Christian Religion and Faith

In the practice of the Christian faith in the United States, particular emphasis has long been placed on the importance of involving young people as worshipers and believers in the greater community of the Christian religion community. It arises from the sense that Christian faith does not occur simply in terms of an individual’s own belief but also occurs in the context of a community in which the Christian religion is actively practiced and nurtured. It is felt in the United States, where social mobility and rates of movement tend to weaken the basis of community life over long periods of time, that the process of passing the Christian faith from one generation to another and the upholding of the precepts of the Christian religion must be actively encouraged by the participants in and the leaders of a church-centered community. One particularly important element of this feature of religious life consists in the existence of youth ministries, which as an institution and a set of practices is a unique and significant aspect of the practice of the Christian religion in the United States. People who are involved in the practice of the Christian faith would do well to look at the way in which this institution has taken root and the various forms in which it has been practiced over the course of the American institutions of the Christian faith.

The idea that the Christian religion as it existed in the United States would do well to create a specific function related to the religious life of young people can be dated back to the point in history of the mid-eighteenth century, when the effects of the Industrial Revolution were beginning to affect the social condition of American rural life, included as it related to the implementation of the Christian religion. At this time the economic conditions of the country dictated that young people were encouraged to move to large cities where the prohibitions which had existed in the tight-knit communities which they had born in were no longer in force and often led to those young people adopting new standards of behavior in regard to the Christian faith. Noticing that these developments were ongoing in American society, the activist and community leader Dr. Francis Edward Clark created the organization of the Christian Endeavor Society, which first went into practice in 1881. Clark’s idea was that young people should be encouraged to participate actively in the institutions of Christian religion by the formation of youth ministries. The creation of the idea of youth ministries led to a quick proliferation in the number of such institutions across the country as functions of the community of the Christian religion. This period of the late 1880s was next succeeded by the post-World War II era of the United States, in which the youth ministries of the period began implementing a new idea of exposing young people to the most sophisticated religious ideas, and later by the 1970s response to the era’s social unrest.