It would appear that my blog last week wasn’t quite controversial enough to get much of a reaction. Or maybe family and our picture of whole church are so far below the radar that it just doesn’t get much traction. Let’s celebrate another beer and beef night!
But never give up; never surrender. Let me have one more shot at this theme of whole church and the challenge of incorporating children and youth. The prevailing view at the moment is children and youth have specific cultural, social and developmental needs and can be best served, evangelised and nurtured in programs that are specific to their age and stage of life. That is all reasonable but the difficultly comes when these programs are run in virtual isolation from the programs around them. In the words of one youth ministry writer it is like “an octopus without a brain, a collection of arms acting independently with no central processing unit coordinating their actions”(Clark, 2007).
Most ministries to children and youth are appropriately delegated to others who are gifted to serve the body in these ministries but the synergy between them is usually limited by the leadership structure. Almost invariably fault lines appear where there is a change in life stage and where there is a change of leadership. Statistically we know we lose a lot of young people in the five years after school. The pleasures and worries of life are a significant influence but I think we also need to look at our church structures- it is a leadership transition point, it is where we move from highly structured, often mentoring, youth ministry to laissez-faire young adult ministry.
I think we need to reconsider how we prepare youth for adulthood and how we structure our community to support them. The senior minister cannot be the doer of the ministry but they are the linch-pin for continuity. At the end of the day the only way these homogeneous units can function together effectively is if the minister holds the vision.
To further exacerbate the problem, this pragmatic view of ministry is often in tension with our theology of church. Sydney Anglican clergy generally hold the view that the visible church is the physically gathered believers or the community of believers that gather at a particular time and place. It is difficult to know where homogeneous ministry to children and youth fits within this theological framework. We believe that participation in the visible church is intrinsic to who we are in Christ but we don’t want to call the gathering of children or youth ‘church’. Meanwhile we have actively discouraged them from participating in what we do call ‘church’ by providing alternative programs, often run concurrently.
