from sunday schools to christian youth work: young people’s engagement with organised christianity...
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From Sunday Schools to Christian Youth Work: young people’s engagement with organised Christianity in twentieth century England and the present day
Naomi Stanton ([email protected])Collaborative doctoral award supervised by Prof. John Wolffe and Dr. Helen Waterhouse (The Open University) and Peter Fishpool (CEO of Christian Education).
Project Background
• Young people’s engagement with organised Christianity in 1900s, 1960s, and present day.
• Examining the institutionalisation and decline of the UK Sunday School Movement in the 20th century.
• Interviews with young people (and their youth workers) engaging with Christian activities today.
• Birmingham has served as a case study area.
Three themes1.Social currencies2.Institutionalisation3.Discourses of rejection and
withdrawal
1. Social Currencies
Social Capital vs. Social CurrencyGriffiths (2009) – early Sunday Schools tapped into the social currencies of their time.
Bordieu’s (1986) social capital is the commodification of resources through relationships and social belonging. It is tied up in notions of power and conformity.
Magdol and Bessel (2003: 149) define social currency as the ‘actualized form of… social capital, …the medium of exchange for goods and services that provide social support’.
Young people’s agency to negotiate their own social capital in the contemporary context.
Youth workers view engagement as a mutual transaction:‘I don’t think they’re taking responsibility for the fact that they need to meet the needs of the young people. They don’t think twice about the young people meeting their needs.’
Sunday Schools and social currencies
• Early Sunday Schools identified and responded to social currencies – educational needs (Griffiths, 2009).
• Sunday School pioneer, Robert Raikes intended to replace Sunday Schools with schools to train young men in labouring skills (Cliff, 1986). This never happened.
• The Sunday Schools of the twentieth century were distant from community need assuming instead a right to teach religion to a changing society.
Contemporary social currencies
‘Well a church like [this one] … unless they look at their youth, you’re not going to get the normal Joe from round the corner to come to church. You’re going to have to give them something, and by giving young people time in the services, by allowing them to do their own services, that’s how we’re going to get people back through the door.’
•Young people value spaces where they can express both ‘choice’ and ‘voice’.
•Young people do not engage as consumers but as active participants.
2. Institutionalisation
From movement to institution• Early Sunday Schools met a clear community need for
basic education. Throughout the nineteenth century they provided for many social and welfare needs in addition to their Sunday teaching.
• By the twentieth century they were centralised, institutionalised and accountable to churches and Unions. Their focus was solely on religious instruction and they were distant from the self-identifiable needs of those they were engaging.
• Instead of adapting to changing social needs in the mid-twentieth century, Sunday Schools shifted towards church needs. This activated their long-term and fatal decline.
The National Sunday School Union
• Set up in London in 1803 by teachers to discuss Sunday School work.
• Developed into publications, social and professional services for teachers, and as a pressure group for dissenting causes.
• Initially, the Union remained distant from the control of individual schools which were locally run.
• Local auxiliaries began to emerge around London in its early years, eventually spreading as local unions throughout the country.
• Originally ecumenical, the Anglicans withdrew after 1843 following disputes over whether the Union should publish the catechism.
• By the twentieth century, the Unions had tighter control of Sunday Schools, taking subscriptions from them and dictating their curriculum.
(Laqueur, 1976)
Institutionalisation
Gender Issues?“[T]he shortage of male teachers has been interpreted by women as a golden opportunity for the exercise of their gifts, and one hears of some Sunday Schools now entirely staffed by women; whilst in several others the women workers outnumber the men. No historian of the modern Sunday School can fail to record this fact and to pay a tribute of admiration to such noble and self-sacrificing labours.” (NSSU Annual Report, 1916)
Contemporary expressions of institutionalisation
‘[This church] is in a time warp, some of the sung responses and things like that are very very high church… and I think that they should be reaching out into our community a lot better than what they are and not portraying themselves as this high Anglican eunuch.’
‘The thing that I didn’t particularly like about communion was the girl’s dresses… [T]hey were wearing enormous big white dresses, veils, gloves, they had little bags, white bags, and you’re just thinking that’s not what it’s about, that’s not it.’
3. Discourses of rejection and withdrawal
Religious decline in the UK• Brown (2001) suggests there was a particular gender significance to the 1960s
religious decline. It was the first time that as many women as men rejected Christianity. This resulted in a dramatic decline in the passing of religious habits from mother to child down the generations, unlike the temporary crises of previous centuries.
• Bruce (1996) identifies a link between modernisation and secularisation but is disproved by those who point to the thriving religion in the US (Davie, 2002; McLeod, 2007).
• McLeod (2007) suggests European religious decline has been both an evolutionary and revolutionary process through long-term gradual decline with times of more significant religious crisis.
• Davie (1994) proposes the concept of ‘believing without belonging’ in that in the second half of the twentieth century much of the population still held Christian belief but chose not to associate with the institutional church. She later developed her theory and proposes the existence of ‘vicarious religion’ (2007) in that many still view the church as acting on their behalf in both belief and religious practice.
Sunday School Decline
Changing Methods – Family Church
Internal or External problems?• External factors blamed for Sunday School decline include:
the rise of the welfare state; increasing transport and recreational activities available on Sundays (and a relaxation of Sabbath traditions that forbade them); religious and moral collapse of society.
• The only internal factor that seemed to be widely considered at the time was the perceived declining quality of teachers.
• This thesis argues that the increasing distance from the social currencies of young people, and a more inward-focused approach, as society underwent massive change in the twentieth century was the most significant factor in Sunday School decline.
Contemporary narratives of rejection‘When we used to host the meetings at everyone’s Church they asked me to host it the once, and I was quite happy to, and I was like, “Who do I need to contact?”…Everybody else has got really friendly people who they can approach for funding or to ask them to run a meeting and I went to [the keyholder] and she was thinking about charging me for the rent of the room…And that’s what I mean, it’s like the older people there aren’t in tune with it… That meeting never happened but it’s just the difficulties I face with it; I’m just like, why should I bother with it?’
‘I’m not a member of the youth group over there, because I don’t know them as much, and I feel like an outcast because the church is more white…I didn’t feel accepted in the Church… because people kept themselves to themselves which was another thing I found hard to get over…cus in Africa where I’m from, everyone speaks to each other and everyone is friendly and…knows everything about each other and here people keep their distance and even if you open up to someone, they’re still closed off so it’s really difficult to show who you are…They say there’s a community but it’s not…And that definitely knocked me as well because churches are meant to be communities.’
‘It does seem as if it's like you've got the young people and then you've got the adults. You’ve never got them both together. There's always a divide… You’ve got the young people on the one side; you've got the adults on the other. And it's like the adults think they know more than the young people when, if they'd go to talk to some of the young people then they'd understand that they do know quite a lot.’
Positive examples‘They feel part of church, because sometimes youth groups can be on a fringe…doing their own thing, so different from what the main church is like…But I think that the nice thing here is that they incorporate it a lot more.’
‘Autism is very, very isolating. I’ve also had a lot of eating disorders as well and that’s been isolating, so really I’m just a social mess at the moment, but I’m getting help with that…If I’ve had a difficult day at college or I get bullied or something, then I can just come in here and know that no one’s going to treat me differently because there are people have been in prison and they admit that, and they know they won’t get judged here and it’s just the faith and just the Christian family, in general, here is just so strong.’
Discourse of rejection?• Those discussing church decline among young people from a quantitative
perspective have largely assumed that young people rejected the church. Many of the narratives in my research suggest the opposite.
• If young people are not in church on a Sunday morning, some churches blame the youth workers for failing instead of looking internally. Some youth workers are successfully engaging large numbers of young people in religious activities at other time of the week. These don’t count.
• Young people need choice and voice in order to critically explore the concept of faith. This happens in youth work settings but often not in the young people’s experiences of church where they sense a division between their peer groups and church adults, often their only significant adult relationship being with the youth worker.
• Evidence of ‘believing without belonging’ and ‘vicarious religion’ can be observed in the study.
In summary…
• There appears to be an interplay between institutionalisation and decline. Echoes of institutional patterns from the twentieth century time periods play out in the twenty-first.
• Youth work goes some way to respond to social currencies but the wider church often remains distant.
• Churches have agency to shape their future – they are not passive victims of secularisation. Recent research shows that where churches engage with their communities instead of focusing on ‘keeping going’, numbers grow.
