A Considerable Speck

Darren Wright (Youth Ministry Blog) recently blogged about The Teens’ Speech and linked to the video. So what is Teens’ Speech?

The Teens’ Speech was a project designed to give a voice to young people in Britain. It was predicated on a simple truth, espoused by philosophers as diverse as Bertrand Russell, Friedrich Nietzche and yes, Whitney Houston. Children are our future. They will define this country in years to come. Therefore, its everyone’s best interest to listen to what they have to say. It’s also in everyone’s best interest to give them the best possible start in life and create a society where young people can make mistakes and learn from them, a society that removes them from the moral and legal equivalent of Newton’s third law of motion – that every action must have an equal and opposite reaction. We need to develop the moral imagination and courage to allow children to develop into well rounded individuals – or we face a future based on the worst qualities of humanity, rather than the finest.

So, yes, The Teens’ Speech tried to give a voice to young people. We did it by interviewing hundreds of teenagers from all over the U.K. – mostly over the telephone, but also face-to-face and on camera, we conducted research and ran polls and we also instituted an unprecedented campaign of engagement on YouTube, Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.

- from The Teens’ Speech website

The video provides a voice to those in our society who usually don’t have much of a voice – teenagers. The video provides a wonderfully moving glimpse of young people who portray a sense of hope in the future and a dream for something better even while dealing with stress, misunderstanding and loneliness.

Check out the video…. and also check out some of the other videos on The Teens’ Speech YouTube Channel.

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Over on NetSquared, Alex Steed has been doing an interesting case study about the UCC and its use of social media (such as Facebook, MySpace etc.) to try to connect with younger audiences. 

…the church is faced with the difficult project of reaching out to young people, engaging them spiritually, offering them opportunities for meaningful social action, and to do all of this via media where they will encounter the outreach effort. Further, they need to have an identity strong enough so that when they are reaching out to young people, they have something attractive and authentic to say.

Steed provides a fascinating critique of the UCC’s attempts at marketing itself as well as providing some strategies for reaching millenials. He also raises some interesting points about millenials and the reasons why some of the UCC’s efforts may/may not be working in attracting them . It would be interesting for local churches to consider some of his strategies and figure out how they would apply at the local level:

1. “[Millennials] place more emphasis on personal recommendations than on brands when deciding which products and services to buy.” [The Economist] This is to say that the UCC headquarters has little direct power in earning trust, interest, or investment from new members. Pouring all of the money in the world into advertising the church, designing newsletters, creating well-polished commercials, or publishing great copy, so long as this all is perceived as top-town marketing strategy, won’t buy an increase in youth participation. Because it is now in competition with the more-organic approach of word of mouth reputation cultivation and management, which is made possible by greater access to diverse methods for communication, top-down advertising and messaging is becoming steadily obsolete.

2. “Millennials value peer relationships over institutional loyalty. This has profound implications for activist organizations accustomed to support from their donors over long periods of time. Young people are unlikely to be lifelong donors to their local United Way or Sierra Club. They will engage enthusiastically in specific campaigns about which they feel passionate, but their institutional support is likely to vanish once that campaign ends.” [Allison Fine] This fact actually works in favor of the UCC, which reportedly faced decline in identification thanks in part to this trend: As participants became increasingly interested in social justice issues, they moved further away from the church towards social justice organizations / instutitons. However, as the organizations that worked in favor of these issues were limited in their ability to cultivate diverse and dynamic communities around singular issues, the UCC is now well poised to create a home for communities that honors the peer-to-peer networks held in high regard by Millennials, engage their humanist values, and create for them a sphere where they can work on, organize around, and advocate for various initiatives (by fundraising, organizing, and alliance-building) as they see fit.

Alex Steed’s blog posts have given me a whole lot to think about, as have many of the comments others have made on his blog. Check it out, I’d be interested to know your thoughts both on the specific issues he raises and the more general issues of connecting with millenials.

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Story in the Boston Globe about Andover Newton, in partnership with the Massachusetts Bible Society, introducing a new program to train future clergy in the use of technology to reach the “unchurched”. It is good to see that seminaries are beginning to understand that the context of ministry has changed and that it is important for those involved in equipping and journeying with communities of faith to understand the tools and the media that connect with the culture outside the four walls of the church.

“The conservative evangelical community has been way ahead, and the progressive community has been lagging behind,” said the Rev. Nick Carter, president of Andover Newton. “Initially there was a knee-jerk reaction on the part of mainline and progressive churches – ‘That’s what they do’ – but now there’s more of a sense that maybe they’ve got something there.”

Carter said that the slow pace of adopting technology in some mainline churches reflects a lack of outreach. He cited as an example how difficult it is on many church websites to find the time of a worship service, because the sites are aimed at insiders.

…

“The old ways of communicating the Gospel, while not ineffective, at this point are not reaching more and more people who rely on 21st-century technology for their information,” said the Rev. Anne Robertson, executive director of the Massachusetts Bible Society, which in its early days employed volunteers called colporteurs to hand out Bibles from horse-drawn carts. The Bible Society sold its longtime bookstore on Bromfield Street in 2006 and took $500,000 from its $6.4 million endowment to finance the media center at Andover Newton.

- Michael Paulson, “With aid of technology, preaching to the wired”, Boston Globe, 28 May 2008

About time, don’t you think?

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