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Don't let the shifting culture get you down
by Duffy Robbins

It happened again just recently. A youth worker came up to me and, with a sense of despair, said, "I feel so confused. I hear all this stuff about the changing culture, postmodernism, the emergent church. I feel like I'm being told that kids are so radically different than they were ten years ago that all of my experience in youth ministry is being washed away in this cultural mudslide. Am I just too 'out of it' to work with kids anymore?"

It was a good question. In the accelerating mudflow of technological advances, shifting moral values, and new "normals," who of us in youth ministry hasn't wondered if it's possible to stay in touch with the culture?

And yet, whenever I confront some of those kinds of questions, I have to remind myself of some basic facts about youth ministry and cultural relevance.

1. Despite the "sky is falling" rhetoric that sells books and packs seminars, we need to be cautious when making sweeping judgements about culture in general, and youth culture in particular.

Sometimes when I hear youthworkers talk about cultural trends, it sounds to me like someone who has just arrived on the beach and is just now witnessing their very first high tide. Their immediate assumption is that everything will be flooded, "We need to move everything, rebuild the church in a different location or it will be ruined!!!"

But you know what? We need to remember that tides rise and fall; this has happened before and it will happen again. One of the significant elements of a mass media-saturated culture is that stories get internationalized, magnified, and ratified very quickly-sometimes way out of proportion. Ideas are broadcast more widely; catchphrases are picked up more quickly; fashions are entrenched more readily; conventional wisdom becomes conventional too hastily. We need to be careful about relocating and rebuilding the church every time the water rises.

2. There is no universal consensus about reality. Talk with teenagers in one part of the country and you would swear that postmodernism has swept the countryside. Go to another part of the country, or perhaps even another part of the same town, and you will hear kids who sound very much like modernists. Or talk to the very same students on two different occasions, and you're likely to notice that, depending on the situation, sometimes they think like modernists and sometimes they think like postmodernists. Without the advantage of a broader view, it's easy to draw conclusions about teenagers in one area, and extrapolate that this is how teenagers are everywhere.

3. Trust the truth. I like the way J.R.R. Tolkien depicts it in a passage from The Lord of the Rings. He records a conversation in which Eomer, panicked and worried about all that is going on around him, has an unexpected meeting with Aragorn, and says, "It is hard to be sure of anything among so many marvels. The world is all grown strange. Elf and Dwarf in company walk in our daily fields; and folk speak with the Lady of the Wood and yet live; and the Sword comes back to war that was broken.... How shall a man judge what to do in such times?"

"As he ever has judged," said Aragorn. "Good and evil have not changed since yesteryear, nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house."

4. Don't surrender to despair. Like the prophet Jonah, we have been called to Ninevah (Jonah 1:1). And like Jonah, we may well be convinced that the prospects are unpromising. But a funny thing happened on the way to disaster. Ninevah turned around. From the palace to the marketplace there was confession and repentance. And God saved the land (Jonah 3:10).

Culture is a human fabric woven from many varied threads, some good and some not so good. The biggest mistake we could make is to become so obsessed with the fabric of that cloth that we forget the rule and dominion of the God behind the cloth. Our task in youth ministry is to be faithful to the Faith, true to the Truth, and tellers of the Story that gives meaning to all others. This approach-and only this approach-will reflect the very deepest understanding of the culture, and the very best hope for doing youth ministry within that culture.

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