Emerging Africa

Harry is caught between two worlds, the muggle world and the magical one. He longs for the one, the magical world because that is where he feels at home, he has a sense of belonging and outside of his love/hate/fame relationship he has with it he seems to feel like he makes some kind of sense their... yet he is safest inside of the muggle world where he is protected by a secret spell cast to watch over him. Whenever he is in the muggle world, he longs for the magical world and inside the magical he craves the safety of the muggle world. A boy caught between two world, fragmented and lonely. This tension of Harry becomes the tension that some youth workers feel, caught in the modern (muggle) world where their theological training makes sense and keeps them safe and the post-modern (magical) world where they long to be and feel most at home...youth ministry and the harry potter complex (2)

Youth ministry has normally found conflict with both parents and church on the application/practice/out working of common assumptions. This divide has become known as the generation gap. This gap caused many of the modern worship struggles of whether one should use only traditional or more contemporary styles of music. It raised the tensions between expository and topical preaching as well as a multitude of others. (these two easy examples are their just to highlight the point). This gap produced the tensions that most youth workers struggled with when they where in youth (we want drums, the church only uses a organs, we wear hats to the service the church doesn’t want us to wear hats to the service. ..etc) The conflict in these tensions where based on how to use common elements of church life. Both youth and churched believed that preaching (for eg) was important but how that should look became ‘the gap’. The ‘old’ wanting some thing more traditional, the ‘young’ wanting something more relevant. While this caused many youth workers interesting elder meetings this gap was navigable simply because between both sides their was a common belief/affirmation. Inside a generational conflict their was still a common approach to life and a common world-view, this allowed for a common language (one understood by both parties)and a common affirmation of what specific ideas where important.

As the post-modern landscapes begins to dominate all of youth culture a new division is forming inside of church. One that is not based on a generational gap. It is a division that has become cultural. This cultural division is creating tensions in church that have nothing to do with the ‘outworking’ of common ideas but a challenge of those common/core ideas. Inside of this divide their is no common language and a sense that what the one culture views as important the other culture views as secondary and visa versa. This division has become increasingly difficult to navigate and ended with most teenagers starting to leave church in droves (this move is not sudden or unexpected). Post-modernism is producing a new language, a new spirituality and a new way of been in relationship. These tensions where normally only felt by missionaries who enter into another culture and struggle with how different their version of faith is inside of the new culture they are in. Now, inside of church, we have two different culture trying to co-inhabit the same space (I would urge you to carefully think through this). Youth workers face the task of having to try and move between these two worlds (this movement is as obscure as platform 9 and 3/4 is for Harry) but it is their only way of preserving what is important from modern faith and yet finding a new expressions. It is their task to try and help the muggles see the magic and the magic see the value of the muggles. Two conflicting and different worlds occupying one space, one church, one family.

The new divisions in youth ministry are more cultural divisions than generational. I think that youth work will keep missing those they are aiming at until they begin to try and construct ministry inside of this paradigm and church will on-goingly miss the beauty of the young until they can understand this paradigm.