Interview with Dr. Thomas Bergler
This past year, while reading a variety of youth ministry books and resources, I was recommended a wonderful book by Dr. Thomas Bergler. That book, The Juvenilization of American Christianity, has been deeply insightful and helpful in my ministry to youth. Because of this, I was thrilled to hear that I would have the opportunity to interview him on the content found therein.
Dr. Tom Bergler serves as Professor of Ministry and Missions at Huntington University where he has been training youth ministers for fourteen years. His book The Juvenilization of American Christianity was featured in a cover story in Christianity Today, and also won an Award of Merit in their Church and Pastoral Leadership category. It was also named one of “10 Books Every Preacher Should Read” by Albert Mohler, President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in an article in Preaching magazine. His forthcoming book, From Juvenilization to Spiritual Maturity explains what churches can do to overcome the problems caused by juvenilization. Here our interview focuses on the substance of his prior volume.
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Chris Talbot (“CT”): Dr. Bergler, thank you very much for giving us an opportunity to interview you. For our readers who may be unfamiliar with you and/or your book The Juvenilization of American Christianity, could you give us a short summary of who you are and what you wanted to accomplish in this book?
Dr. Thomas Bergler (“TB”): The purpose of the book was to discover what the impact of youth ministries has been on American Christianity over the past 75-80 years. What I found is that youth ministries revitalized American churches but sometimes at the expense of spiritual maturity. In their quest to appeal to teenagers, youth leaders pioneered new ways to make the faith more emotionally satisfying (popular worship music) and more effective in transforming the world for Christ (mission trips, racial reconciliation). They also sometimes created immature versions of the faith, but they assumed that young people would grow into spiritual maturity later as adults. That did not always happen because over the same decades, the nature of adulthood itself changed. Now not just adolescents, but also adults find themselves on an unending journey of self-development and identity formation. This combination of youth ministry innovations and the new immature adulthood created a situation in which people today get formed in adolescent versions of Christianity and never grew out of them.
CT: In your book you essentially coin the term juvenilization in reference to the culture of the American church. Could you first define it for us, and second, explain what challenges that it presents to the church?
TB: Juvenilization is the process by which the religious beliefs, practices, and developmental characteristics of adolescents become accepted (or even celebrated) as appropriate for Christians of all ages. The main problem with juvenilization is that it makes it harder for people to understand, desire, and attain spiritual maturity. I have even spoken to some Christians who have negative reactions to the idea of “spiritual maturity.” To be fair, most Christians I talk to do think that spiritual maturity is a good thing. But the net effect of widespread juvenilization has been that spiritual maturity is neglected.
CT: You also provide some interesting examples in your book of how we see this juvenilization in the church during the last century. How is this “juvenilization” manifesting itself in the church today?
TB: Juvenilized Christians not only don’t know much about God; they don’t think theology is important or helpful. One national study found that even among those adults who say that spiritual growth is “very” or “extremely important,” about half agreed with the statement “religious doctrines get in the way of truly relating to God.” Another national poll found that neither church members nor pastors could say much about what the content of spiritual maturity might be or how to get there. And people who don’t know much about God are unlikely to grow and are more likely to make bad choices. One pastor who read my book said it gave him insights on some of his difficult church members who are in their sixties. They are baby boomers who grew up in the founding era of juvenilization, and so they take it for granted that the church should be shaped around their preferences. The leaders of a church that targets twenty-somethings asked a woman in her forties to leave the worship team because she “did not project the right image.” Whenever we see a self-focused, uninformed faith that is more concerned with image than with substance, we are seeing the effects of juvenilization.
CT: In your book you start in the 1930s, instead of, say, the turbulent 60s, where most would think the youth culture is most evident. What was your reasoning behind this?
TB: The many new youth ministries that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s decisively shaped the future of youth ministry. Many of those organizations are still around, and they created the models that most often come to mind when we think of the words “youth ministry” or “youth group.” But when I studied that era, I found not just that many new organizations were started, but that they were deeply influenced by the feverish atmosphere of world crisis of the day. Because of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, many Americans took it for granted that they were living through a prolonged crisis of civilization from which their society might not recover. And many of them insisted that only by saving youth could civilization be saved. Meanwhile, it was also in the 1940s that the term teenager was coined. Were young people the saviors of civilization or just trivial youngsters caught up in the latest fads? Confusion about this question caused youth ministry leaders to justify all kinds of questionable approaches, since there seemed to be no time to waste.
Captivated as they were by the crisis of civilization, most Christians underestimated the power of teenage consumer culture to squeeze the maturity out of Christian faith—not just for teenagers, but for Christians of all ages. The 1960s certainly intensified the American obsession with youth. But for Christians, the sixties primarily revealed the long-term effects of the youth ministry decisions that had been made in previous decades. Some Christians were better prepared to weather the storms of the sixties than others.
CT: Readers of your book will realize that you researched not only the Evangelical movement, but also African-American, Mainline, and Roman Catholic youth movements as well. What was your reasoning behind this?
TB: I wanted to compare different Christian churches both in order to be somewhat representative and to also see if I could find some parallels and contrasts that would help me understand the dynamic interplay among church, youth, and society. What I found is that white Evangelical Protestants were the most aggressive adapters to teenage tastes, setting that tradition up for plenty of long-term juvenilization. Mainline Protestants did not understand the emerging youth culture as well, so they either did not try to adapt to it, or their efforts failed to attract much loyalty among young people. Roman Catholics and African American Protestant churches felt less need to adapt to the tastes of young people in the 1950s because they could count on tight-knit ethnic communities and interlocking institutions (families, schools, and churches) to form young people in the faith. But because they did not learn how to appeal to young people on a more voluntary basis, the youth exodus of the sixties hit them much harder than it did white Evangelicals.
By comparing these four very different Christian traditions, I was able to identify what I call the dilemma of juvenilization: churches could adapt to youth culture at the risk of creating an immature faith or they could ignore youth culture and potentially forfeit the interest and commitment of the young.
CT: Stuart Bond, in a 1989 Youthworker Journal, argued that youth ministry would continue to be ghettoized in the culture of the church. However, in your book you argue that youth ministry is actually redrawing the culture of the church for today. Which is true? Or do you think it is a combination of both?
TB: What is happening now in many churches happened first in the cutting edge youth ministries of the 1950s and 1960s. The same dynamic is still at work. Youth ministries are time machines. If you want to see what will be happening in the church of the future, visit the most innovative youth ministries today. Ironically, even though adults sometimes try to quarantine religious change by restricting it to youth activities, the changes always end up reshaping the adult church, especially in a wider culture that worships youthfulness.
CT: Near the end of your book you write, “[I]n far too many youth groups, teenagers learn to feel good about God without learning much about God.” How does reducing Christianity, especially for youth, to a “feel-good” faith negatively affect American Christianity.
TB: An intellectually shallow faith is a faith that is easily lost. The National Study of Youth and Religion found that teenagers do not learn much about their faith, and their lack of understanding contributes to their drift away from the faith during young adulthood. Second, people with a shallow faith are easily misled by false teachings and dubious spiritualities. In my forthcoming book, I analyze what I call “slow dances with Jesus” worship music as one example of this kind of problem. Finally, those who think Christianity is all about feeling good will tend to remain immature because they will value comfort over growth. There is nothing wrong with feeling good about God. The problem comes when we value only feelings or insist on pitting feeling against thinking, as if one must win and the other must lose. In fact, the Bible teaches that godly thinking and godly feelings develop best in teamwork with each other.
CT: What is the single-best thing that pastors and lay persons who are concerned with this trend can do to address it?
TB: First, they should teach what the New Testament says about spiritual maturity. Spiritual maturity is not an unattainable perfection. Rather, it is the basic competence in the Christian life that forms the foundation for all subsequent growth in holiness. It is desirable, attainable, and visible. Spiritually mature believers know the basic truths of the faith well enough to teach them to someone else. They can discern between right and wrong and truth and falsehood (Heb. 5:11-6:2; 1 Cor. 2:14-3:4; Eph 4:14-15, 22-24). They are connected to the body of Christ where they are growing and helping others grow (Eph. 4:11-16). They share in Christ’s mission and embrace a Christ-centered spirituality of both suffering and comfort (Phil. 3:7-16, Col. 1:28). A second step is equally important: cultivate Christian communities that equip followers of Jesus to grow to maturity. My forthcoming book, From Juvenlization to Spiritual Maturity (Eerdmans, 2014), will help congregational leaders with both of these crucial tasks.
CT: Thank you again for taking the time to share the fruit of your research with the Helwys Society Forum readership.
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