The Shock Absorber in Action
By Stu Crawshaw, Lead Pastor – Soul Revival Church
Over the past month and a half, I’ve been on writing leave, working full-time on my PhD, “How Youth Ministry Can Act as a Shock Absorber for Local Churches in Australia.” It’s been a really productive and encouraging time, and I’m deeply grateful to everyone who made it possible.
Thanks especially to our wardens, parish council, staff team, and the Soul Revival executive for supporting this season of focused writing. I also want to thank the whole church for your encouragement and prayers — they really have made a difference.
What’s Been Achieved
While on leave, I’ve written around 20,000 new words and edited the first 30,000 words of my thesis. Most of that work has gone into refining the methodology and the introduction, and into starting a literature review, theology, and recommendations that connect theology and sociology to our story at Soul Revival, which make up 50,000 words of my 80,000-word project.
With Tim Beilharz as my research assistant, we’ve also conducted nearly 20 interviews with people connected to the Soul Revival Youth Community at Gymea Anglican Church (1992–2012). These interviews, together with my own memories and reflections, form the heart of the research. The next step is to write up the findings from my auto-ethnography — that is, my personal narrative of leading Soul Revival in those early years. Katie Crawshaw has also served as my research assistant, helping me code the interviews and search for themes.
A Fresh Discovery
One of the most exciting discoveries so far is that the idea of a “Shock Absorber” model for the church fills a genuine gap in the current academic research on youth ministry.
Just as a car travelling down a bumpy road needs something to absorb the shocks, a church travelling through cultural change needs something to absorb the shocks. The Shock Absorber in a car takes the hit first, cushions the impact, and then transfers the force more smoothly across the rest of the vehicle. In the same way, youth ministry helps the church absorb cultural shocks — young people often encounter cultural change first, and their creativity and flexibility can help the whole church learn how to respond.
For a Shock Absorber to work well, it needs both flexibility and strength. Young people provide flexibility — they’re naturally generative, creative, and willing to experiment. Adults provide strength — the stability of wisdom, experience, and biblical grounding. When young and old work together, they form a generative intergenerational ministry, capable of adapting to new cultural challenges while staying faithful to Christ.
This idea draws on the work of Mark Senter, Kenda Creasy Dean and Andrew Root, who describe youth as generative agents of change, and Erik Erikson, who reminds us that adults are also generative through mentoring and legacy-building. Bringing these ideas together, the Soul Revival story (1992–2012) demonstrates how young people and adults can work together to absorb cultural shocks and help the church remain both relevant and resilient.
What’s Next
Now that I’m back from writing leave, I’ll keep the momentum going by:
• Finishing the sociological chapter
• Finishing the theological chapter
• Completing the final recommendations chapter, where I’ll draw together what this means for churches today.
I’m confident that this PhD, when finished, will be a real asset for our church. It’s already helping clarify and affirm our Soul Revival strategy — building intergenerational communities of friendship that stay flexible and strong as we follow Jesus together.
Thanks again for your support, prayers, and encouragement. I’m looking forward to sharing more of what I’m learning as we continue to grow together as a Shock Absorber Church.
Brief Excerpt
The study focuses on the bounded setting of Soul Revival Youth Community, a ministry that emerged within Gymea Anglican Church in the early 1990s. At this time, Gymea Anglican Church was struggling to adapt to cultural change and was becoming increasingly irrelevant to young people. Most of the teenagers who grew up at the church left after graduating from high school. The church had little impact on unchurched youth. In 1992, the researcher and some young adults at Gymea Anglican began a new initiative they called Soul Revival. They attempted to adapt their ministry to the young Generation X in the Sutherland Shire as a new Grunge youth subculture emerged at the beginning of the decade.
From 1992 to 2012, Soul Revival developed distinctive practices in worship, discipleship, and community life, particularly among young people. Soul Revival responded to the increasing alienation among teenagers of Generation X and subsequently Generation Y by developing new organic structures that gave youth a place at the church where they belonged and had influence. These structures evolved into a uniquely Australian approach to youth ministry, rooted in the Australian concept of mateship and evolved Aboriginal concepts of communal belonging. The Soul Revival leaders decided to discontinue running a youth group and instead establish a stable friendship group that would allow young people to grow in a safe and supportive environment. They dropped the ‘youth group’ label and replaced it with the title of ‘youth community’, as they wanted a deeper expression of the biblical principles of loving friendship, outlined in Scripturess such as John 15:15.
These biblical foundations led to strong, long-term, committed servant-hearted relationships between youth pastors, youth leaders, parents, elders, young adults, and the teenagers they led. They offered each other the gift of time, ‘hanging out’ and ‘having a read’(of the Bible) became the hallmarks of the approach. The mission drove the ministry as Soul Revivalists sought to love God and to share the truth and love of Jesus with everyone, everywhere, as commanded in Matthew 22:37-40. They embraced difference, not sameness, in their all-age, all-stage community in line with Romans 12. Their early experiments blossomed into a Sutherland Shire-style intergenerational youth ministry model, which successfully provided young people with more continuity in a changing world. This initiative led to more effective discipleship, resulting in transformed lives and priorities. There was a higher retention of existing youth and a more effective mission. Soul Revival grew from 4 to 500 young people in 7 years, primarily through the conversion of unchurched teenagers to Christianity and their subsequent involvement in the ministry.
Soul Revival’s influence reshaped aspects of the Gymea parish. The youth ministry structures were more flexible and effective than Gymea Anglican's pre-existing structures in reaching young people. The older strategies were influenced by the Church Growth Movement, which developed during the 1970s, and by the Homogeneous Unit Principle, which segregated age groups. In contrast, the new Soul Revival structures ignored age, class, race, and gender in their new Saturday night Community, which hosted intergenerational ‘relo-bashes’ (parties) and invited the whole church to community hangouts, while also preserving additional age-appropriate junior youth spaces for youth experimentation. The ‘commitments’ for Christians were places to share lessons from experimentation and to teach a biblical culture of costly discipleship.
After 20 years of ministry at Gymea, the founding leaders of Soul Revival, Stu and Louise Crawshaw, left Gymea Anglican together with Matt and Lauren Redmond. Stu and Matt were subsequently invited in 2012 by Bishop Peter Haywood and Archbishop Peter Jensen to join Sydney Anglicans’ Evangelism and New Churches, where a new Church plant, Soul Revival Church, was established. This church plant, based on the same ‘shock absorber’ principles of generative intergenerational relationships, has had a similar trajectory, growing to nearly 900 people from a launch team of 30 in just 13 years. Soul Revival’s influence reshaped aspects of the Gymea parish, and, when applied to the whole church structure at Soul Revival Church, the strategy has provided a helpful framework for intergenerational ministry in Sydney.