- In the biggest constitutional decision in forever, British voters decided to leave the EU.
- The Prime Minister resigned.
- Many of the major political parties were thrown into disarray.
- The value of Sterling and the UK economy took a downturn.
- Wales overtook England as the UK’s finest football team.
- I got married. * (*Disclaimer: these are not in order of priority.)
The extraordinary thing about the last few weeks isn’t that these epoch-shaking events happened, it was the quick succession in which they happened. (I realise that my marriage might not be as ‘epochshaking’ for you as it was for me.) Normally the world changes in incremental steps, one small change at a time. Take my marriage for instance (I’ll stop talking about it after this paragraph). There were a whole heap of tiny moments which led up to our wedding day. Leaving aside all the obvious things such as ‘meeting’, ‘talking’ and ‘deciding to get married’; the months in the run up to our nuptials were filled with little steps – moving to the same area, joining a church together, finding somewhere to live… For the most part, it’s incremental shifts which change our world, not galactic-sized leaps.
This month, we celebrate 25 years of Premier Youthwork (Hooray!). We’re celebrating this in a few ways: we want to look back on a quarter century of this publication – what we’ve got right, what we’ve got wrong and the impact it’s had on youth workers across this country (and beyond). We’ve got some of the most influential youth workers over that time to reflect on what’s changed and what hasn’t as we look back at the journey youth ministry has been on. We also hear from some influential church leaders about the value they place on youth ministry, including the head of Coptic Orthodox Church and Nicky Gumbel. We also want to reflect on the wider culture and the sweeping changes in the lives young people are living. This is where we get back to incremental steps.
Young people are growing up in a world that looks vastly different to how it did 25 years ago. Or ten years ago. Or five years ago. There are plenty of things that have accounted for this change (and Martin Saunders explains many of them from p.14) but chief among these is the internet – the way we connect and interact with the world around us has changed for ever. And here’s the thing: there was no big moment when we realised the internet was here to stay. We didn’t all wake up one morning, smart phone in hand, hashtag in mouth and selfie face on pout. The internet has taken over the world step, by step, by step – that’s the way real change happens.
We didn’t want to look back in this issue, we want to just look forwards. What are the next 25 years of youth ministry going to look like? Which cultural shifts do we need to be on top of? Futurist Mal Fletcher picks out a few of them before a group of young youth leaders discuss where they feel the future of youth ministry might be heading (p40). If we’re honest, at times youth ministry hasn’t kept pace with the ever-changing world of young people as effectively as we’d like. We were slow to respond to the porn epidemic, many churches still don’t have an adequate narrative or pastoral answer for young people struggling with mental health and our current engagement with the internet mainly comprises of Facebook events. This isn’t a call to be relevant for the sake of it, but we have to speak truth into the society young people are actually existing in. We’ve got to spot these small, incremental changes before they become epoch-shaking ones.
While we’re here, I want to honour founding editor John Buckeridge. This magazine is only here because of his tenacity in making it happen. His courage in turning an idea into printed pages has had untold impact across the UK and beyond.
Our hope and prayer is that Premier Youthwork has impacted untold lives over the last 25 years, through incredible youth workers like you. Yes, you, holding this in your hands. We’d be pointless without you utter heroes who take scribblings on a page and turn them into sessions, conversations and residentials. Here’s to the next 25 years…
