Faith Generation

Retaining Young People And Growing The Church

Nick Shepherd

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780281073894
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Ministerio cristiano

The recent Church Growth Research (see www.churchgrowthresearch.org.uk) identifies that
the successful transmission of faith to children
and young people is a key factor in stemming decline and promoting growth. This book explores the cultural and theological
reasons as to why this is the case and makes
research-based recommendations for the faith formation
of children and young people. The central argument is that
church communities need to engage in deliberate
strategies that help foster 'intentional Christian Communities' within which children and young people can form and sustain Christian identity.

1

Decline, growth and signposts for change

In Britain institutional religion now has a half-life of one generation, to borrow the terminology of radioactive decay. The generation now in middle age has produced children who are only half as likely as they are to attend church, to identify themselves as belonging to a denomination, or to say that belief is important to them.

(David Voas1)

In 2014 the Church of England produced a significant report outlining three years’ worth of research into church growth entitled From Anecdote to Evidence. The aim of the report was to provide a clearer understanding of where growth might be occurring, and the factors that support this. While specific to Anglican expressions and initiatives, given an observable trend in other research that indicates decline is now punctuated with signs of growth,2 this evidence is helpful in determining the focus for continued action and reflection on the health and growth of the Church in England.

The report presents a buoyant picture where growth is observable in 18 per cent of churches and over half are also now seen as relatively stable. A dose of realism is apparent in that 27 per cent of churches are in decline and there are some general trends that should still give cause for concern. Case studies in the research show that growth is not confined to a particular tradition but includes parish churches, Fresh Expressions and church plants, and cathedrals (largely because these are the priorities for the Church Commissioners who funded the research).3 The report first seeks to show where signs of growth are apparent and what factors might be present to cause or stimulate this. Among these, clear leadership, collaborative ministry (between lay and ordained), being a welcoming community and actively connecting with the wider community are given attention. It is not surprising, then, that these factors have received particular attention in strategic documents and books on church leadership.4 What is perhaps surprising, and a little disappointing, is a general lack of response to one particular key finding from this research, namely that there is a clear association between children and youth ministry and growth.5

Actively engaging children and teenagers is highlighted as an associated trait in three quarters of growing churches.6 Churches that employ a youth worker are only half as likely to be in decline as those that do not have this resource. From the perspective of growth, employing a children or youth worker is the most effective lay appointment a church can make. Beyond this, the association between growth and children and youth work shows that worship services designed for children, a youth programme, camps and retreats for young people and connections to a church school are the elements of this ministry that are strongly associated with growth.7

What is harder to identify is why this is the case. Why are these activities vital and why do they bring vitality? This question of ‘causation’ is not an issue that the researchers feel able to comment upon in this report. There is a difficulty in establishing the distinction between correspondence and causality – do churches grow because they have youth ministry or do growing churches have youth ministry because they are growing? A reason for arguing that intentionally focusing on children and youth ministry is a factor that promotes growth is found, though, in placing this evidence in the context of the more general problem of decline that recent ‘growth’ strategies have sought to address, namely that our key problem is a decline in young people remaining in church.

Our problem with decline still lies in our lack of ability to pass on the faith to the next generation, a problem at a crucial tipping point given that nearly half of churches have fewer than five under-16-year-olds connected to them. Churches that are growing may simply require identifiable family and/or youth ministry activities to manage the increased numbers of young people they have; families might move to churches with such activities and concentrate the numbers we have in such churches. Yet this association with growth, and growth by association, in my view does not fully take into account what is actually happening in youth ministry. An assumption that effective youth ministry is a sign of growth caused by other factors runs the risk of overlooking how this area of practice is crucial in addressing the issues that children and young people themselves identify as challenges to their own belief and engagement in church. If decline in young people’s continuing participation in church life remains our primary problem and at the same time youth ministry is strongly associated with growth, is it not fair to assume some causal link between these two key findings?

There are some very basic principles behind putting children and youth ministry activities in place that might help promote growth. These are not what I intend to explore here, though they are in my view strong arguments alone for putting such priorities in place. The first is that by focusing on children’s and young people’s activities churches enhance their community connections – and also specifically connect to families who are moving to certain areas, moving through key life-stages and in some circumstances looking for ways to reconnect with the faith that might have been a part of their childhood. This ‘social contact’ basis for growth is apparent, especially in the ways in which Messy Church, for instance, has re-engaged some families that had become disconnected from churches in their areas.8 It is my view, however, that effective children and youth ministry actually lies at the heart of these growing churches for a reason – it is a key requirement for growth. This is not to say, however, that all churches that have such ministries are growing or will grow. What is important to note is that in the midst of decline – and in particular generational decline – these are places where the transmission of faith between generations is intentionally or consequently being addressed. Further, since the general picture is one of decline, what might we learn from such examples that might be more deliberately put in place elsewhere?

If you grew up in a church, or came to faith through church youth work, no doubt you will recognize these activities immediately. You may even have a sense of the personal importance this participation had for you. As someone who has spent the past 20 years arguing for urgent investment in children and youth work, I find it comforting to have this level of institutional affirmation of the association youth ministry can have with growth. However, without tackling the question of why this is important we cannot really begin to address the questions of ‘what’ and ‘how’.

This perspective may not strike you as surprising, given that I am someone who has spent his working life implementing, and latterly arguing for, an urgent focus on youth ministry and mission. This does not mean, however, that we should be uncritical of what is undertaken and what we have achieved. While association with signs of growth is encouraging, it is also true that much of what we have done in youth ministry over the past 20 years may be considered to be highly ineffective!

Within youth ministry this has provoked reflection on whether the focus of practice has been adequate. Some have argued that a greater attention to working with families is preferable to the peer-focused youth ministry that we have broadly adopted across most denominations.9 The role that parents play, or don’t play, in the formation of their children’s faith has also been given attention – in suggesting both that the weakness in passing on faith lies here and that this is where we are best drawn to put resources.10 There is also increased emphasis now on children’s ministry – on understanding the ways in which faith is nurtured and helping parents engage more effectively in supporting their children’s faith formation.11 Beyond these ministry-focused reflections there is also a concern for how we might reconnect and re-engage with the young people who have had no contact with the Church for generations – who belong to families with little connection to church or live in areas where churches have little connection to their communities. The declining number of young people in church needs to be set against a backdrop in which the majority of young people in the UK, Europe and increasingly the USA don’t go to church!12

These remain important questions and they are part of the bigger picture I want to address in this chapter. What’s the problem? Why are young people leaving the Church and why is the Church no longer a part of the landscape of young people’s sense of spirituality and religion? These are the questions that lie at the heart of whether the strategy of employing a person to lead and develop specific programmes to nurture children and young people’s faith, providing communal support and resources for parents and beyond this engaging with young people outside the Church, is likely to lead to growth. Or, to put it another way, whether growth is possible at all if we don’t focus on these tasks.

Faith in decline: accepting the evidence on generational decline

The signs of growth highlighted in From Anecdote to Evidence are encouraging, and the call for urgent action to foster these is welcome. Yet, within this, it would be a mistake to miss the point that the backdrop to these findings remains the reality of decline. Alongside natural decline as members of older generations die, the particular problem we still have is that young people are leaving the Church and that mission work among young people has a negligible impact on this. The first priority we have is to accept this decline as the ‘brutal reality’ we face, to try to understand why it is happening and to do something about it.

A steady stream of research indicates that this trend has been with us since before the 1950s and that it is deep and continuing. In the 1990s, data provided a new impetus that ‘reaching and keeping’ teenagers should be a priority for the Church; analysis of the English Church Attendance Survey revealed that on average churches were ‘losing’ 140,000 young people aged 14–16 every week.13 This trend was later extended to include ‘tweenagers’ who, by the age of 11, were already seen to dissociate from the Church as soon as other options for leisure activities become viable in their family lives.14 At the turn of the new millennium, the threat was that the Church might be ‘one generation from extinction’ – with dissociation or disaffection in childhood a key contributing factor. The issues here identified were negative experiences of participation in Sunday school, competition for time provoked by other leisure pursuits and lack of quality conversation around questions of faith in the family.15

Not coincidentally, this period saw a steady rise in the deployment of employed youth ministers and the growth of a new subculture of Christian movements such as Soul Survivor Festival. In the mid-2000s hope emerged that this ‘haemorrhaging of young people’ might be abating: there was still decline but it had lessened and in some quarters of the Church signs of growth were beginning to become apparent.16 This hopeful trend has become one of the key narratives in analysing statistical data on church attendance and affiliation. From Anecdote to Evidence merely resets this data into a more positive narrative of ‘signs of growth’. Yet what lies behind this growt...