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Last Friday, the Church of England announced a new "national youth strategy." This strategy, backed by a new fund, officially blesses "alternative forms of youth worship" in hopes of drawing back to Anglican churches some of the young people who are now staying away in droves. The church is now willing to sponsor such novel events as one cathedral's "raves in the nave." (Explains one online dictionary, a rave is "an all-night dance party, especially one where techno, house, or other electronically synthesized music is played.")

In America, land of the open religious market, such efforts seem less surprising. Even an all-night dance party for the Lord would fail to raise many eyebrows in this country, where massive youth rallies focused around contemporary music have been standard methodology for more than a generation.

More eyebrow-raising, perhaps, is that the elder statesman of world evangelism, Billy Graham, played a part in creating this pop-culture style of youth ministry.

Set aside for a moment the vision of Graham as the wise grandfather figure who commands the respect of the world (The Ladies Home Journal once ranked Billy as second in religious achievements only to God.) Imagine instead a younger, brasher, risk-taking Graham, who became a power in the rising youth-evangelism scene of the 1940s with a personal style akin to that of the day's zoot-suiters.

Far-fetched? When Graham and a youth ministry team, en route to England on a 1946 evangelistic tour, became stranded by weather overnight at a Newfoundland air force base, the base's social director gave them the once-over and concluded they were a vaudeville act. (Ever eager for an opportunity to preach the gospel, Billy and the team accepted the invitation to entertain the troops. When a few minutes into their "act" the base commander realized their true purpose, he flew into a rage and threatened to lock them up.)

Graham's flashy, energetic style and his tireless advocacy of relevant youth ministry helped propel what may have been the most influential Christian youth movement of American history.

Of course, Graham did not invent Christian efforts geared to adolescents and young adults. In 1844, the British-based Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) set out to reclaim for Christ a generation of young people. These were the adolescents who, in search of work, poured out of England's and America's small towns (the YMCA began its American spread from Boston in 1851) into the cities. In seedy downtowns whose taverns, brothels, and gambling dens promised pleasures and delivered dissipations that have never changed, YMCA chapters offered havens of healthy Christian camaraderie. Thus they did not so much create a youth culture as offer shelter from the underworld of the big city—and with remarkable success.

By the 1920s and 1930s, however, Protestant youth activities had entered a doldrums. Evangelicals of that era critiqued the mainline churches for their lack of fervent witness to the youth. Even their own once-powerful institutions were failing. Quipped one Philadelphia Baptist pastor in 1925, "You can take the 'C' out of the YMCA and nobody would ever notice the difference."

Over against this downward trend, such fundamentalist youth groups of the 1930s as the New England Fellowship's Surrendered Life League emerged. In the battle for adolescent souls, these groups worked in the idioms of popular culture. They "tuned their old-time faith to the new sounds and images of the popular entertainment world."

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November (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46