I've spent the week writing a document to try and answer that question ...
The problem is that I keep reflecting on what are we actually doing now. The struggle is that, in spite of some lights here and there, as a whole we are struggling to engage with young people. Children's work fares a little better as we seem to find it less fearful to work alongside under 10's, but working with teenagers it seems there are fewer and fewer people prepared to go for it.
It is well summarised by a colleague from Oxford Diocese who writes:
The number of young people the church has formal contact with has declined. Of the declining numbers however the age range that is the most noticeably absent are the teenagers, especially the mid to upper adolescents (14-19's)
This critical decline is, in part, being masked by a number of factors:
• The larger churches with an employed youth worker or strong volunteer team (attracting Christian teens from a wider geographic area).
• Churches that have what they call "youth groups" that are in fact working with those who are still in primary school or only just at secondary school.
• A great deal of emphasis and energy for children's work.
In my experience there are a growing number of churches who have become disengaged from adolescents through factors such as:
• Fear. Fear of irrelevance, fear of having nothing to offer and in many cases fear of the adolescents themselves.
• Continuing to run a model of group that worked in the past but no longer does. (For example, Hosting a group in the hope it will have a critical mass of young people and may well attract others, being very didactic in its input, or coinciding a group with the service times).
• A failure to celebrate, encourage and resource ministry among young people, giving the impression that it just needs someone, anyone to volunteer and somehow muddle through.
• A difficulty in taking young people seriously as co-learners and co-journeyers in faith, rather than ‘empty vessels' to be filled. The result being that young people don't either get chance to wrestle with the reality of what faith might mean, or to have the space and opportunity to encounter God.
We are at a point where we need, as a Diocese and as churches to take this seriously.
If we are unable to have faith conversations with the rising generation then we are failing in the great commission, failing to help and be a blessing to a generation of young people, becoming further adrift from the huge cultural shifts happening, and losing confidence in the ‘dangerous memory of Jesus' having anything to offer not only young people but our communities as a whole.
We have a challenge on our hands - or we could just sit on them for another few years!
Have a good week!
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