When I graduated from Sunday school, there was no youth programming in my church. Nor would the session allow my sister and me to start a youth group without adult supervision. Fortunately, my sister is persistent and my mother is kind. She agreed to support us on our quest. She also took us on a five-hour drive to our first Presbyterian Young People’s Society weekend; it was the catalyst that transformed our youth group from a small, improbable family affair into a vital, ongoing ministry.
There is no single experience of PYPS. It has existed at local, presbyterial, synodical, provincial and national levels, and it once thrived in every synod in the country. To describe what it has been, therefore, would be a long and difficult task. To describe what it has meant to the church, on the other hand, might be attempted.
In the last decades of the 19th century, our church saw the formation of at least 600 independent, youth-directed societies. Most of these were service-based, with the young people gathering to fill a need like visiting the sick or raising funds for the minister’s salary. Naturally, when the topic came up at General Assembly in 1895, it formed a committee.
This set the stage for a century-long relationship between the national church and the society, where youth autonomy and church influence and support were constantly seeking a balance.
“I think one of the downfalls of the church was the time they decided no longer to fund and support PYPS,” says Wilma Welsh, who is the clerk of presbytery for Waterloo-Wellington. She is also a former overseas missionary, and, in 2006, was moderator of the General Assembly. She credits all this to her experience in PYPS in the early 1960s.
“I probably would not be in the church now if not for PYPS,” Welsh says. “Many heard the call to ministry. I always say that the Women’s Mission Society kept mission alive in the church, but I think PYPS kept the church alive.”
The PYPS that Welsh knew in the early ‘60s was a youth-run organization with local, presbyterial, synodical and national levels that was supported by the Board of Christian Education and its assistant secretary, Rev. Robert Percival Carter. The time that Welsh refers to when that support was lost—or at least altered—was in the early ‘70s, when the Board of Christian Education was integrated into the Board of Congregational Life.
“Bob Carter was the staff person and I guess when they removed him—my understanding is that there was a decision that PYPS would no longer exist,” Welsh explains. “But then fortunately some of the young people kept it going.”
The Board of Christian Education’s report to General Assembly in 1971 clarifies what happened. “In 1968, the 94th General Assembly approved the principle of local responsibility in selecting resources for Christian education,” it reads. “Providing support for this requires decentralization of resources. The national staff of the board was reduced by two persons and their salaries are being made available to synods for training and developing key leaders within presbyteries who might assist congregations.”
The trend of decentralization was felt in PYPS, and the national council broke down in 1972. For a time the Board of Congregational Life organized a National Advisory Council for Youth Ministry, but funds, board staffing and youth participation lagged. Instead the board encouraged synods to hire youth directors, which they all did in some capacity by 1991, although the report notes that there was “no uniform pattern of youth ministry either in program or performance.”
There may be problems with that, suggests Rev. Will Ingram, senior minister of St. Andrew’s King Street in Toronto. “The camp reports to synod, PYPS reports to synod, the synod youth worker is connected with synod, and synod is really an irrelevant body,” he says. “Other than those ministries, the synod doesn’t have that much of a role in anybody’s life. It’s not even mandatory for ministers to go to synod. It’s on some kind of a rotational basis. So how do we even hear what’s happening at PYPS?”
Click for Remembering PYPS
“We were the only Presbyterian church for 60 or 100 miles, so PYPS enabled me to encounter more of the breadth of the Presbyterian church, for better or for worse. I remember at one PYPS convention there was going to be dancing, and dancing wasn’t considered a good thing in the church I grew up in—at least among the leadership. So that was kind of an issue.” —REV. CALVIN BROWN
“I was a real practical joker, and this one time my girlfriend and I drove up for part of the weekend … While the guys were at supper, we went into their cabins and stole all their underwear. Lawrence was in the shower, and we didn’t know that, so he didn’t have any underwear. While Anne was driving, I sewed up the flies. Then we mailed them back special delivery.” —REV. DONNA CARTER-JACKSON
“I didn’t come from a church with a really large youth group. I think there were four or five of us, and a lot of them got really active in PYPS. I had friends in a Baptist youth group in town and they had 30 or 40 people in their group. What I find interesting is there are a number of people who were in that Baptist youth group who are no longer active in the church; but from our small youth group, most of the people are still active at some level. If you were a betting person at the time, you probably would have thought that the small, seemingly moribund youth group at the Presbyterian church didn’t have much going for it and the big, thriving Baptist one was great. But in retrospect, and probably partly because of our involvement in PYPS, a lot of those people stayed active in the church.” – REV. WILL INGRAM
“Some of the things you remember—you remember kids being picked up by the hands or feet and thrown into Lake Simcoe. But you know, they were just such a good group of friends that it was really good for all of us … A lot of them went into the ministry. I felt called to stay in the church as a layperson—and I’m the only layperson who’s ever been moderator of the General Assembly.” —WILMA WELSH“We got [Michael] ‘Pinball’ Clemens [of the Toronto Argonauts] to come and speak. He shared his story about being a pro football star and a Christian, and about how the two came together. I remember at the time this friend of my brother’s was a basketball star and had the potential to get AA scholarships. He had been hit by a car and was on life support. They didn’t think he was going to make it at first, and then he ended up recovering. Pinball Clemens came to visit him in the hospital. On an interview on the radio later that week, he was talking about this friend of my brother’s and asked people to pray for him. So when I saw Pinball I was able to thank him for that and that was really a neat experience.” —REV. DEB STANBURY
“When I was working at the WMS, the woman I was working for sometimes said she didn’t know if I was working for them or PYPS. In those days we had mimeograph machines and I’d bring a bunch of people in and we’d all stand around [printing PYPS newsletters]. It’s different now. Printing things was expensive then. So you couldn’t just go out and print something. It was all done by our hard work.” —VALERIE DUNN
“Of course several couples got married from the group.” —AUDREY MCLELLAND
“There was so much in common there. The commonality of folk that you would meet was just sort of a solid base. We didn’t think it was a place to go cruising for chicks, but it certainly happened.”—REV. DR. RICK HORST
Ingram was involved in PYPS himself from the mid-‘80s until 1993. The leadership opportunities and encouragement he received there led him to work as a counsellor at Glen Mhor Camp, and later as director of Camp Iona. “PYPS became the channel through which we got personal connections, but also spoke to the wider Presbyterian Church and then to the wider world,” Ingram says. “As I look back, that was the channel through which a lot of other really important experiences emerged.”
“I don’t know if the young people today have the same opportunity,” reflects Valerie Dunn, whose years in PYPS in the ‘60s were followed by employment with the WMS and the Presbyterian Record. “They seem to be all into adult leaders now. We didn’t have adult leaders to speak of. We did it ourselves.”
This is a note that sounds again and again through the history of PYPS.
“PYPS was a big thing because we did it on our own,” remembers Audrey McLelland, who attended Ontario-wide PYPS rallies between 1937 and 1947.
“It was an entity unto itself, and they made a lot of the fact that it was run by your peers,” says Rev. Donna Carter-Jackson, whose father Bob Carter was still involved “on the church side of things” during her involvement in the 1970s. “We had special ministers and special adults whom we loved and who loved us, but part of the great thing of it was that it was kids who were totally responsible.”
“I wonder if our parents really knew what we were doing most of the time,” laughs Rev. Dr. Rick Horst, who in his PYPS days was “still, I think, living in the light and freedom of the ‘60s.”
Asked if the freedom and independence of PYPS influenced his decision to become a minister, the moderator of the 2011 General Assembly replies: “Absolutely. It gave a real sense of affirmation and accomplishment.”
Rev. Deb Stanbury, whose PYPS days ended only in 2005 and who now works at the Yonge Street Mission’s Evergreen Centre in Toronto, feels the same way.
Stanbury’s time, however, was one of conflict. By her day, local and presbyterial societies had disappeared entirely and only synod-level conventions remained, organized by a youth executive that reported to their synod—in Stanbury’s case, the synod of Toronto-Kingston (which is today the Synod of Central Northeastern Ontario and Bermuda).
“I remember there was some nervousness at one point about going to the synod,” Stanbury recalls. “The synod wanted there to be a little bit more accountability, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I thought, yes, there are some things in the constitution that totally need to be changed, and yes, we need really gifted adults to advise us. But at the time I think I had a different understanding of where that was leading us than where that actually went. It became a case of the adult advisor and synod youth consultant leading things and bringing some youth into it from behind, which completely changed the structure of PYPS.”
Today, with the disappearance of most PYPS groups, some synods have formed their own models of youth ministry. The Presbyterian Youth Council in Manitoba was designed around the needs of its region, as was the Presbyterian Atlantic Youth Synod and Saskatchewan Presbyterian Youth. Only two synodical PYPS societies—both in Ontario—still organize three conventions each year. And only in the Presbytery of Cape Breton do we find a handful of local young people’s societies.
Valerie Dunn is grateful for her years in PYPS, and fears young people no longer have the chance to grow through being thrust into leadership roles as she was. “Try,” is her message to those young people. “Even if you’re scared half to death, try. How many chances do you get to do that?”
Well, actually, PYPS still offers some chances like that. At least, it did a few years ago.
I entered PYPS with no experience of youth ministry and with a frustration that I wasn’t able to serve my church in any way except as a Sunday school teacher (and even that was with adult help). PYPS opened up a whole new world for me. By the end of our first weekend, the worship director had discovered that my sister and I could sing, and recruited us to help lead praise songs. At my second weekend, I was given a discussion group to lead. At my third, I was invited to attend the leadership retreat, where I was startled to find myself asked to join the executive as communications director. A year before, I had known nothing of the church outside my own congregation. Now I found myself in contact with every church in my synod. It was an alarming change in some ways—communications is not my comfort zone—but it was a good experience. A growing experience.
At home, too, things changed. With each successive PYPS retreat, my sister and I had enticed more and more friends to come along, and we soon had a solid half-dozen members for our youth group. The praise songs we had learned and loved became material for a new band that our church indulgently listened to before and after services once a month. As we improved they asked us to supply an anthem, then a children’s hymn, and even an entire service once or twice. It wasn’t that anyone wanted to see contemporary music take over our worship. But the congregants did want to see the youth in church, and the youth wanted to be wanted.
And that, I think, is where all of this comes full circle. In the late 1800s, the young people organized themselves because they wanted to do something useful. They wanted to serve. My youth group—my local young people’s society, if you will—organized itself to serve its church with music. And it still does, every month, even though none of the original members are left. I shared our story at a presbytery meeting once, hoping to encourage other churches to do as we had done. We would help introduce them to PYPS, and support them in building their own youth group, with its own mission.
“That’s great,” said one minister, “but we can’t do that. We don’t have any youth.”
Neither did we, I wanted to tell him. Give them something useful to do, and they’ll come. Make them feel needed. Give them, as the convener of the London Presbytery Committee on Young People’s Societies wrote in 1899, “something to live for, something to do, worthy of young men and women.” Because “where a society has something to live for … it thrives.”
