I agree that the youth ministry does not need to be a completely self-sustaining, segregated, holistic ministry apart from the wider ministry of a local congregation. As Chap Clark says in this book Hurt, adults in general have abandoned teenagers, and the church does not need to contribute further to that. But honestly, most youth ministries still have some degree of significant autonomy apart from the whole life and ministry of a congregation. It may not be as bad as it once was, but I would venture to say that we still spend a fairly significant amount of time in youth ministry still in the one-eared Mickey Mouse mode.

My contention is that perhaps we should use that to our advantage. Mark Ostreicher makes the point in Youth Ministry 3.0 that, in general, youth culture is on the leading edge of culture in general, and to an extent I think he is right. What if, in the church, we used the youth ministry to lead the congregation-at-large towards habits and practices that they otherwise would not consider. When you introduce change in any group there are innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards (see this Wikipedia article for an introduction and The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World by Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk for a theological and missional treatment of the subject).

If youth ministers are by nature innovators and teenagers are often innovators and early adopters, then church leadership (youth ministers, pastors, elders, deacons) should look to the youth ministry to set in motion a process of change. Since we are already operating autonomously in certain regards we won’t face some of the hurdles in a youth ministry that you would if you attempted change in the wider congregation. The same thing, and perhaps to an even greater extent, applies to young adult and college ministries.   

In a way, approaching youth ministry this way fights the one-eared Mickey Mouse model. If we want the whole church to begin to move in a certain direction and start by focusing on setting that in motion in the youth ministry, it acknowledges that the youth ministry is connected to and significantly influences the whole congregation. I wonder if this might also apply to dying denominations as well.

So what do you think? Can youth ministries become labs of ecclesial innovation and change? Or am I just being manipulative and trying to force top-down change?

• “How come the old people are so stuck in their ways?”
• “I wish the old people wouldn’t be so against change.”
• “Why are they so stuck in the past?”

I usually counter that the teenagers are just as averse to change as anyone else, they just want other people to change to agree with them.  Believe me, when you mess with teenagers’ traditions, they are just as bad as any demographic when it comes to whining about it.

As a case study to prove my point, I offer the social networking site Facebook.  As someone who remembers when people started putting links in their AiM profiles that said “FACEBOOK ME,” I’ve seen the phenomenon from the very beginning.  The evolution of Facebook has been fairly gradual, but at every major innovation, the old guard of Facebook cried out against the new change.  This is peculiar, since, especially at the beginning, users of Facebook were limited only to the free-spirited, open-minded, liberal college students of America.  Surely our colleges are bastions of progressive thinking, aren’t they?

Well, look at the major phenomena in the evolution of Facebook (these may not be in exactly the correct order, but I think they are):

• Facebook, originally a college-only social networking site, opens up to anyone.
• Facebook creates the “mini-feed,” whereby users learn recent actions and updates made by their friends.
• Facebook opens up their software to allow developers to create their own applications that users can use like Pieces of Flair, Top Friends, and iLike.

Each and every one of these stages in evolution was met with a Facebook group called something along the lines of “[Pick a number] against [Facebook's latest change].”  Every change met harsh resistance:

• The elites didn’t like high school students invading Facebook.  It was started as a college-only site and should stay that way. High schoolers’ immaturity would ruin it.  And no one dared to think of their parents being on Facebook.
• The mini-feed soon became known as the stalker feed.  Thousands were against it; they said it creeped them out.  However, users soon realized they enjoyed the convenience of not having to check hundreds of their friends profiles for the latest update.  It was all in one easy-to-use location.
• Some of us, me included, didn’t like have to scroll down for miles to find someone’s Wall when people put 47 different applications on their page and cluttered it up like crazy.  Facebook was turning into MySpace.

As a result of Facebook opening up to thousands of different applications, it became obvious that people’s Facebook profiles were way too cluttered, and a solution was devised.  It is called the “New Facebook.” Instead of having one huge Facebook page on your profile there are now usually four different tabs users can choose from in order to get to the information they are looking for.  This allows users to click to appropriate tabs rather than scrolling.  Simple, right?

Right now, there is a group called, “I Hate The New Facebook.” It currently has over 1,526,000 members. Yup, over a million people.

With every innovation in the life of Facebook, I wonder what the newest users thought about the “old” Facebook.  Chances are, they didn’t  think anything of it, because they didn’t know how Facebook existed before they joined up.  Ask someone who joined Facebook immediately after the “stalker feed” was added if they think it is a useful tool, and I’d bet they’d say yes.

It’s interesting how good and bad are such subjective opinions.  Usually good means “they way it’s been and I’m used to” and bad means “I have to adjust” (which has profound implications for what it means to be a Christian, but that’s a post for another day).  This goes across generations.

If this is the case, when making changes to a church or ministry, the most “objective” and innovative opinions are those of the people who have been there the least amount of time.  Instead of getting together the charter members of a church when evaluating ministries and thinking about the future, maybe we should be talking to the people who are newest to the community without a dog in the traditionalist fight.  Their imagination has not yet been conformed to the status quo.

Whatever the case, next time your youth are complaining about the old people not liking change, just ask them “How many of you like the new Facebook?”