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Helping churched kids grow up
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Young people are taking longer to grow up. Studies show 18- to 30-year-olds are waiting longer to marry, have children, finish school, and establish financial independence. Young adults also tend to leave the church during this period.
Justin Moffatt, college pastor at
Many are also troubled by intellectual problems that confront them as their knowledge expands. “In high school,” Moffatt said, “a good student knows, say, 98 percent of the curriculum. But when he leaves home, he finds the gap between what he knows and what he can know much larger than he thought. Overseas travel, wide reading, and relationships can all have this effect. But instead of letting what they do know inform what they don’t know, students often think the other way around. I want them to think: ‘I don’t know why there’s suffering in the world, but I do know that God is love.’”
How should the church engage young people? “Too many Christians let fear dictate their actions,” Moffatt said, “whereas Ecclesiastes says ‘Cast your bread upon the waters. Try things in faith.’ I think the church’s default position should be ‘Grow up,’ but there needs to be flexibility. We need to disciple [youth] with care and love.”
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Pathetic tradeoff
Psalm 37:4, knowing that the unique talents and interests that a young possesses are gift from God; they don’t exist in opposition to God. Knowing themselves as a direct link to knowing God. The church should engage young people so that they can first and foremost connect to God.
Mix the generations, so that older people can pass on the stories of their lives to young people to give them perspective, vision and hope for the future.
“But instead of letting what they don’t know inform what they do know, students should think the other way around: ‘I don’t know why there’s suffering in the world, but I do know that God is love.’”
Well now, there’s a rational solution to who are struggling with doubts about the existence of God.
Nothing is more annoying than going to a church and having people “engage” me. I’m there to worship and minister to the body of Christ - not get my needy needs met.
“Train up a child in the way he should go: and WHEN HE IS OLD, he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6 (note emphasis)
Sure, I was pretty flaky in college years also. It was part a struggle with sin, part being put off by “churchy” types and the many expectations, and part just plain bored of church. However, I was not bored of Jesus or the Word and that helped me to find my way back, as happens with many Christian young people as they mature. My kids are still young but what can do but train them up best we can and pray?
As far as the young generation in general is concerned, these 20-somes and even 30-somes were all carted around in minivans from one adult-organized activity to another their entire childhood. They never had pick-up ball games in the park or unsupervised playing in the woods like we did as kids in the 60s and 70s. The young people today never explored their world as kids, and spent most of their childhoods indoors working a joystick.
IMHO this is the result of our media-induced culture of paranoia since parents crouch in fear lest their kids become the latest victims of the various weirdos for whom the liberals bleed.
For whatever reason, we currently have a young generation with phones constantly in their ears, can’t spell, have $20,000 in credit card debt before 30, multiple illegitimate children by multiple partners, and otherwise are unequipped for any sort of adult-level committment as such has always been understood. You think it’s hard to get excited about the 2008 election, I’m already very worried about the 2040 election when the current young generation comes of age.
I think when they find out that Noah’s Ark is a fable, it throws them back into childhood and they have to start over again. Maybe not at the beginnnig, but probably to the time they stopped believing in Santa and the Easter Bunny and Angels and Devils.
#3 Bianca,
I’m not sure I get what you’re saying–I go to church to worship and minister to the body of Christ, too. But sometimes I also enjoy fellowship there, or someone ministers to me as well.
Young people need to function in the rhetoric stage of learning. They are done with grammar from around 6th grade. Unfortunately, many churches don’t mature into the logic stage, much less make it to the rhetoric stage. If young adults cannot struggle with the real issues of life, but are made to keep swallowing formulas and typical Sunday School answers, they have no need of the church.
I have become convinced that a big part of the problem is youth groups. (Others who have studied the issue have said so.) Instead of focusing on older men teaching younger men, older women teaching younger women–which to me means that older men and women need to be looking for younger men and women with whom we connect well–we shuffle them off to the “experts,” the youth ministers.
Meanwhile, youth ministers are often the most childish adults out there, and they are not encouraging our children into godly adulthood. The youth are busy dating one another (and yes, often sleeping together), and they are more and more part of the culture of the youth group and less and less part of the culture of the larger church. If they come to services at all, they sit together, and they tend not to engage with or be engaged by adults.
Then they graduate from high school and with it the youth group and the church. They’ve never attended church as adults or even almost-adults, and off in a new town with the fun of college life is not the time to go to a new church and figure out how to attend church as something other than a member of the youth group. Plus, Saturday nights tend to be late nights, so getting up on Sunday is hard, with no one saying they have to–especially in a secular college with no one even expecting them to. (Many fellow students in my Bible college didn’t attend church, even though it was expected.)
Part of the answer to this phenomenon is waking up the adults in the church to their responsibility to engage with the youth, youth group or no. We simply must love them and disciple them while they are among us.
I think Cheryl’s absolutely right in her conclusion. The problem is not the kids or even necessarily the youth ministers (who are usually woefully under-supported by the parents), but with the parents who see the youth group as a babysitting service. If the goal of the youth group is to get the kids off to college without getting pregnant or hooked on drugs, we’ll end up failing to meet that goal and leaving kids horribly ill-equipped for the challenges they’ll face away from home.
10-That was is what happened to me. We were taught not to fornicate. I didn’t know what an abusive man was until I had been married to one for many years.
Babysitting equals leaving the youth to keep learning in the logic stage. The logic stage is memorizing facts. It doe not involve thinking.
the Family Worship Book, Kerry Ptacek, gives the historical and biblical evidence for father-led Bible study in the home. It documents historically how and when sunday school and other programs took over.
#8 Reg I’m with you. Lotsa times I’ve been in churches where the Sunday school lesson is a “canned text” written by some denom bureaucrat far removed from the world and circumstances I and the others in the room live in and hafta work our way thru. Church can be a place to find the answers but you have to be asking the planned-for questions. Otherwise, few ministers to the collegiates are really ready or able to answer stuff not in their Sunday school curriculum script.
I’m all for controlling what is taught doctrinally. But I’m also an advocate for ministry that draws a bead center mass on the big issues besetting or bedeviling our young adults.
If the teaching and fellowship arent intellectually challenging but instead mere repititions of prior canned text, who would stay around?
Often times I look out at Fort Hood’s pharmacy waiting room and see young men and women who defy the description this article provides. Young guys in their early to mid 20s who are not only married but the father of 2 or 3 kids. (Often times I see the 20ish wife with one kid holding her hand, one in her arms and one in the oven!)
The civilian guys in their early 20s –in the colleges at least– are realistic and honest enough to know that there simply are no civilian non-govtal jobs out there with any genuine permanency. So I dont blame them for deferring marriage and fatherhood. And a job for an unskilled entry level young man where he and his family can get full dental and medical? You’re not going to find it. Such jobs disappeared in the 50s early 60s, along with the unions which advocated for them.
Cheryl D,
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head.
If godly men were to disciple the young men more, I suspect we’d see less fall out, and less foolishness.
I appreciate what you said about older men mentoring and discipling younger men. However, there appears to be a point where the young think the “old folks” are not relevant to their lives anymore. They are “out of it, not with it”. We are building a new youth building. The stated purpose is: “Not for our present youth, but to attract unsaved youth to a place where they are accepted, safe, and have an opportunity to relate to Christians and the Gospel of Christ”. They need adult volunteers. I have years of experience and a certain amount of wisdom accrued the hard way. But I really don’t know anything I can do to help. They don’t really need an old guy around dispensing wisdom.
They may not want you Chas, but they need you.
Chas,
The most important adults in my kids lives have been the older ones. The eighty plus drywaller, the eighty plus accountant, the eighty plus farmer. They were important to the kids and still loved today because they had time for the kids. They talked with them, told them stories of the old days, taught them to weed and fish and clean tools. And they cared about the kids and let them know. They need you and you can develop some pretty unigue relationships over time.
Chas,
Yes, they need you. Most stories I’ve heard of wisdom gleaned from older people don’t come from someone standing up giving a talk, but just doing stuff with young people, and the wisdom and love show through.
I’m guessing from what I remember of your age, Chas, that you know how to do a lot of things that younger generations didn’t learn. My father and my husband’s father both knew how to do a lot of practical things that we don’t know (unfortunately they were both better at doing things than teaching them).
Whatever your interests are, there’s some young person who will share them. Not all of them - but enough to make a connection.
Chas,
One of the most important people in my life is 50 years older than me (the same age as my father, only my father died at 67 and she’s still alive–albeit with Alzheimer’s–at 90). I was 15 when I met her. I didn’t even think of her as a friend till I was well into my twenties, when she insisted that I had to come see her, and she was willing to drive 720 miles total (two round trips) to pick me up from the city with the airport. Believe me, that kind of love goes a long way!
She didn’t sit around spouting wisdom. But she did take me out to lunch, and we talked. And talked. And talked some more. If we’d been guys, we probably would have been working on cars or whittling or something, and not just eating and talking. But she talked to me, and accepted a phone call from me when my dad was dying that probably made her late to work, and hugged me. And quietly her love and her wisdom shaped me. I’ve had many other meaningful elderly people in my life. One of the sad things to me about my present church is that we have only one elderly couple. But a friend’s mom is in assisted living, and she turns 70 today, and I’ve added her to my list of friends. And I’m volunteering to drive seniors to the doctor. So I have my “elder fix.”
Anyway, just having time for a younger person, taking him out to lunch (or to a ball game, perhaps) is likely to mean a lot. Here’s a hint from someone who was a lonely child and is now deliberate herself about being an “older woman”: Watch for the kid who always says hi to you, or seems to watch you, or otherwise seems to have connected with you. That is the kid to connect with, because that is the kid who will be greatly honored by your attention. If no young people seem to make that connection, make a point of speaking to the kids when you see them until you see one who lights up when you speak to him. Again, there’s the kid to mentor–but these days you need to be sure his parents know and approve.
Thanks everyone. When they finish the building, I may drop by to see if I can help.
Janey (7) Oh, I agree with you and I do appreciate being ministered to. I just am suspicious of all these evangelical buzzwords, one being “engaging” people - where people try to apply a church program to me and figure out what I need according to my demographic - the church corporation mentality.
Make it Man:
Please note the following change:
“But instead of letting what they do know inform what they don’t know, students often think the other way around. I want them to think: ‘I don’t know why there’s suffering in the world, but I do know that God is love.’”