With kids increasingly turning away from church as they grow older, churches struggle for a better way to reach youth – including creating meetings that change lives.
BY REGINA MCGEE
One by one they got up and spoke about what a church could be, where the church should go, how to connect with kids who are lost in a world of material plenty – who are starved for real contact with God. They were six young speakers giving the first-ever Young People’s Address at the 2008 General Assembly of the United Methodist Church (UMC) last spring in Forth Worth, Texas. The quadrennial General Conference is the UMC’s most important church-wide meeting, and these young people found themselves at the center of an conference that included the president of Liberia, Bill Gates and a host of religious leaders.
Hank Hilliard sat in the audience with tears in his eyes. UMC’s manager of youth ministry development, Hilliard had been dubbed “Hank the Bank” by the speakers, whose care had been entrusted to him during the conference. “I was moved by their sincerity. They just poured out their hearts up there.” Hilliard, 37, is in the early planning stages of Youth 2011, the church’s triennial U.S. event for middle schoolers and teens. He is part of a wave of youth workers and youth conference planners dedicated to reaching out in new, more effective ways to bring youth back to the fold.
“In many churches, the traditional ways of doing youth ministry has been program-based,” he says. “But providing youth programs and a cool youth minister with a goatee who plays guitar is a kind of ‘if you build it, they will come’ thinking that isn’t working,” Hilliard contends. “We need to shift our thinking from building programs to building relationships with kids.”
With sharp increases in the number of young adults leaving the churches they grew up in, much is riding on the youth outreach efforts of faith groups like UMC.
Youth in the Spotlight
Research in recent years shows that young adults are turning away from institutional churches in record numbers. Based on interviews with 35,000 Americans age 18 and older, the Pew Forum’s 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey found that 28 percent of Americans have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion – or no religion at all.
A Barna Group survey revealed that 61 percent of people ages 21-29 had participated in church activities as teens but are now disengaged. Lifeway Research in 2007 found more than two-thirds of young adults who attend church stopped attending regularly for at least a year between the ages of 18-22. In response to findings like these, faith groups are making structural changes and creating more effective youth outreach programs. Some examples:
Two reports within the Unitarian Universalist Association, culminating four years of research, recommend decentralizing youth outreach efforts by creating five regional youth ministry offices. They call for a culture change that puts “serving the religious needs of teenagers and young adults at the hear of each congregation’s mission.”
Messengers (delegates) to last year’s Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting asked for more child-friendly and family-oriented events at the annual meetings, with the result that at this year’s annual meeting in June in Louisville, Ky., there will be a new daily camp experience for youth put on by Lifeway’s Centrifuge.
The Catholic Diocese of South New Jersey has embarked on an ambitious plan of new initiatives focused on youth, including a youth congress and a variety of retreat experiences and community service projects.
Despite painful cutbacks and layoffs caused by the economic crisis resulting in a 26 percent net reduction in UMC assets, top executives of UMC agencies announced in May that they are moving ahead with plans to hold a global event for young people in Germany next year. The church has also launched a new campaign to reach 18-34 year olds, featuring the new 10thousanddoors.org Web site.
“Reaching youth is not a new issue, but now people are looking at it as a real problem, because the data is causing us to look at what’s driving the fall-out,” says Mark Matlock, vice president of event content for Youth Ministries, an event management and publishing company focused on Christian youth services. He adds that it’s an “extreme oversimplification to say that kids are walking away from their faith. Their choosing not to go to church when they get older doesn’t mean their faith is dead.”
Youth 2011: Come as You Are
In 2011, for the first time in its history, UMC’s triennial U.S. youth conference will be held in two venues: Indiana’s Purdue University, July 13-17, and California’s Sacramento Convention Center, July 27-31. With the dual location, says Hank Hilliard, the church is hoping more people will be able to attend. “We had a woman who drove a bus from Portland to attend the ‘08 conference in Greensboro, North Carolina,” Hilliard recalls. “She was thrilled to learn we were going to have a West Coast conference this year.” The 2008 conference drew some 6,500 participants, down from a high of 10,000 in the 1990s.
To get the ball rolling on the 2011 meeting, Hilliard decided to try something new. He set up a weekend Dream Retreat, inviting 12 young people and 12 adults to come to Nashville (UMC headquarters) to engage “in deeper, more difficult questions [than trying to determine a logo, speakers or bands]. What are the real needs of youth? What is the real purpose of this event?” Hilliard says. The retreat laid the foundation for the design team, a planning group of 24 people, half of them church youth, including one young person from the Philippines, which, along with Africa, is where the United Methodist Church is growing the fastest.
Hilliard is psyched to try a variety of new approaches at the 2011 conference. He’s eager to experiment with Twitter, texting and social media to encourage youth interaction and involvement. He’s considering replacing the daily newspaper with daily video or texted updates. He’s thinking hard about ways to involve youth, to get them not just to attend but to participate. One plan revolves around praise bands. “Our hope is identify bands from around the country through video submissions posted on our Web site. We would select a few to perform at the conference, and possibly send a resource person to work with each band to prep them for the conference.” he says. “Developing them as leaders – think what that can do for them and their churches back home.” Hilliard hopes to create a range of experiences for youth at the event, to reach every kind of kid. “Maybe it’s Ultimate Frisbee, maybe it’s connecting with community and God in a mosh pit,” he says. “Bands are really important. Some kids really connect with God and community when they’re screaming and clapping during a performance.”
Some kids seek quiet. A lot of kids, actually. At the ‘08 youth conference, Hilliard says hundreds of kids lined up down the hall to enter the Prayer Room, where they found low-lighting, a prayer labyrinth, contemplative music, candles, a chance to step out of the every day throb of distraction. Hilliard’s eager to offer this kind of quiet space at the 2011 conference. For him, it’s all about engagement, being at eye level with kids. “You can’t entertain kids into the church,” he says. “They carry entertainment in their pockets. You can’t program the problem away. Kids are so busy these days. This is a great opportunity, almost freeing. Let’s throw out the old model, roll up our sleeves.”
Focusing on Youth & Youth Workers
If there is one organization that has come to epitomize, embrace and reflect all the swirling currents around youth ministry today, it’s Youth Specialties.
YS grew out of the efforts of Mike Yaconelli and Wayne Rice, who borrowed money from their in-laws to produce a publication about how churches could work with youth, which they self-published on a press in their garage and sold for $5 as they drove around giving seminars for youth workers.
The first annual YS National Youth Workers Convention was held in 1970 and YS has been growing ever since, with new publishing ventures and new events, including Latin American and Canadian versions of the National Youth Workers Convention. In 2006, YS took over the management of DCLA, a popular student convention held annually in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. And in 2007, the Christian media company Zondervan acquired YS, with a commitment to support and maintain YS’s offbeat culture and approach.
Mark Matlock, YS’s vice president of event content, says culture, families and churches too often marginalize teens, who yearn to be heard. He says DCLA aims to let student voices emerge by structuring the conference togive students both a personal and collective experience. All attendees meet at the start of the day in the Big Room for group teachings and programs. Afterwards they break into labs for small-group discussions and individualized experiences. Evening programs focus on Bible lessons told through different mediums, such as drama, comic book art and music.
Accommodating teens’ biorhythms means starting morning sessions around 10:30 and letting kids stay up later, says Matlock. “It fits into their summer rhythm.” Having volunteers staying at each of the hotels where DCLA attendees are staying helps “keep the hotel under control and makes a huge difference,” Matlock says. “Setting up expectations before youth arrive on site is important. Kids get missional if you cast them in that light, and a little positive peer pressure goes a long way,” he says. “I’ve always been impressed with how our youth behave at all our events.”
Illustrating the difficult currents in today’s youth workers world, YS will be making some dramatic shifts in its National Youth Workers Convention, which draws thousands of youth workers across a spectrum of Christian faiths. Speakers for the main sessions will focus on “things that bring us together rather than divide us,” said Mark Oestreicher, YS president, in a Webcast in May. The change is a result of feedback from previous conventions in which attendees complained that YS was seemingly pushing an agenda by focusing in the general sessions on such hot-button issues as homosexuality and youth.
Oestreicher said that YS is trying to choose speakers who are “not there to push buttons or raise issues so much as speak to your soul as a youth worker.” The 2009 National Youth Workers Convention will be held in Los Angeles, Cincinnati and Atlanta beginning in September, with more than 3,000 people expected at each event.
Youth Specialties (youthspecialties.com) offers free resources for youth workers, including how-to articles, programming resources and podcast interviews with YS authors and speakers.
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