Nigel Pimlott, Youth Work and the Emerging Church

On this month’s podcast (online later today hopefully) Nick has a chat with Nigel Pimlott, author of Youth Work After Christendom and Deputy CEO for Frontier Youth Trust.

I have almost no experience of youth work, so I wasn’t expecting to connect with this interview very well. As it happened, though, there was a lot that really resonated with me.

My ears pricked up when Nigel made the observation that a lot of the ‘alternative stuff’ that we see the emerging church experiment with is the ‘bread and butter’ of youth work. This observation helped make sense of a lot of my struggles with church over the years.

Although I didn’t find faith until ’93, I had flirted with the church on and off through most of my life. My parents dutifully sent me to Sunday school each week, which from what little I can remember was quite an engaging experience. After only a couple of years of this, however, I was dumped in the church service, which I only tolerated for a couple of weeks before leaving never to return. A few years later I ended up in a youth group, which again I recall enjoying, but again after a couple of years I was ‘promoted’ to the Sunday service and subsequently quit the church. And again, a few years after this I found myself in the youth group of another church, and once again the pattern was repeated. I just couldn’t make the transition from the creative, informal, relational, edgy, whole life encompassing youth groups, to what I saw as the rather one dimensional, formal, philosophical, and just plain boring church services.

A number of years after this I made friends with a Christian at work, and ended up having a profound experience of Jesus. Consequently I thought I’d better to go back to church. I really thought that now I was a Christian, church would be different. But it wasn’t. I started to think that maybe the problem was with me, and so I spoke to the pastor, and he confirmed that I did indeed have a ‘spiritual problem’. I struggled with this over the next 15 years, and it has only been in the last few years that I’ve begun to realise that perhaps the problem wasn’t with me after all.

I can now see that the youth workers had worked hard to form a genuine sense of community and to present the gospel in a way that was natural and authentic. The church services, on the other hand, hadn’t. They had expected me to extract myself from my culture, and become part of theirs. The ‘culture shock’ that this led to was explained away as part of the process of becoming a mature Christian.

This was painful, frustrating and confusing at the time, but it’s an experience that I’m now glad I had. I can now see that culturally sensitive fresh expressions of church are absolutely essential if we ever hope to pass on our experiences of Jesus.

So I write this post to gently rebuke (in love!) all those ministers who blamed me for not connecting with their churches. And I write it in thanks to all those youth workers who took the time to get to know me and presented the gospel in a way that I could relate to. Although I didn’t find faith on their watch, they played a big part in moving me in that direction.

Tim