National Youth Workers Convention

I spent Saturday through Monday at the National Youth Workers Convention in Pittsburgh, a gathering of a few thousand, largely youth pastors, who work with adolescents through the church. There were large worship, music, and comedy sessions, as well as over a hundred exhibitors with resources and services to support youth ministry, but I was most moved by some of the smaller seminars I attended. I heard strong, thoughtful words on a range of topics, including youth culture, politics, and post-modern theology. (I mention seminars I attended on politics and post-modern theology because they were interesting and challenging, but also to preempt any accusations of being cool.)

Probably the most intriguing, though, was talk from Chap Clark, a pastor and professor who conducted an ethnographic study of teenagers, described in his book Hurt: Inside the World of Today's Teenagers, published in 2004. As an ethnographer, he studied adolescents not (primarily) with surveys and interviews, but by observation, spending a year substitute teaching in a southern California high school. (This wasn't deceptive; the kids knew he was also conducting research on their culture.) His study found that mid-adolescents (about 13-20 years old) truly do have a culture distinct from the adult culture, and that it is a culture that has largely grown out of a sense of abandonment from adults. Obviously he's not necessarily referring to cases of physical abondonment and material neglect, but to psychological abandonment. The recognition, in the last hundred years or so, of adolescence as a phase of life distinct from childhood and adulthood, has followed the centuries-long elevation of the importance of the individual. As a result, adolescence has become a time when teens, by necessity on their own, determine how they will fit into adult society. Their responses to this challenge - including forming "clusters" of 4-10 friends who become like family and the numerous, distict personalities they have in different arenas (school, sports, home, church, etc) - are different from adults' responses, and indeed, are different from the responses of teenagers just 20 years ago.

This is a brief and necessarily incomplete summary of Clark's presentation, never mind his book. But I wanted to mention it, as the conclusions are powerful. They suggest that the existing institutions of adolescence (school, sports, and yes, even youth group) are better structured to reinforce than to ameliorate the isolation. The results are relevant to any adult interacting with teens, parents most of all. But more importantly, Clark's findings have been presented to thousands of adolescents in the US (and even some abroad, now), and they overwhelmingly say that he is on the money. I hope to return to the topic once I've read the book (currently en route from Amazon).