. And 'no' if we intend to let them do all the work because, after all, that's what they're paid for. But yes if we see them as facilitators helping the wider body of the church in the task of disciple making and disciple maturing. And yes if we accept that increasingly youth workers are becoming missionaries because so many of the U.K's young people have no understanding of or desire to understand Christianity. And yes if we acknowledge that, lump it or like it, we live in an age that calls for unique skills and training precisely because distinctions between generations have never been so severe - we need help to manage the change. However I also believe that churches should be aiming towards making the role of youth work within the church eventually redundant - yet this can only happen when we help adults recognise that they need to up their game when it comes to learning the craft of discipling the young.

Restoring Confidence.

Now I'm not suggesting that the majority of churches have abandoned their responsibilities to young people (although many youth workers often have great difficulty recruiting volunteers to the team) but we haven't recognised just how much work needs doing when it comes to equipping young people to be Christian in today's world. Young people in the western world are bombarded every day with messages that overtly or covertly undermine a faith worldview. So are adults you might think. Exactly right. Which means if we're going to have the right 'wisdom' to pass down to young people within the church then we need to get adult education right.

In one sense the generation gap exists because the church has not had a 'whole life' perspective i.e. a faith view that does not divorce itself from culture at large in order to avoid 'contamination' but actively seeks to equip Christians to engage with the world around them. This is about restoring confidence by getting serious about teaching. A colleague at LICC was asked by one of his children 'If the Koran was written more recently than the Bible doesn't that make it more reliable?' Would you know how to answer that question? Would you know where to begin? If we're going to pass on confidence about our faith to the young then we need to take the kid gloves off and employ a little 'double listening' as John Stott puts it: listening to the word and to the world.

In recognising the need for 'further adult education' one group of churches in the North West started putting on the church equivalent of evening classes providing modules for all laity in subjects such as preaching and church history led by ministers and courses in apologetics taught by scientists in the laity.

Formation not information.

Like most things Christianity is better caught than taught. This is why it's vital that we also recapture a view of the family as a 'sacred unit'. Elaine Storkey tells a wonderful story of visiting a Jewish family for the first Shabbat dinner on a Friday night. The father at the head of the table sang a blessing and as he came to an end you could hear the voices of other fathers singing around the neighbourhood. So how much Christianity do our young people 'catch' in the home? More importantly how much of Christianity is modelled to them? Christ's method of passing on a rich faith to his disciples was modelling a beautiful relationship with the father. It's vital that Christian parents do this as well. It's important that we read the Bible with children but just as important is that they see parents reading the Bible on their own. It's the formative experiences that count: no youth worker can match the amount of time a parent will spend overall with their child. To drive home the importance of this some churches have mimicked schools and started doing parents evenings in order to encourage families in their role of discipling the young!

Give us a job.

More and more churches are recognising that splitting up the body of the congregation on Sundays into Sunday schools or teen teaching groups (or Fridays or whenever you meet!) robs the church of something precious: all ages joined in unison in their worship of God. As a result more churches are doing intergenerational ministry and there are now a wealth of resources to help in this area. Some churches in America even employ baby minders at the back of the main service so that parents don't have to leave the service to attend or help mind a crèche. But it's also vital that churches learn from the rich apprentice model adopted by Jesus. Jesus never stopped to think 'are these disciples too young or too inexperienced to be involved in my mission?' he involved them in his work and was soon kicking them out in pairs to preach the good news.

It was John Wimber who said 'if you want someone to feel like they belong, give them a job to do.' So how soon do we involve young people not just in obvious roles, doing the PA and worship but in preaching and teaching? How do we go about identifying and maturing giftings? Is our presentation of church so slick and professional that there's no room for people to learn through mistakes? And there shouldn't be any sacred/ secular divide when it comes to training our young people, we should be training them for the whole of life because God is interested in every aspect of our life. Why not have a shadowing programme where young people join adult members of the congregation in their place of work? When it comes time to choose G.C.S.E's or A levels why not invite adults to talk about their career path in the youth group?

A family affair.

Father. Son. Spirit. Do we need anymore convincing than the beauty of the community that is the trinity that church should be a family affair - full of rich wisdom exchanges between all ages, the old firing up the young for the amazing journey ahead of them and the young inspiring the old with their fresh zeal and excitement? It's a role that Mosaic law took very seriously: the Shema Yisrael is the most important prayer of the Jewish faith and the first prayer taught to children, the title means 'Hear o Israel' and is taken from Moses' farewell teachings in Deuteronomy six:

'Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one, love the lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commands that I give you today are to be upon your hearts, impress them on your children, talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road.'

Adults within the community were to take every opportunity to instruct the young in the ways of Yahweh in order to foster spiritual development.
Christian communities also should be the best place for people to grow, learning from their mistakes in a forgiving environment and being encouraged to identify and develop gifting. In modelling a nurturing role with his disciples Jesus underlines the importance of such a context for the on going mission of God - something Luther picked up on: 'Indeed for what purpose do we older folks exist, other than to care for, instruct and bring up the young?'

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