Transcript Open University Working with Young People (WWYP) courses

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 themes
1.Social currencies
2.Institutionalisation
3.Discourses of rejection and
withdrawal
1. Social Currencies
Social Capital vs. Social Currency
Griffiths (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 midtwentieth 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
Numbers of scholars affiliated to NSSU, 1898 - 1972
2000000
1800000
1600000
1400000
No. scholars
1200000
1000000
800000
600000
400000
200000
0
1890
1900
1910
1920
1930
1940
Year
1950
1960
1970
1980
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 inwardfocused 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.
Feedback and discussion
Thanks for listening!
Naomi Stanton
[email protected]