A response to Thomas E. Bergler’s The Juvenilization of American Christianity
Because we increasingly live in a post-Christian culture, any church leader must seek to discover how to contextualize the gospel to our culture. And our culture is a youth-worshiping, Justin Bieberized, Twilight-Hunger Games-Kardashian culture.
by John Ortberg
I ran across a generationally concerned quote while reading University of Connecticut sociologist Bradley Wright recently:
“Our earth is degenerate in these latter days … children no longer obey their parents.”
It was chiseled on an Assyrian stone tablet around 2800 B.C. And it may well have been true. You don’t see a lot of thriving Assyrian family ministries these days.
The “things are getting worse” narrative is a comet with a long tail in human history and has particular resonance with today’s evangelical community. Thomas Bergler’s thoughtful exploration of American youth ministry taps into that narrative with a wealth of information that will be new even for many of us who grew up in the evangelical world. And it will prompt many questions about a dilemma that has troubled the American church for a long while: What kind of people are we trying to reach, and what kind of people are we trying to produce, and is it possible to do both simultaneously?
Youth has always been worshiped in its own way. After all, Ponce de León didn’t risk his life and fortune searching for the Fountain of Maturity. But what was once a quest has become an industry. Between Rogaine, Viagra, Botox, and Gingko, the fountain of youth has turned out to be pharmacological.
Bergler poses as his thesis that an inescapable tension struck the core of American Christianity during the 1930s and ’40s: Should church leaders aggressively seek to adapt to youth culture and risk altering the faith, or should they avoid youth culture and risk losing the youth?
One of the difficulties in answering that question is the lack of a baseline. To truly measure the cost of adapting to youth culture, we would need to have a good gauge of the “maturity level” of people whom churches were turning out in the three or four decades before the ’30s and the rise of youth culture. The emergence of adolescence as a prolonged developmental stage of life is clear; judging its impact on national character would require some kind of assessment of prior national character.
