Monthly youth leaders column

On occasions, those of us who have stayed with youth ministry in advancing years are the subject of ageist banter from our younger colleagues. But I wonder if the oldies should fight back a little on an area of ministry where, just maybe, our younger partners in the gospel have lost the plot.

I was recently involved in a university mission and the inevitable question arose about how friends are to be invited to the mission events. Different people recounted their successes and failures and one student came out with the statement: ‘I have texted and emailed all my course mates’, and then, as an afterthought, he said: ‘Oh yes, I spoke to one person face to face’, and it almost came out as an expression of failure that he had to forsake technology and speak to a human being. His case is probably extreme but I wonder if inter-personal skills are going out of fashion or, at the very least, conversation fashions are changing.

Tyranny of the urgent

At this point, some of you may be saying, ‘This man operated in a bygone age and has failed to adapt to the modern world’. There may be truth in that and I do not like the pressure emails have put on us to make decisions in a minute which used to take hours or days. I have one person who, when she emails me, it’s always urgent and an answer is required that day. That is the tyranny of the urgent and should be resisted on any matter that needs thought and prayer. By all means respond to someone who has invited you out for coffee at 10.30 at Starbucks and you can either go or you can’t — that’s easy to respond to. But when a decision has many options and, whichever is chosen, will affect the lives of people, time should be taken.

Many youth leaders use text and email as a means of following up on absent young people and spreading information. I think that’s fine, but, if the student comes back with a response that says ‘I haven’t been to the group because …’, and there are clearly issues behind their behaviour or absence which need a face-to-face conversation, I wonder if that skill is vanishing. The church grows through faith sharing, reading the Bible with people, engaging in conversation where doubts have arisen, dealing with pastoral issues that have caused people to stumble and ‘encouraging people to live lives worthy of God’ (1 Thessalonians 2.11). I once visited a church where several people referred to their church as ‘the email church’ — all communication was designed to stop people meeting face to face, to share problems and joys and just to be with each other.

Keep on meeting

In our secular world it is sometimes hard to speak to a person. How many buttons do we have to press to state our options before we get to talk to a person who can help us? The community of our youth groups must remain a group where we meet to pray, to share, to teach and to ‘have all things in common’. Recently I came across a youth leader who had decided that much of his teaching was on a website, so that ‘all his young people could receive the teaching rather than just those who come to the meeting’. Even if you put your talk headings on a website, does that mean that some young people will assume they don’t need to turn up because they can get their teaching from their computer.

I hope I’m not being a grumpy old man who wants nothing to do with modern technology. It is a great tool but don’t let us assume that it enables us to avoid doing the work of face-to-face contact with people. Let’s not fool ourselves that electronic contact is our only way of being good relational youth ministers.

Dinosaurs stand up

Tyranny of the urgent

Keep on meeting

Dave Fenton

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