Nine is the new 13

Hands up everyone reading this who’s involved with their church’s teenagers! I can see a paid youth worker over there, a Sunday School volunteer in the back row, a vicar on a mission in the side aisle … A training session by Jenny Hyson, Diocesan Children’s Adviser and Ian Macdonald, Diocesan Youth Adviser, however, made it plain that the entire church has a responsibility to engage this critical age group.

Statistics show that children who leave the church at 12 have – by and large – already made up their mind to do so at seven. It’s a central message which turns on its head everything we think about working with the upper primary/lower secondary child – the ground for them finding church welcoming, accepting and personally relevant is laid long before they reach the age of independent decision-making.  And as the training session revealed, there is a massive shortfall between the perception which those of us who are youth leaders have of our teenage years and the pressures and influences on those who are teenagers today.

Just think of all the changes in society of the last two decades: family structures, the way education is conducted, the general ‘busy-ness’ of life (swimming lessons, music lessons, Sunday football, Sunday shopping) and, because of greater mobility, the lack of adult role models who can commit themselves to anything in community life (other than self-improvement, like the gym). Add to these the size of the marketing budgets targeted at this age group, and our yesterdays are unrecognisable to today’s young.  Incidentally, teenagers have more money than ever before (pocket money rose by 32% in the six years 1993 – 1999).
In the late 1990’s, 1000 teenagers were leaving the English church every single week – they thought it boring (87%); uncool (73%); none of their friends went (61%); they had other things to do on a Sunday (63%); for some, it was the only chance they got all week to have a lie-in. Then there are the not inconsiderable hurdles of ‘I don’t believe in God’ (64%) or ‘My parents don’t encourage me to go’ (48%). Even if that decline were suddenly to have halted (which it hasn’t), congregations now are left with not only the question of how we counteract the influence of the teenagers who left in the 1970’s, who are telling their own children that there’s nothing to be gained from belonging to a church community, but also how we can work with families to attract their young when they get into their early teenage years. And how can we encourage Dads so that especially boys continue to have a male role model who does find it cool to go to church? 

One of the ways we can respond is to acknowledge the fact that ‘nine is the new 13’.  Ruth Hassall is the Church Pastoral Aid Society’s advisors on the 9s – 13s and she would like to see churches reordering their youth resources to make way for clubs catering specifically for them. Children are consumers much earlier these days and they and their parents have a marked sense of having the consumer’s right to vote with their feet. If we are weekly producing something too babyish for the 9 year olds (the girls amongst whom are already aspiring to be teenagers), we will never interest them in the first place or lose them even when they’ve been faithful members of our various groups since the age of three. Rethinking how we work with teenagers might seem daunting, but engaging 9-13s – premature teenagers, or be-’tweenagers’ – is actually quite liberating, because it’s out with a curriculum and in with building friendships and listening to the way they want to learn and what about. It’s a real shock to the average Sunday School system to hear that we need to see beyond the usual ‘rota-and-programme’ approach which aims to keep youth leaders in post on the promise that they won’t have to take more than one session a month or be too creative! The Door spoke to two leaders: to Marianne Holt at St Mary’s church in Old Amersham and Alex Johnstone at St Andrew’s in central Oxford; both of them have a stable leadership team of the same faces every week who have developed their own courses and clubs in response to their groups’ respective interests: St Andrew’s has just started a ‘Christians and Sport’ group, for example. Both would also add another ‘must’ – being age-appropriate and drafting in older teenagers and young adults, prepared to be candid about their own journey of discovery, to be role models and leaders for the 9–13s.

If successful, reaching out to this vulnerable age group may well also mean throwing open the doors to quite challenging young people who put us under enormous strain to be non-judgmental. ‘There is no such thing as the right personality for the job of tweenagers’ leader’, says Marianne, ‘all you have to do is love the children and be prepared to value them, to treat them as individuals and work with the exciting raw material of their eclectic youthful energy.’ Treating them as individuals includes, in both Oxford and Amersham, communicating with the group members in the first instance, rather than with the parents (although at Oxford, parents enjoy regular parents’ evenings, where they get to discover what fun they’re missing out on by not being 13 any more!)

We underestimate the thirst for spirituality amongst young teenagers, Alex believes.  ‘Church clubs aren’t just about having fun, and small groups enable young people to investigate faith and the world – and develop a living relationship with Jesus – in a secure setting.’ In Amersham you might eavesdrop on African or Celtic prayer, or see the youngsters on a prayer walk, or laying on hands.
The 9-13 age-group and beyond is, thanks to 24-hour media outlets, far more fired up about global issues than ever their leaders were. Whether it’s third world debt or the environment that offends their sense of justice, youth sessions can tap into this fervour and nurture the kind of faith which (as Matthew’s Gospel tells us) can move mountains if we need it to. This is vital equipment for facing adolescence and adulthood – Ruth Hassall: ‘One of the main challenges that we face as leaders of 9-13s is helping them to grow in faith as well as age, so that with each passing year they discover God’s bigger than they’d previously known him to be.’ She believes, too, that we should offer them chances to grow as disciples through serving and leading others: ‘We need to provide meaningful opportunities in a supportive environment whilst not loading them with greater responsibility than they can bear.’ You couldn’t get much more responsible than going out to Armenia on a building project, which is what older Amersham teenagers have before them this summer, whilst the younger ones fund-raise to make it possible for them to go.

Both Amersham and Oxford youngsters meet partly in homes and partly in church. St Andrew’s also takes over a school on Sunday evenings so that there is loads of space to have a social, fun-and-games ‘loud’ programme in parallel to a quiet area: church means having to behave in a certain way, it seems, and being off-site allows youngsters more freedom of exploration of themselves and the faith.

Returning to the question of where responsibility for our tweenagers lies, it’s back to Ian Macdonald. ‘The key to our providing a secure, loving and stimulating springboard for adolescence is thinking laterally – about the day, the time, the content and the venue of groups. But before even that, the challenge to the church is first to find new ways of flexibly supporting all the different family structures of today and accommodating the pressures of current lifestyles. Every single churchgoer has a role in engaging tweenagers in today’s church and valuing their contribution. And it’s urgent.

Liz Roberts is a youth leader herself and works as a freelance publicist for charities. She attends St Matthew’s Church, Harwell, Oxon. Photos Frank Blackwell, with thanks to the Tweenagers Club at St Andrew’s Oxford.

Resources:

There are lots of websites available – often originating in the US. Here are just three:
www.youthblog.org Christian Youth Work and Ministry: Thoughts, Reflections, Encounters and, of course, Humour. A website for encouragement by the Diocese’s Ian Macdonald.
www.funandgames.org. Ideas for Christian youth groups
www.thesource4YM.com. More ideas for Christian youth groups
Peter Brierley, ‘Engaging Teenagers’ ISBN 185424 221 0 (currently out of print – second-hand retailers ought to be able to source)

People:

Jenny Hyson, diocesan children’s adviser, and Ian Macdonald, diocesan youth adviser – Diocesan Church House, 01865 208200
Ruth Hassall – CPAS  01926 458456

Training:

For information about Tweenagers training events please contact the Youth adviser.