G. Mark Sumpter
Fall 2004
In this article, we consider two items from an historical perspective that have had a bearing on the world of youth ministry in North America. Both of these influence the way we see the church and her role in carrying out the nurture of her baptized young people. We will see how 1) the parachurch movement and 2) the societal changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution influenced the church regarding the care of her young covenant members.
The Parachurch Movement
The parachurch movement had its origins in the early 1800’s. Voluntary societies became a near-substitute for the church. This happened due to an entrepreneurial spirit found in society and in the thinking of Christians. In terms of church ministry, some referred to the “Protestant form of association” which conveyed a decentralization of the work of congregational ministry, a lack of denominational administrative constraints, and openness about both sexes and all ages volunteering to take up Christ’s cause. In short, this spirit of voluntarism confirmed the growing understanding that the church is akin to a voluntary society. This voluntary society mentality paved the way for the contemporary view of the church and her ministry to Christ’s lambs.
One like Bruce Shelly in his article, The Rise of Evangelical Youth Movements, cites the historic example of Herbert J. Taylor. When Taylor discovered that a whole generation of children was being spiritually overlooked in the city of Chicago during the 1930s, he determined to help pioneer and finance multiple non-denominational organizations with the goal of reaching the young people who rarely, if ever, attend worship services and Sunday school. Shelly summarizes the results of Taylor’s effort, “[t]hese ‘non-denominational organizations’ turned out to be the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, Young Life Campaign, Youth For Christ, Christian Service Brigade, Pioneer Girls, and Child Evangelism Fellowship—parachurch evangelistic organizations that can be considered the evangelical heirs of revivalism.”1 Shelly’s analysis is telling: “Taylor’s line of thinking is significant. Though a Methodist layman, he did not turn to his church. He looked instead to new interdenominational agencies…Today parachurch organizations have changed the face of American Protestantism. Many recent observers have noted a shift in religious loyalties from traditional denominations to the parachurch movements.”2
A blend of a passion for ministry and having deep pockets promoted a liberty for ones like Taylor to set the American scene aflame with parachurch fervor. In this light, the local church was seen by many as the runt of a growing litter—a growing litter of agencies and movement ministries.
In our attempts to fulfill the task of covenantal nurture in the wake of the proliferation of the youth ministry movements of 1880-19503, we have done so, chiefly, with the traditional expression of a church youth group. In this respect, we, of local churches of the reformed world and life view, have too easily embraced the distinctive traditional features of a youth group “movement” ministry. We are on par with our Evangelical brothers in terms of adopting the model of the parachurch and importing it into the local church. Our Reformed fathers, of two or so generations back, adopted their own brand of the parachurch ministry. Call it Walther League or Luther League for the Lutherans, Young People’s within the Dutch tradition of the Christian Reformed Church (fueled with ideas from an agency called the Young Calvinist Federation until its fairly recent retirement) or the one-time existence of the Machen League of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church—it’s the same looking parachurch model in most local Reformed congregations today.4
With the practice of the youth group bequeathed to us, slowly, over the past two or three decades, there has been an increase in interest on the part of families from conservative, Bible-believing churches to re-evaluate the place and role of the traditional youth group model. The result of this re-evaluation in some covenant households and churches has strengthened their resolve to retain this traditional model of ministry; other households and congregations have become leery about the place and practice of it.
The families that embrace the traditional ministries of focus-group nurture like Pioneer Clubs, Youth For Christ or Young Life, measure the success of a church’s ministry by how well their home church emulates these kinds of programs. Conversely, there are families that have come to hold that “[c]hildren who are cordoned off into ‘age-based herds’ develop peer dependency, which makes a child give greater weight to the values of his friends than to those of his parents.”5 Families are solidifying their viewpoints, and this has brought the concept of the youth group and its practice to the attention of church leadership, who are formulating their own convictions.
In the wake of the parachurch mentality, households and churches have been left in a growing quandary, or worse, a rift. The role of the church and her practices and the role of the covenant family and its practices are at loggerheads. Both the church and the covenant family are crying out for help on this; and both are seeking to navigate their way through the issues.
A Look at the Influence of the Industrial Revolution
The rise of the parachurch movement has had its negative effect, but so have the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most fathers worked at or close to home, often with other members of the family. The head of the household was the pace-setter regarding leadership for the family. Two spheroids orbited around his leadership: the family as a little church and the family as a little commonwealth. In both cases, the father ruled. He facilitated the growth of his family in taking to heart the responsibilities to “observe God’s rule in church, state and home. The father was the instructor. In this, he represented church and state. But more than these, he represented a direct relation to God, mediated by scripture.”6
But all of this soon changed! “While Christians could sometimes ignore or minimize new intellectual challenges to their traditional beliefs, they found it extremely difficult to neglect the immense social changes that industrialism produced—burgeoning cities, with their poverty, dilapidated housing, drunkenness, prostitution, and crime; massive immigration; and decreased agricultural opportunities that threatened long-established patterns and expectations.”7 Weldon Hardenbrook gives perspective as to what this meant, “This dramatic transition literally jolted the role of men in America. Once farmers and the children of farmers, these men exchanged work around their homes and families for new occupations in factories. And in most cases, this new situation required men to leave their homes for long periods of time.”8
Uh-Oh, we can see it coming. When the father left the home he took the heart and core of his calling with him. His leadership as head of the home went to the shop, office or field. The calling and work of tending to his little church and his little commonwealth shifted out into the mainstream of life and away from his family. Howard King says the shift to working outside the home saw a concurrent shift of family responsibilities transferred to institutions.9 Today’s result is a fragmentation of the family, and specialized ministries for the members of the church. Both institutions—the family and the church—have suffered from the loss of multi-generational connectional influence within their respective spheres for covenantal nurture. A comment about the results of industrialization is in order even at the risk of oversimplifying things.
For the household, on one hand, there is the Christian man who gives up too easily as he swims upstream against a family-unfriendly way of life in North America. In this giving up, he abdicates his charge to oversee and direct the nurture of his children. This man has the inclination to turn to the professional specialists of the church who stand in his place regarding household training. This man’s view of the family is weak. On the other hand, there are men who are self-conscious about the biblical mandate regarding household nurture. These men, in the name of a zealous mission to maintain control of their family, have the tendency toward their own kind of isolationism. In a spirit of watchfulness, they can overly isolate their children from both the younger and older generations of the church. This man’s view of the local church is weak.
The practical matters regarding the influence of industrialism present concerns for the church. First, related to our comments above, the local church that is absentminded about the dangers of isolating her age groups from one another will orphan off her children from Mother Kirk.10 The congregation that practices the traditional model of specialization and isolation, interestingly, is untrained about biblical image of the local church as family. Secondly, there is the local church that is keenly aware about the message and practice of the secular world and its worldliness. The world is seeking to squeeze the church into its mould of segregating the ages from one another—something often borrowed from educational institutions. Congregations are moving at warp speed nowadays showcasing a special vigilance about this kind of worldly influence. The families of a congregation like this guard against segregation by answering with a strong, maybe a near-exclusive, orientation toward an intergenerational approach to ministry. That is, all the ministries of the church, at all times, must include every generation. This local church, we can rightly say, has a weak view of the local church as church.
In summary, the adoption of the parachurch model for the local church, and the industrialization and its influence on the covenant home and church have set the stage for undermining the covenantal model of nurture for children and young people. Do we have ways to start working at faithful and helpful solutions to these influences?
The foundational doctrine of the covenant most solidly enables us to build a practice of nurture for our children and youth that rightly affects, in a mutually beneficial way, our ministries in the home and church. Some lessons regarding the covenant and it’s directives for philosophy and practice are developed elsewhere.11
Notes:
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“The Rise of Evangelical Youth Movements” by Bruce Shelley appeared in Fides Et Historia 18/1986: p. 47.
Ibid, p. 47.
The reader may follow the chronological narrative of these movements through this historical period in The Coming Revolution in Youth Ministry and It’s Radical Impact on the Church by Mark Senter, (Wheaton: Victor Books, 1992).
See Senter, Ibid., pp. 98-104 for the background on specific denominational movements within the Reformed persuasion.
The Future of Home Schooling by Michael Ferris (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1997), p. 85.
From Culture Wars to Common Ground, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), pp. 76-77.
The Seeds of Secularization by Gary Scott Smith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1985), pp. 126-127.
Missing From Action: Vanishng Manhood in America by Weldon Hardenbrook (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1987), p.11 quoted in Point Man by Steve Farrar (Portland: Multnomah Press, 1990), p. 40.
“The Family in the Modern World” by Howard King in Patriarch, Issue #42 (Patriarch Ministries, P.O Box 50, Willis,VA, 24380), pp. 26-27.
See Mark DeVries, Family-Based Youth Ministry (Downers Grove: IVP, 1994)., pp. 41-42; 116-118.
Other articles will be available on this web site in the months ahead.