Thomas Bergler

Between 1930 and 1970, national Methodist youth leaders led a sustained liberal religious education to mobilize young Methodists for racial justice. Ironically, by promising too much, liberal religious education theorists influenced Methodist youth leaders and young people to see themselves as failures, despite their many impressive successes. their story further suggests that it was not just the rise of new intellectual movements or Christian education theories, but also disillusionment with the results produced by liberal religious education methods that drove changes in 20th-century Christian education.… (meer)

Bergler has taken time to study publications of the Methodist Church, Catholic Church, Youth for Christ, and the National Baptist Convention written for youth leaders or for young people from their inception in the late 1940s to the present. He presents his research in the light of what is going on in American culture at the same time. The result is a rather interesting and informative book about a trend in American Christianity to adapt to the culture which, during the 1960s to 1970s, was somewhat youth-driven and which, from the 1980s to present, has become somewhat seeker-oriented. Bergler was probably correct in limiting his research to those groups, but it would be interesting to see a similar study done for other denominations such as Southern Baptists, Presbyterians, Church of God, Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, etc. As I looked through the author's footnotes, I thought he must have had an interesting time just sitting down with some of those publications and reading through them cover to cover from volume 1, issue 1 until the periodical ceased publication (or through the latest issue). I can see a lot of persons in other denominations asking themselves if this applies to their church and trying to decide what, if anything, to do about it. I do have one major criticism with the book. There are several "sentences" which begin with conjunctions which are in reality not sentences, but sentence fragments. An editor should have corrected this grammatical problem before the book was published. Otherwise, this was a very interesting read.… (meer)