TL;DR
Through three case studies, Fagg shows that the pioneers who made youth ministry serious in Australia also helped split it from secular youth work. An important historical contribution with real contemporary bite.
The history of youth ministry in Australia is under-researched. Ask most youth ministry practitioners where their field came from and you'll get fragments: a name, an organisation, a half-remembered story about someone's coffee-shop ministry in the '70s. David Fagg's article is a welcome attempt to fill that gap. Published in the Journal of Youth and Theology in 2021, it documents how Christian youth workers active in the 1960s and 1970s shaped the trajectory of both church-based youth ministry and secular youth work in Australia — and, in doing so, contributed to the divide between the two.
This is not a comprehensive history. Fagg is upfront about that. The article is drawn from a broader PhD project at Deakin University examining how contemporary Christians in secular youth work combine faith and profession. What it offers is a window into a formative period through the stories of three representative practitioners. That window is valuable precisely because these stories are in danger of being lost. The practitioners Fagg interviews are elderly; the movements they built have either evolved beyond recognition or disappeared entirely. The article reads, at times, like an act of historical rescue.
Setting the Scene
The article opens with a useful historical sketch. Australian youth work emerged from nineteenth-century British philanthropic efforts — the YMCA, Scouts, denominational boys' societies — and was heavily shaped by Evangelical Christianity, with its integrated vision of salvation, social action, and citizenship. After World War II, everything shifted. The baby boom produced a massive, cashed-up youth cohort. Counter-cultural movements — civil rights, anti-Vietnam, second-wave feminism — energised young people and alienated them from institutional Christianity. The government began to take an active interest in youth work, and the profession started developing its own secular identity.
Two movements were particularly significant for what followed. The Protestant radical discipleship movement — Australia's variant of the Jesus People movement, though Fagg rightly distinguishes it from the American original — combined serious Bible study, social justice activism, and intentional community. The Young Christian Worker (YCW) movement, rooted in Catholic Action and Josef Cardijn's 'See, Judge, Act' method, equipped young Catholics for service in the world. Both movements provided the crucible in which the article's key figures were formed.
Three Case Studies
Fagg selects three practitioners — Peter Corney, John U'Ren, and John Bonnice — as representative of wider patterns across his eleven interviews. Each comes from a different denominational context (Anglican, parachurch/evangelical, Catholic), and each illustrates a different facet of the period's dynamics.
Peter Corney pioneered new forms of youth ministry and worship in the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne, became frustrated with the institutional church's conservatism, left to establish the Master's Workshop (an alternative training centre for counter-cultural ministry), and eventually returned to parish life to embed youth ministry thinking in the local church. His achievement, Fagg argues, was to establish youth ministry as a field worthy of serious intellectual and practical energy.
"Christian youth workers like myself and others who were trying to do youth work in the new setting were beginning to see that the base that we were working from, the church, was problematic. It kind of wasn't shifting quickly enough and it wasn't changing enough…"
John U'Ren, working through Scripture Union Victoria, used parachurch resources to connect with young people in the counter-culture. He helped establish Theos ministries — coffee shops, live music, a mobile bus — and was a key behind-the-scenes networker in the radical discipleship movement. John Smith of God's Squad described him as someone who brought innovation to life in a self-effacing manner, brokering relationships between competitive elements within the movement. U'Ren's instinct was always outward — away from what he called the "enclave of conservative evangelicals" at Belgrave Heights and toward contextualised gospel outreach.
John Bonnice came through the Catholic YCW in Frankston, eventually becoming National President in 1977. His work centred on equipping young people for social action — road safety campaigns, advocacy against predatory hire-purchase companies, support for young apprentices. For Bonnice and his YCW companions, Christian faith and social justice were inseparable:
"It was very much, to be a Christian, was to be caring for others, being involved in your community and address issues of social justice…the values of the gospel are your social justice values."
Yet the YCW's increasing focus on social action outside the parish created tensions with the Catholic hierarchy. The Vatican withdrew support, and Bonnice eventually left formal church involvement. His story, and the diaspora of ex-YCW members into the secular youth sector, is one of the article's most poignant threads.
The Divide That Emerged
Fagg's central argument is that these Christian youth workers inadvertently contributed to a divide between church-based youth ministry and secular youth work. Their innovations had two effects. First, by taking youth ministry seriously — culturally aware, intellectually rigorous, practically creative — they legitimated it as a discrete pursuit within the church. A proportion of youth workers chose to focus there. Second, by demonstrating that Christian faith could motivate excellent work with young people outside church structures, they created a pathway into secular youth work for vocationally driven Christians. The two streams developed their own identities, training pathways, employing organisations, and theoretical frameworks, and drifted apart.
This argument is persuasive as far as it goes. But the article raises questions it doesn't fully answer — and it's here that the piece becomes most interesting for anyone thinking about youth ministry today.
Strengths
A timely historical contribution. Fagg is right that this period has received too little scholarly attention. The oral history dimension gives the article a texture that archival research alone cannot provide. Hearing Corney, U'Ren, and Bonnice in their own words brings the period alive and preserves perspectives that might otherwise be lost entirely.
Clear articulation of the secular/ministry divide. The article names something that practitioners on both sides of the divide often feel but rarely analyse. Fagg's account of how it happened — not through hostile separation but through the unintended consequences of innovation — is more nuanced than a simple secularisation narrative.
Honest about institutional tension. The excursus on the relationship between these youth workers and their institutional churches is one of the article's strongest sections. The pattern Fagg identifies — innovators acting first and seeking permission later, finding (or failing to find) advocates within structures, and watching the institution eventually appropriate their methods — resonates well beyond this particular period.
Rich use of direct quotation. The interview material is well selected. The practitioners' voices carry conviction and specificity that secondary analysis alone would lack.
Limitations
The institutional dynamic deserves sharper analysis. Fagg documents a recurring pattern: practitioners with a strong sense of vocation find existing denominational structures unable or unwilling to accommodate their work. They move to the margins — parachurch organisations, alternative training centres, secular agencies. The institution eventually absorbs their methods, often stripped of their original theological rationale. But the article doesn't press hard enough on why this pattern persists.
Roger Hart's 'Ladder of Participation' — originally developed for children's participation but widely applied in youth work — offers a useful framework here. Hart distinguishes between tokenistic participation (where young people are consulted but have no real power) and genuine shared decision-making. A similar ladder could describe how denominations relate to youth ministry innovation: at the bottom, youth ministry is tolerated as a recruitment tool; further up, it's resourced but controlled; at the top, innovators share real authority over strategy. What Fagg's case studies suggest — and what remains true today — is that denominations often welcome youth ministry only on their own terms. The practitioner's sense of calling runs ahead of the institution's capacity to accommodate it, and the result is the kind of marginalisation and eventual departure that Corney, U'Ren, and Bonnice all experienced in different ways.
The 'radical discipleship' model needs more critical engagement. Fagg presents the radical discipleship movement sympathetically, and there's good reason for that — its integration of evangelism, social justice, and intentional community was genuinely compelling. But the article could push further on why this model couldn't find a home in either the denominational church or the emerging secular profession. The practitioners' commitment to what they understood as 'the Way' — shaped by the counter-culture but reframed through rigorous biblical engagement — was too theologically explicit for an increasingly rationalised, government-funded secular youth work sector, and too culturally radical for denominational gatekeepers. That double exclusion is worth naming directly. It helps explain why, even today, much of the most interesting youth ministry in Australia happens in parachurch spaces rather than denominational ones.
Gender is acknowledged but not explored. Fagg notes that all eleven participants are male, "reflecting the professional gender bias of their times." Fair enough — but this is a significant limitation that shapes every conclusion the article draws. The history of women in Australian youth work and youth ministry during this period remains an open field.
The contemporary implications are underdeveloped. The final section gestures at implications for today — preserve the history, take risks, build partnerships — but doesn't develop them with the same rigour as the historical analysis. The most interesting contemporary question the article raises is whether the secular/ministry divide is still necessary or useful. Fagg's own subsequent research on Christians in secular youth work suggests he has more to say on this.
Verdict
Fagg's article is a valuable piece of historical recovery. It documents a formative period in Australian youth ministry with care and specificity, and it names a structural divide whose consequences are still felt today. The case studies are well chosen, the argument is clear, and the oral history material gives the piece a human warmth that academic articles sometimes lack.
Where it falls short is in pressing its own findings harder. The institutional dynamics it describes — the tension between innovation and structure, between vocation and organisational control, between theological conviction and professional secularisation — are not just historical curiosities. They are live issues for anyone involved in youth ministry in Australia right now. Fagg opens the door to a genuinely important conversation about what the church owes its youth ministry practitioners, and what those practitioners owe the church. That conversation still needs to be had — and this article is a solid starting point for it.