Young People and Church Since 1900

Engagement and Exclusion

Naomi Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351623759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Formation religieuse

When the Sunday School pioneers saw a need in their communities in the late eighteenth century, their response provoked a 200 year movement. These early Sunday Schools met a clear social need: that for basic education. By the 1960s, they faced rapid decline – a rigid institution amidst societal change.

Over recent decades, Christian youth work has emerged as a response to further youth decline within churches. Many youth workers engage with young people's self-perceived needs by delivering open-access youth provision in their local communities alongside more specifically Christian activities. Tensions emerge over whether the youth worker's role is to serve community or church needs, with churches often emphasising the desire to see young people in services.

Drawing together historical and contemporary research, Young People and Church Since 1900 identifies patterns and change in young people's engagement with organised Christianity across time. Through this, it provides a unique analysis of the engagement and exclusion of young people in three key time periods, 1900–1910, 1955–1972, and the present day. Whilst much commentary on religious decline has focused on changes external to churches, this text draws out the internal decisions and processes that have affected the longevity of Christianity in England. This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars of young people and Christianity in the twentieth century and today, as well as youth ministry students and practitioners and those interested in youth decline in churches more widely.

1 Introduction: Postmodernism, institutionalisation, and social currencies

This book explores young people’s engagement with organised Christianity in England from the early twentieth century up to the present day. It focuses on the Sunday School movement’s peak at the start of the twentieth century, its virtual demise in the mid-century, and the growth of Christian youth work in recent years. The three specific time periods that the research informing this text has considered are 1900–1910, 1955–1972, and 2008 to the present day. The city of Birmingham in the West Midlands of England was the case study area across the time periods (although I also undertook a small study in the US which is presented in chapter six). The research focused on young people aged thirteen to twenty one, and has involved the collection of young people’s and Christian educators’ narratives from the different time periods before, during, and beyond the pivotal time of religious change in mid-twentieth-century England. The narrative-based qualitative research offers a unique approach in bringing the past and present together to identify patterns and change in young people’s engagement with organised Christianity across time, demonstrating patterns of struggle in meeting the needs of young people and imposing an institutional agenda on them. The overall study was made up of two smaller projects, the historical research, and the contemporary fieldwork, using different methods but similar analyses. The findings are brought together to identify shifts and patterns in the relationship between young people and organised Christianity since the early twentieth century. These two complementary dimensions are referred to as the ‘historical study’ and the ‘contemporary study’ throughout the text. The historical study highlights key factors in the decline of the Sunday School movement, and the contemporary study traces the presence of these factors, among other issues, in Christian youth work today.

The research makes a contribution to debates about Christianity, decline, and secularisation in the UK and beyond. It will be of relevance to academics concerned with religion from within a range of disciplines including, for example, religious studies, sociology, history, and theology, as well as to Christian youth-work practitioners and churches. The findings both add to these academic debates as well as providing tangible applications for the practices of those concerned with engaging young people with religious organisations in meaningful and empowering ways.

This opening chapter outlines the narrative methods used in the research, and the view of both archival and interview data as forms of narrative to be analysed. The chapter goes on to explore some of the theories on postmodernism that underpin and support the research approach. Key concepts that inform the research are introduced, and the notion of social currencies that runs throughout the text is developed. The chapter then explores the context of Christianity in twentieth-century England, drawing on relevant literature. Finally, the key themes that have emerged from the research findings are introduced and the outline of the book’s chapters presented.

The decline of Sunday Schools after two hundred years of the movement is worthy of exploration. The focus on the earliest time period (1900–1910) when Sunday School attendance was at its peak is useful in contextualising the later historical time period (1955–1972) when it was in decline. The contemporary study develops the themes of the overall research, building on the historical findings, as well as illuminating the unique experiences of young people seeking to engage with organised Christianity today.

My own analysis is clearly influenced by my training as a youth worker and subscription to the values of a particular professional ‘community of practice’. The text therefore analyses the process of engaging young people in Christian youth activities in the context of my commitment to wider youth-work values. In particular, it begins with an understanding of youth work as a process of informal education as defined by Tony Jeffs and Mark Smith (2005). This position sees choice, conversation, relationships, and voluntary participation as key elements of youth work. The findings of my research, in which I attempted to limit the influence of my assumptions through the grounded-theory approach and narrative-inquiry methods, validate this position. The emphases on choice, dialogue, relationships, and participation in Christian youth-work settings were found to be crucial to young people’s engagement. The research also found that there were tensions in Christian youth work between meeting social, spiritual, and institutional agendas, and explored the ways in which youth workers manage these tensions. The conflict between starting with the needs of young people and meeting institutional demands strikes a parallel with the wider youth-work field, where current debates are centred on the tensions between outcome-driven, targeted provision, and the soft outcomes that are often associated with universal, open-access youth work. Churches often want to impose what they perceive as young people’s ‘spiritual needs’ on all those who engage with Christian youth work, whereas the youth workers I interviewed recognise that young people desire to choose and negotiate these needs for themselves. Similarly, in the wider youth-work field, funders often define young people’s specific ‘social needs’, whilst youth workers allow for young people’s negotiation in this process. My interpretation of my research findings is influenced by my role in this wider debate.

Collecting the historical narratives

The study of the historical time periods drew primarily on the records of the Birmingham Sunday School Union. Records of the National Sunday School Union and some of the other local unions were also examined to see whether the Birmingham themes were representative. The nature, origins, and structure of the unions is outlined in chapters two and three. Publications for Sunday School teachers, minute books, Annual Reports, promotional materials, and correspondence were all consulted. The archival evidence is supplemented by oral history interviews with people who attended Sunday School in the 1960s, recruited mainly from the families of the young people interviewed for the contemporary study. Due to their small number, the oral history interviews (five in total, only four of which fitted into the 1955–1972 period), were not representative enough to be analysed in their own right, but they serve to further illustrate themes from the archival narratives.

Collecting the contemporary narratives

The aim of the contemporary research was to gather the narratives of the young people about their experiences, not to define beforehand what was significant in a list of pre-set questions. A research method fitting with this objective was therefore chosen. Narrative-inquiry technique was employed; entailing open-ended interviews in which the interviewee structures and controls the conversation beyond its initial theme, and then clarifying and follow-up questions are asked by the researcher when the participant has presented their ‘story’ (Bell 2005, 21). In this way, my sub-questions were defined by the interviewee’s narrative rather than their narrative being defined by my questions.

Analysing the narratives

All of the data from the archives and the interview transcripts were subjected to thematic analysis through coding and identifying themes (Braun & Clarke 2006). In addition to this, the emerging discourses across the time periods and modes of testimony were identified and explored. The discussion of the themes within this text aims to deconstruct them beyond just personal experience to show how they also reflect (or challenge) wider discourses of Christianity specific to the time periods.

Brown emphasises the Barthian theory that, when viewed from a postmodern perspective, all text (including more than just the written word) is a narrative and not a true representation of reality, reflecting the discourses of that period (Brown 2005, 102, 113). The idea of people’s constructed realities or narratives links with the methods used for this research. The project involved differing research methods across the time periods, from archival research to oral histories and present-day interviews. However, these sources are consistent in that they are all texts to be deconstructed, narratives, or representations of reality to be analysed (ibid., 147).

Balancing institutional and personal narratives

Mary Jo Maynes et al. (2008, 43) distinguish between public and individual narratives, the former representing institutional, or cultural structures, and the latter representing personal stories. They recognise that personal narratives will contain references to the public narratives that have impacted on their life stories, thus one is not free of the other. McLeod and Thomson (2009, 33) suggest that testimonies should be more important than archives in historical research. However, this study takes the perspective that the archives are one form of testimony, representing the institutional voice, to be examined alongside other forms of testimony.

The dominance of the institutional narrative in the historical case study reflects the hierarchical power of the Sunday School Unions in that the narratives they sought and documented were purely administrative and not that of the teachers or scholars (throughout this book, the term ‘scholars’ is used to denote children attending Sunday School). This demonstrates the separation of the decision makers from those they were attempting to engage. Though the institutional voice is strongest in the historical time periods, the contemporary case study naturally allows more voice to the young people. As well as being a reflection of the methods available, this reflects a shift from expectation to autonomy in young people’s engagement with Christianity across the time periods. This move from institutional to individual power is a key pattern in the research.

Sample

Birmingham has served as a case study across the time periods, providing a consistent point of reference. For the historical research, the study focused primarily on the Birmingham Sunday School Union which served the city as well as many of the satellite towns in the West Midlands that surround it. For the contemporary study, youth groups were accessed that fall within the Birmingham city wards. The wards represented within the contemporary research include a mix of those close to the city centre and more suburban areas, covering both areas of moderate wealth and those that are more deprived.

For the contemporary study, young people who are engaging with Christianity (and their youth workers) were identified via their youth groups and churches, through an opportunity sample. I went where people were willing to be involved in the research, often relying on verbal recommendations between youth workers. Interviews took place with forty-two people (not including the American case study which is outlined in chapter six). Thirty four young people were interviewed and eight youth workers. The denominations of Christianity represented within the sample were Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, United Reformed, Catholic, Pentecostal, and a black majority church of no specified denomination. The interviewees were based in eight different church-based groups. The young people interviewed were aged between thirteen and twenty one years; seven were thirteen to fifteen, twenty two were sixteen to eighteen, and five were nineteen to twenty one. Twenty one of the young people were male and thirteen were female. The gender balance was affected by the fact that two of the groups were Boy’s Brigades, by the young people’s own willingness to take part, and by the need for adult permission. Three of the groups accessed had significant numbers of young people from minority ethnic backgrounds. Of the eight youth workers, two were female, and six were male. Five of the youth workers were volunteers and three were paid employees of their churches. All of the participant names within this text are pseudonyms to preserve their anonymity.

The young people and youth workers were interviewed within their church settings. This means that the contemporary study has focused on specifically church-based activities and not on activities in which youth workers may engage young people in settings external to the church building.

Details of the small sample of youth workers involved in the US case study are in chapter six.

The postmodern approach: Epistemes, discourses, and narratives

The nature of this project links with Michel Foucault’s theory about the changing ‘epistemes’; periods of time in which a particular philosophical way of thinking was dominant in society (Foucault 1970). These changing ‘epistemes’, which can overlap as they change, are observed in the time periods of this research. Foucault (1970) suggests that the period of pre-modernity was informed by the assumption that all knowledge was divine and comes from the divine. For example, when monarchs were believed to rule by divine right and religious and political rule was combined. This period was over before the time periods of this research. The study begins in 1900 when modernity was long established. Within the modern period it was assumed that knowledge was hierarchical; the monarch or authoritative institution held more knowledge (and thus power) than those below it. Within this hierarchy, if something was considered, or discovered to be right, then this was an absolute. At this time, knowledge was also rational. Therefore, in this period, although religious authorities might have been seen to occupy a place in a social hierarchy, the actions of religious organisations or world events, such as the wars, would have provoked some questioning of religion. The postmodern perspective maintains that in the mid-twentieth century, society moved to a new period of postmodernity where reality can never be sure, and may even be different for different people (Foucault 1970; Brown 2005). For example, in the 1960s, when postmodernity is believed to have emerged most visibly, people began to challenge previously held truths, hierarchies of authority, and structural inequalities. These changes can be seen in English Christianity where a couple of centuries ago, in the move from pre-modernity to modernity, conflict may have increased within the church, but the church was still seen to hold institutional authority. A particular crisis point for institutional Christianity was the move to postmodernity, when the status of churches became less secure as people began to construct their own realities. Changing social conceptions of hierarchical authority and of knowledge as absolute began to change in an increasingly diverse society, and patterns of truth for one were found to differ to those of others. The 1960s, when the changing episteme is most visible, is a key focal point of this research and the theory of postmodernism may shed some light on religious change in this period.

Callum Brown (2005, 62), drawing on the work of Foucault and others, argues that the different layers of discourse must be considered when analysing the narratives of a particular time. The dominant episteme influences the discourses of its time and influences the narratives that people construct for themselves (ibid., 60). Thus the differing narratives analysed in this study reflect the governing ‘discursive formations’ of their time (ibid.). Brown (2005, 135) argues that the postmodern view of history limits the individual’s agency and capacity to influence if they are held captive by the dominant episteme and discursive formations that surround them. It could, however, be argued that these epistemes are only changed from the ground upwards. In the midst of a changing episteme there are pockets of resistance where people cling to the discourses of the former time, such as the clergy and Sunday School Unions in their hierarchical authority. In the contemporary study, the young people who engaged with Christianity were making a marginal choice and could be viewed as challenging a dominant discourse of their generation.

Maynes et al. (2008, 1) recognise that personal narratives as a research method contradict the Foucauldian assumption that individuals lack agency and are constrained by dominant discourses. From this perspective, personal narratives are not individual expressions of agency but reflections of the wider discourses to which the narrators are held captive. However, Maynes et al. (2008) emphasise that people do have agency in how their narrative links with wider societal processes. They point out that considering personal narratives in research can allow for ‘marginalised voices’ to be heard that may be rendered invisible by a focus on dominant discourses (ibid., 1). They give the example, among others, of how the use of personal narratives in feminist research has allowed the voices of women to be heard which may not have featured in public narratives (ibid., 2). An example of the emergence of a counternarrative in my research is the challenge presented by some of the individual narratives to the notion that young people have rejected church. Some of the personal narratives explored suggest that young people who have attempted to engage with church have been rejected by their churches rather than the other way around.

My own view is that the use of personal narratives allows the researcher to observe the struggles for and against change that take place within discursive formations. It also illuminates people’s influence and agency in constructing these formations. If narratives are the building blocks of wider discourses, then these building blocks deserve attention. These personal narratives are what make up the wider discourses and epistemes that govern society, and thus change within them has implications for changing discursive formations.

Based on Foucault’s (1970) conception of discourses and narratives and Brown’s (2005) interpretation of Foucault’s theory, this text defines discourses as the dominant and visible messages portrayed by institutions within society. It defines narratives as the individual expressions that influence and are influenced by these wider discourses. Epistemes are the periods of time in which particular ways of thinking are dominant that over-arch these discourses and narratives. The research underpinning this book has involved the collection and analysis of individual and institutional narratives. The thematic analysis of these narratives has allowed me to identify both the wider discourses that the narratives reflect as well as the existence of counternarratives that appear to challenge institutional discourses.

Brown (2005, 147) recognises that the study of ‘history is never neutral’. Taking the view of this study as a collection and analysis of narratives, it is important to be aware of my own narratives and how they affect me as a researcher. Brown (2005) suggests that objectivity is a myth, and the postmodern historian must be aware of her own subjectivities. Similarly, Maynes et al. (2008, 98) describe research involving the collection of personal narratives as an ‘intersubjective encounter’. They explain that such research is influenced both by the life story of the interviewee and that of the interviewer in their interpretation and analysis of the narrative (ibid., 99). They suggest that this intersubjectivity can occur ‘even where there is no direct contact between narrator and analyst’ such as where the researcher is examining letters, autobiographical writings or interviews completed by someone else (ibid., 99). Thus this intersubjectivity occurs even in my interaction with archival documents such as minute books and publications, as my own narrative inevitably affects my interpretation of the institutional narratives, which themselves are subjective to their place, time, and the individuals within them.

All research is subjective. If the researcher does not apply a level of discreti...