According to all the Back to the Future references this month, we are now living in the future. So many people have made comments about the lack of hover boards, no self lace up shoes and where is my flying car? It seems we love to predict the future, but we also love to identify how those predictions were wrong. So how did we go with our youth ministry predictions for October 21st 2015?

I will admit that I am old enough to have been around youth ministry when we would use sentences like “millennials are those teenagers that will graduate high school post 2000”, notice the future tense of that statement. Some Generation Y or Millennials will now be 15 years out of high school, so I hope that they have moved on from youth ministry into the adult body of the church.

So how did our predictions go for the “radical” change that would take place in youth ministry because of Gen Y? How many of the predicted changes did we get right and what did we get wrong? Here are just five reflections from someone who was around in the 1990’s when these predictions were being made:

1. Social Justice – I remember hearing that Social Justice was going to be the new “in” for Gen Y. Youth Ministry was going to shift towards Social Justice to engage the Gen Y who were supposed to more socially minded than other generations. Without denying the attempts by many Gen Y, I would say that they have shown themselves to be no more socially active than other generations. Facebook “likes” don’t count as social justice nor does reposting a tweet about some global issue. Even if Gen Y are more socially aware, the Youth Ministries around today in my opinion are not the hot beds of Social Justice activity that we may have predicted.
2. Conservative – There were also predictions that Gen Y would be more conservative than other generations. This doesn’t seem to play out in the way we thought. There has been some return to tradition forms of worship, but contemporary praise and worship has never been more popular or normative. The styles of dress and social interaction are not that conservative or traditional. The role of women and the attitude to homosexuality don’t seem all that conservative either.
3. Music – I remember some of my friends telling me about this music from a church called Hillsong and they predicted that music would be essential for ministry with and to Gen Y. Not only has the Hillsong style become more normative but the Praise and Worship music seems one of the key draw cards for Gen Y. Youth Ministries have transitioned into Young Adult Ministries as Gen Y age and they seems to appreciate good music more than good preaching, though the sermons still have to be good.
4. Podcasts – not many of us in the late 1990’s would have predicted the impact of the podcast on church life, I remember some churches in the early 2000’s trying to sell their own sermons on CD. To think that young people can download a talk or sermon from anywhere in the world to watch/listen to on the bus ride to school or uni means that their expectations of preaching sermons has been raised. Young people can now listen to the “best” preachers in the world on a daily basis, meaning they could be sermoned out by the time they get to church on a Sunday. Some may have predicted this but I never heard this prediction in the late 1990’s.
5. Communication – In the late 1990’s we knew that the Gen X grew up in a boom of entertainment technology and that Gen Y would grow up in a boom of communication technology. However we never predicted the impact of the iPhone, Facebook, Twitter or the creation of the “selfie” for thousands of Instagram posts. Believe it or not many people used to like being behind the camera in the 1990’s. Whilst we predicted that youth ministry would change due to a growth in communication technology, youth ministry is really enhanced by this ability to contact young people outside the youth group time slot.

Were you around in the 1990’s? What did you think youth ministry with Gen Y would be like? Did we get it right or were some of our predictions off the mark? If you are Gen Y was this what you thought youth ministry would be like when you were in primary school?

As a member of Generation X I was always one step removed from being in the youth ministry culture of Gen Y. Whilst I’ve engaged in it for the past 25 years, it is a long time since I was an actual young person in the ministry. Leadership positions tend to make you bias. So I would love to hear your opinions in the comments section below or tweet me on @mrmarkmcdonald (so high tech!)

markoffaith.net, Mark of Faith