case for post-christian youth ministry, The

Group, Sep/Oct 2000 by Lawrence, Rick

The British church is a punctured balloon.

Across the pond, social researchers are warning that the Christian church in England will effectively disappear in 20 years unless it can somehow cork up the gushing human leakage (likely the first time those three words appear side by side in the history of the English language). Just 10 percent of Brits go to church-the figure is less than 1 percent for young people.

That means the country that spawned boot-shaking Christian heavy-hitters C.S. Lewis, John Stott, John Wesley, J. Hudson Taylor, William Booth, George Whitfield, and William Wilberforce is basically dead in the water and sinking fast.

Not really a water-image person? Let's try some forest-fire comparisons.

What started as a tiny pagan campfire a few decades ago has whipped up into a monster wildfire that's raced through the dry tinder of the UK church. When I was in England nine years ago, the cavernous old churches were lucky to have a smattering of elderly folks show up on Sundays. Forget youth-friendly; these churches looked like nuclear test zones-desolate, decimated, and sad.

And, it turns out, this is all really great news for the UK church.

Forest rangers generally see wildfires as necessary to a healthy ecosystem-they clear choking underbrush and pave the way for new growth. And today, out of Britain's blackened church topsoil, radical new approaches to youth ministry are poking through and reaching young people in powerful ways.

Earlier this year, I spent two weeks in the UK tramping around the youth ministry landscape. What I saw upended my definitions of effective youth ministry and sparked a passion for strategies that promise to capture both churched and unchurched American teenagers.

Most British youth workers are forced to develop culturally relevant, outreach-savvy ways to capture kids with the gospel because the typical UK teenager is one or even two generations removed from any connection to the church. That means no ready-made church youth groups. So youth leaders must find ways to plant their ministry flag in kids' world, or they'll have no chance of reaching them.

Roger Ellis, founder and an "apostolic leader" of the Revelation Centre, a fast-growing, youth-friendly church on the southern coast of England, says, "I remember a few years ago I was at a conference where they were talking about radical new models for discipling youth. And they had all these fancy ideas-this and that. And I said, 'Well, has anybody ever thought of church?"' Nobody thinks of church because UK churches have been pigeonholed as culturally irrelevant.

Now for the big aha...

You should pay attention to the youth ministry strategies that are emerging in England because the North American church is in a quasi-swoon of its own. Tom Sine, church futurist and author of The Mustard Seed Conspiracy, says, "Very slowly the church is going out of business-it's graying. My generation got discipleship all wrong. We do discipleship around the fringes of our lives. Instead, we need to make discipleship our first choice-our jobs, marriages, and so on should follow after."

According to the Barna Research Group, just four out of 10 American adults attend a church service on a typical Sunday-a significant decline from the early '90s when half the population parked themselves in a pew. Even more troubling, young adults are far less likely to get involved in a church than older adults just 28 percent of Baby Busters attend church, compared to 51 percent of the over-55 crowd. Young adults are also much less likely to give money or volunteer their time to churches.

So let me take this opportunity to beat my forest-fire imagery to a pulp... The North American church has an opportunity to stave off a wildfire if it will learn from the mistakes and innovations of the UK church. If we don't, who's to say the cultural hurricane won't whip our troubling little church "campfire" into a firestorm?

I offer you a little taste of what UK youth ministers are doing to recapture a lost generation. I hope your curiosity explodes into urgency...

the youth church model

Before I traveled to Britain, I was openly biased against the youth church model that's found a smattering of support in North America. How could a model that purposely disconnects young people from adult relationships have long-term merit? But I buried my skepticism in a shallow grave when I visited the Warehouse Youth Church, one of four stand-alone "congregations" that make up the Revelation Centre in Chicester.

The Centre is a main cog in a fast-growing quasi-- denomination of so-called new churches-almost 90 congregations loosely organized under the name Pioneer. About 200 teenagers are involved in the Warehouse, started by Pete Greig, one of the Centre's three "apostolic leaders," and now led by 25-year-old youth minister Dan Slatter.1 The church meets in a former "fish paste" warehouse three Sundays a month, then joins with the Centre's three other congregations for a large central Gathering on the fourth Sunday.