The Ideas Factory: 100 adaptable discussion starters to get teens talking

By Martin Saunders

The Ideas Factory is a priceless resource for anyone working with young people. It contains 100 adaptable discussion starters: a brief story, usually factual, followed by a series of provocative questions. The stories explore topics relevant to young people, including relationships, technology, and emotions; an important biblical concept, such as giving, the afterlife, or love; and the main stories and themes of the Bible. The questions begin with general issues, before moving on to what the Bible has to say. Extra questions are included for use with unchurched young people. This revised and updated edition has up-to-date examples and references to connect with today's young people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Release date: Jan 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780857217509

Martin Saunders

Martin is editor of Youthwork magazine and author of a number of books including The Ideas Factory, The Think Tank and 500 Prayers for Young People.

Book preview

Preface

Eight years is a long time in youth ministry. When I wrote the first edition of The Ideas Factory, the first of my two books of discussion starters, the economy was still looking pretty good, we’d just welcomed over 2,000 youth workers to a dedicated national event, and there was an air of optimism all around.

Quite a lot has changed since then.

The financial crisis, and ensuing recession, has had a devastating impact on the sector; certainly in the UK, and probably a lot further afield. Churches decided that the first cut they would make would be the youth worker; others merged the distinct roles of youth worker and children’s worker together in a sort of crazy cost-saving fudge. Christian organizations had to radically downsize their staff numbers; some disappeared altogether.

Outside the Church, the story was even more brutal. Youth work roles melted away in many towns, often leaving no youth services available to the young people left behind. One major British city replaced all of its statutory youth work provision with a one-off £1 million grant fund for the voluntary groups that would have to stand in the gap. That money is of course long gone; the need remains and has indeed intensified.

Although voluntary groups (of which faith-based organizations such as churches make up the vast majority) have been relied on to fill these huge sinkholes in provision, they’ve not always found financial support easy to come by. That’s been especially true for Christian organizations, especially those that list the promotion of the Christian faith as an explicit aim.

So while the needs of young people haven’t lessened, our ability to meet them has been seriously undermined by the financial picture. And while a sort of recovery may mean that churches find the pressure on their coffers slowly easing, the continuing commitment from governments to austerity and funding cuts suggests the burden on the voluntary sector is only going to increase.

That’s not necessarily bad news of course; local communities and councils will increasingly look to the church as a provider of youth and children’s activities. It is, however, something we’re going to have to get our heads around, and fast (for a basic guide to setting up church-based youth provision, check out my book Youth Work From Scratch).

The seismic shift in the financial picture isn’t the only change we’ve seen. In a related story, the number of people leaving youth ministry appears to hugely outweigh the numbers incoming. The workforce seems to have dwindled; the major youth ministry events in the UK are now attracting closer to 500 youth workers – a long way now from 2,000. That’s educated anecdote for now (although at time of writing, Youthscape is currently undertaking a major piece of research into the numbers of youth workers and young people involved in the UK church – check out www.youthscape.co.uk for details) but there’s no doubt that while the numbers of people enrolled in youth ministry training courses has fallen dramatically, we’ve also seen many youth ministers – both local church workers and higher-profile national specialists – leaving the sector. Many of the older heads have moved on; there doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of new blood coming in… in employed terms at least.

What this almost certainly means is that youth ministry is becoming slowly de-professionalized, and in many places being handed over to volunteers. Again, this is not necessarily bad news, provided those volunteers can be found, envisioned and trained properly. Indeed, as a reader of this book you may well be one of the new emerging army of volunteer youth workers. Hello if so. Hooray for you. You’re the cavalry!

At the risk of sounding gloomier still, we’ve also seen a change in the cultural temperature since the beginning of the last decade. In the past, most young people grew up in homes that were either sympathetic to Christianity, or else at least ambivalent about it. Now my seven-year-old returns from a playdate to tell me that her friend’s parents have been explaining why her faith is nonsense. Many children grow up in atheist homes which make them suspicious of the church’s motives when we try to engage them.

It’s no surprise then that we’re also encountering young people who have fixed (and antagonistic) views on Christianity earlier too. The New Atheist and secular humanist movements are beginning to have a powerful impact on young minds; the questions we face from young people are often harder, better researched and designed to trip us up. Again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing; rather a young person who wants to engage on the question of faith than one who simply can’t be bothered.

So a lot has changed. And this heavy combination of blows to youth ministry’s gut can feel pretty hard to take. It’s not all bad news though as I’ve suggested, and it’s not All Change either.

For a start, and most importantly of all, we still serve the same unchanging, everlasting and undefeatable God. He’s not finished with young people, or with the church that seeks to serve them. He is at work in our communities, schools and families in ways that we can’t see and might never know. His mission is unrelenting, whether we choose to join in with it or not. And when we do, amazing things continue to happen.

In the last few unsettling years I’ve heard stories of near-revival; of the power of God breaking out among a group of young people. I’ve marvelled at the transforming lives of the young people in my own church, some of whom are among the most incredible world-changing, dead-to-self, hope-drenched wonders I’ve ever encountered. And I’ve watched as in the UK the Soul Survivor youth festivals have continued to attract over 20,000 young people every Summer, and each year more than a thousand of them make a commitment to follow Christ. Stop and read that again, because it’s easy to skip over that extraordinary figure. Even in the context I’ve described, over a thousand British teenagers are choosing to put their hope in a man who lived, died and rose again 2,000 years ago. Jesus isn’t dead, and the faith of his followers isn’t either.

God hasn’t changed and our message of hope hasn’t changed either. We still believe (don’t we?) that God loves young people totally and unconditionally; that he longs to be in relationship with them, and that he wants to transform and redeem the hardest parts of their lives. We are still the hope people, the Good News people, the Resurrection people; even if at first glance the odds look bleak.

There’s one other thing that hasn’t changed since I wrote these two books, and that’s young people’s ravenous appetites for story. Cinemas are continuing to enjoy record teenage attendances; the Young Adult fiction industry is burgeoning; teen drama continues to be a significant element of American and British television. Young people still love grappling with narratives, and serious ones too: the current trend for post-apocalyptic young adult fiction shows teens are far from vacuous in their story taste. Young people continue to use stories to think, talk about and make sense of the world, and in youth ministry, they’re the big way in. Stories act as a big front door to talking to young people about their lives, our own, and the giant sweeping narrative of God that connects us all.

These books still make sense; they’re still, I hope, a useful tool for ministry among young people. A few other things in the world have changed too; that’s why we’ve updated some of the stories and cultural references. Jade Goody, the tragic reality TV star, no longer makes sense as a cultural sign-post to young people; talk of CDs and DVDs has been updated to include the innovations of Spotify, Netflix and Blu-Ray discs. What I hope you’re holding then is an up-to-date resource which covers some of the big issues and questions facing young people today, and provides a relevant way-in to talking about them.

What will youth ministry look like in another eight years? It’s hard to imagine, given the shifts we’ve seen recently. One thing is certain: God will still be God, and he’ll still be at the heart of his church’s work with young people. My hunch is that story – the medium through which we so often understand and know God better after all – will still be enduringly fascinating too.

Martin Saunders, September 2015

Introduction

Story is not only our most prolific art form but rivals all activities – work, play, eating, exercise – for our waking hours. We tell and take in stories as much as we sleep – and even then we dream. Why? Why is so much of our life spent inside stories? Because, as critic Kenneth Burke tells us, stories are equipment for living.

Robert McKee, Story (Methuen, 1999)

The power of story

The teenage appetite for story remains unquenchable. If anything, with the advent of new technologies offering greater choice of stories than ever before, that appetite has grown. Today’s teens may not spend half of their lives in the library (although some do), but in a range of other places – some real, some virtual – they greedily guzzle on story, day and night. Television, cinema, the Internet, podcasts, video games – all play host to a constant stream of narratives for young people to absorb.

They’re not just consumers in this, however; young people are also story-tellers. Often, they’re great story-tellers. Any suburban train or bus journey around school turn-out time will give you the proof of this. Young people love to regurgitate the stories they’ve heard – true, fictional and those which fit between the two. They also like to recommend stories to one another – youth culture’s way of circumventing the marketing man. So many teenage conversations, in my experience, seem to begin with ‘Have you seen…?’ or ‘Have you played…?’

Play is an increasing mechanism through which young people are consuming story. Since the 1980s, the video-game industry has steadily grown, capturing the imaginations of generations of young people along the way. Back in 1984 – when my tech-obsessed father brought home our first primitive computer – the games and their storylines were simplistic, to say the least. One leading title for the ZX Spectrum was called Horace Goes Skiing. You didn’t even need to load it up to know exactly what the story was going to be.

Fast forward more than three decades, and the technology has moved on more than anyone in the industry could have predicted. Driven by a desperate ongoing battle for the market between the gaming giants Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft, video games have become hyper-real, totally immersive, and packed with the kind of artificial intelligence that would have made 2001’s HAL blush. Graphic images border on the photographic; surround-sound is standard; and a comparable investment has been made in storyline. For a while now, games have even had their own scriptwriters.

The lines between Hollywood and the gaming industry have now become so blurred that a fascinating two-way synergy is now taking place. In recent years, Hollywood has churned out a series of movies based on games, including several Resident Evils, a couple of Hitmans, Need for Speed and Prince of Persia. All have been one-star awful without exception. In the other direction, many video games are now developed in parallel with their corresponding movies. Big-name actors provide the voices for their virtual counterparts – as was the case with Electronic Arts’ popular series of Lord of the Rings games. When the Wachowski brothers made the much-maligned Matrix sequels, they filmed so much extra content that the stars were often unaware whether the scene they were filming would appear in a game or a film.

So the way we tell stories is changing, but story still forms the beating heart of our culture. This book is designed to help you engage with that – to tap into the imaginations and cultural databanks in young people’s heads, and to unleash their ability to tell, process and discuss stories.

Uncommunicative community

While early-third-millennium young people might be communicating more, it seems they’re talking less. The digital generation are finding new and exciting methods of correspondence all the time, but none of them appear to involve standing toe-to-toe with another human being. Online communities, smartphone apps, Xbox Live, email, instant messaging – all offer a way for a young person to meet more people and have far more ‘friends’ than they could have dreamed of before. Yet while each of these platforms is part of a much heralded communications revolution, the less publicized flipside is that they threaten to create a communication blackout. Today’s teenagers – and pre-teens, and young adults, and pretty much any other demographic group – now have the opportunity to retreat into a digital shell, where face-to-face conversation is far from compulsory. All the risks of classic human interaction – tension, argument, passion – are stripped away. The great attraction, beyond the technological bells and whistles, is that conversation is much ‘safer’ this way.

There are the more severe cases, of course – principally those young people who are bullied, depressed, or suffer from low self-esteem. Yet this cultural shift is impacting far more widely than those individuals, and is touching an entire generation. While the right-wing press might have focused on the possibility of text messaging ruining yng ppls ablty 2 spll, there are far greater dangers for them to get themselves worked into a fluster about. Never mind their capacity to spell the Queen’s English – what about their ability to speak it?

In decades past, young people had two options if they wanted to talk to one another outside of normal social hours. The telephone offered the most obvious alternative; and as a last resort, they might even have written a letter. But both of these methods contributed to building up an existing relationship, and helped to strengthen and consolidate it. Many of the newer forms of communications technology allow young people to make completely new ‘buddies’ in far-off parts of the world. They can hide behind aliases and avatars, and they may not even know one another’s real names. And while they type, and ‘post’ and ‘tweet’, very often, they don’t hear one another’s voices. They don’t talk to each other.

If Christian youth workers are really passionate about helping young people to grow into well-rounded young adults, then this area should be of real interest. Not because they’re worried about slipping literacy standards, but because the ability to hold a conversation has been a well-proven bedrock of civilization for thousands of years. Or rather, conversation is the bedrock of community, and communities are the building-blocks of civilization.

Whatever the marketing men might tell us, virtual communities can’t take the place of physical communities. They might appear to involve less personal investment and risk (although, sadly, we know that isn’t true), but they’re ultimately hollow and dishonest. No one reveals their true self online, for the simple reason that one doesn’t have to. In an Internet discussion, you can pretend to be whoever you want. Virtual communities are all about hiding behind an edited version of yourself – your looks, your achievements, your abilities – that you choose to present to the world. They’re the polar opposite of genuine communities, which are about truth; about stripping away the pretence and baring your soul. In a virtual community, you’re supposed to lie; after all, who would choose