In these forty years since I reached adulthood, both the world and the church have changed vastly. Among the changes:
- The majority of two generations of young people (raised in church) has left organized Christianity, creating an aging church that is decidedly less engaging for teens than the church I knew in the 1970s. It's not only the kids that are missing in most Protestant churches, but their parents.
- Youth ministry in American churches has virtually collapsed. I was part of vibrant youth ministry in three different churches during my middle school and high school years, with music groups, Bible studies, recreational programming, camping/retreat experiences and mission trips. In each of these churches, Sunday nights were hopping with activities for all ages, especially for youth. The recent collapse is in part related to the loss of adults with kids from most churches - but also to the extreme busy-ness which has descended upon the lives of most young people.
Recently I attended worship at a vital congregation that I am coaching, and I found myself watching parents with kids. The kids are just like me from 40 years ago - we could ride bikes together in the neighborhood. Except, it's a different neighborhood now. And I know that the odds are at least 4:1 that each young person that I observed will drop out of church in just a few years, likely never to return.
Often as I consult with churches, we think about the need for vital age-level ministries as a strategy to reach families (meaning the parents of young families), since children remain the number one motivation in America why people who don't currently attend a church will decide to start attending one. In this thinking, youth ministry is a strategy for building today's church - for partnering with parents in family development. All good.
But beyond activity which will anchor parents in our churches, I am troubled that we might be squandering the best opportunity we will ever have with these young people to give them a good dose of Jesus - of counter-cultural Gospel - that will create in them a dis-ease with the social status quo and a hunger for the Reign of God for all the years of their lives.
So lets get to the point: Most confirmation classes are a total bust. 9 out of 10 of the young people will drop out of church within a couple years of their confirmation class. Most young people are not longing for orientation and socialization into organized religion. Confirmation makes church members - who typically discover within weeks or months of the process that being a church member means nothing to them. Forget that! We owe more to our kids than orientation into a dying organization and expression of faith that will not (in most cases) last until they are 50.
Thinking back to the youth ministry that kick-started me onto my path: it was radical! I remember sitting under a pine tree in Idyllwild, California at summer camp in 1972, while a nerdy preacher man fed us the Sermon on the Mount, verse by verse, in King James English. It was the stuff of revolution. It was the radical edge of it that engaged me, that has kept me through the years. I did not sign on to milk-toast church. I signed on to follow a Revolutionary. My understanding of the discipleship challenge has flipped across the decades, but one idea has not - the way of Jesus is a way of social revolution. It blasted me into anti-nuclear arms activism in college, then into rethinking the American economic model, rethinking human sexuality, and seriously rethinking church. The teachings of Jesus have been my compass through almost five decades.
Friends, these young ones are not going to stay in 'church as we know it' - most of them. But let's give them a dose of Jesus that haunts them every day of their life. We owe them nothing less.
We owe our world nothing less than a talented group of young adults who have been grounded in Jesus' social vision.... in his courage, his selflessness, his radical social inclusiveness, his communal altruism. We need these virtues desperately in the century before us. And so, with the precious few young people that we have access to these days, some of whom will become leaders on this planet in very short time - may it be said that we watered nothing down, that we did not run in fear of their parent's politics, but that we gave them the Sermon on the Mount, and in their vernacular - and that we messed with their hearts and minds so profoundly that the gates of hell will never prevail against them!
I have decided... to follow Jesus... The cross before me, the world behind me... No turning back. No turning back
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