Young People And Church Since 1900

When the Sunday School pioneers saw a need in their communities in the late eighteenth century, their response provoked a 200 year movement. These early Sunday Schools met a clear social need: that for basic education. By the 1960s, they faced rapid decline – a rigid institution amidst societal change. Over recent decades, Christian youth work has emerged as a response to further youth decline within churches. Many youth workers engage with young people’s self-perceived needs by delivering open-access youth provision in their local communities alongside more specifically Christian activities. Tensions emerge over whether the youth worker’s role is to serve community or church needs, with churches often emphasising the desire to see young people in services. Drawing together historical and contemporary research, Young People and Church Since 1900 identifies patterns and change in young people’s engagement with organised Christianity across time. Through this, it provides a unique analysis of the engagement and exclusion of young people in three key time periods, 1900–1910, 1955–1972, and the present day. Whilst much commentary on religious decline has focused on changes external to churches, this text draws out the internal decisions and processes that have affected the longevity of Christianity in England. This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars of young people and Christianity in the twentieth century and today, as well as youth ministry students and practitioners and those interested in youth decline in churches more widely.

When the Sunday School pioneers saw a need in their communities in the late eighteenth century, their response provoked a 200 year movement. These early Sunday Schools met a clear social need: that for basic education. By the 1960s, they faced rapid decline – a rigid institution amidst societal change. Over recent decades, Christian youth work has emerged as a response to further youth decline within churches. Many youth workers engage with young people’s self-perceived needs by delivering open-access youth provision in their local communities alongside more specifically Christian activities. Tensions emerge over whether the youth worker’s role is to serve community or church needs, with churches often emphasising the desire to see young people in services. Drawing together historical and contemporary research, Young People and Church Since 1900 identifies patterns and change in young people’s engagement with organised Christianity across time. Through this, it provides a unique analysis of the engagement and exclusion of young people in three key time periods, 1900–1910, 1955–1972, and the present day. Whilst much commentary on religious decline has focused on changes external to churches, this text draws out the internal decisions and processes that have affected the longevity of Christianity in England. This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars of young people and Christianity in the twentieth century and today, as well as youth ministry students and practitioners and those interested in youth decline in churches more widely.

Sticky Faith delivers positive and practical ideas to nurture within your kids a living, loving faith that lasts a lifetime. Research indicates that almost half of high school seniors drift from their faith after graduation. Struck by this staggering statistic, and recognizing its ramifications, the Fuller Youth Institute (FYI) conducted the "College Transition Project" in an effort to identify the relationships and best practices that can set young people on a trajectory of lifelong faith and service. This easy-to-read guide presents both a compelling rationale and a powerful strategy to show parents how to actively encourage their children’s spiritual growth so that it will stick with them into adulthood and empower them to develop a living, lasting faith. Written by Fuller Youth Institute Executive Director Dr. Kara E. Powell and youth expert Chap Clark--authors known for the integrity of their research and the intensity of their passion for young people--Sticky Faith is geared to spark a movement that empowers adults to develop robust and long-term faith in kids of all ages. Further engage your family and church with the Sticky Faith Guide for Your Family, Sticky Faith curriculum, and Sticky Faith youth worker edition. Sticky Faith is also available in Spanish, Cómo criar jóvenes de fe sólida.

The book No Youth...No Church: Exploring the decline and Impact of Young People Not Attending Church After High School and College is a scholarly nonfiction work written after the author observed many years of teenagers and young adults leaving the Christian faith, especially the Pentecostal Apostolic churches after they graduated from high school or entered and graduated college. The book provides clear, easy-to-read researched information on some reasons that young people are not staying in church. Included in the book are statistics and interviews from young people and pastors and possible interventions that could work for churches with declining attendance of young people. Without young people in the church, it will die.

This book explores what it means to be and become-at-home in theological perspective, located in the context of a youth club. Drawing on ethnographic research, Phoebe Hill presents an account of what an authentic Christian hospitality could look like in a youth setting, and the ways in which the young people – the strangers at the door – might enable the Christian youth worker to become more fully at home. Discourses around Christian hospitality often unwittingly perpetuate implicit power imbalances. The youth club offers a context for Christian hospitality that ‘tips’ the power in favour of the young people who attend, enabling the youth leaders to share and create home with young people in a distinctive way. As young people leave the Church in droves, the Church faces the urgent and daunting task of finding new ways of being with young people on their own terms; this book offers one solution. Hill argues that homecoming is an essential task of humanity. We are connected in this common pilgrimage and the need to find places and spaces where we can be at home. Becoming at home may be harder than ever before; numerous sociological, philosophical and theological factors are compromising our ability to dwell in the contemporary world.

Counting Religion in Britain, 1970-2020, the fourth volume in the author's chronological history of British secularization, sheds significant new light on the nature, scale, and timing of religious change in Britain during the past half-century, with particular reference to quantitative sources. Adopting a key performance indicators approach, twenty-one facets of personal religious belonging, behaving, and believing are examined, offering a much wider range of lenses through which the health of religion can be viewed and appraised than most contemporary scholarship. Summative analysis of these indicators, by means of a secularization dashboard, leads to a reaffirmation of the validity of secularization (in its descriptive sense) as the dominant narrative and direction of travel since 1970, while acknowledging that it is an incomplete process and without endorsing all aspects of the paradigmatic expression of secularization as a by-product of modernization.

This edited text brings together academics who are at the cutting edge of youth work education. The book draws on global perspectives to explore current practice conditions and generate rich debate regarding the power and potential of future practice.

Moving beyond the (now somewhat tired) debates about secularization as paradigm, theory, or master narrative, Periodizing Secularization focuses upon the empirical evidence for secularization, viewed in its descriptive sense as the waning social influence of religion, in Britain. Particular emphasis is attached to the two key performance indicators of religious allegiance and churchgoing, each subsuming several sub-indicators, between 1880 and 1945, including the first substantive account of secularization during the fin de siècle. A wide range of primary sources is deployed, many of them relatively or entirely unknown, and with due regard to their methodological and interpretative challenges. On the back of them, a cross-cutting statistical measure of 'active church adherence' is devised, which clearly shows how secularization has been a reality and a gradual, not revolutionary, process. The most likely causes of secularization were an incremental demise of a Sabbatarian culture (coupled with the associated emergence of new leisure opportunities and transport links) and of religious socialization (in the church, at home, and in the school). The analysis is also extended backwards, to include a summary of developments during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and laterally, to incorporate a preliminary evaluation of a six-dimensional model of 'diffusive religion', demonstrating that these alternative performance indicators have hitherto failed to prove that secularization has not occurred. The book is designed as a prequel to the author's previous volumes on the chronology of British secularization - Britain's Last Religious Revival? (2015) and Secularization in the Long 1960s (2017). Together, they offer a holistic picture of religious transformation in Britain during the key secularizing century of 1880-1980.