Making Church Matter for Youth
by Ann A. Michel

What is the religious life of American youth like? A trio of recent books offers some guideposts to navigate the sociological and theological terrain of youth ministry. They call into question many traditional assumptions about teenagers and religion, reveal the depth and complexity of spiritual formation in youth, and challenge the church to take both young people and the Gospel more seriously.

It is tempting to blame youth ministry’s difficulties on teenagers themselves. We tend to think of them as rebellious, disinterested in religion, and inattentive to their parents. Sociologist Christian Smith corrects these unfortunate assumptions in Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2005). His book contains results of the largest ever survey of teen spirituality. Taken at face value, the data dispute the notion of a widespread loss of religious belief among youth. More than eighty percent believe in God, forty percent attend religious services weekly, and few experiment with alternate spiritualities. Through normal processes of socialization, most young people follow the faith of their parents without much question.

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What I Learned from a Group of Unruly Youth by Will Rowan

During the spring of 2003, I was part of the “Littlemore Roadshow” bringing workshops to high schoolers in rural Alberta. We were scheduled to work with seventy eleventh graders in Wainwright – a group so difficult most of their teachers had given up on them. But their reputation did not concern me. “I am an experienced youth minister,” I thought, “capable of handling any challenge.”

We arrived at a resort in the middle of the prairies to organize a class retreat and train students as peer leaders. Immediately, I sensed what the teachers had warned us about. Each session brought insults to my team and the peer leaders. No one wanted to participate. It was the longest six hours of my life.

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Leaders do not need answers.
Leaders must have the right questions.

W. Edwards Deming, perhaps the most prominent name associated with the “quality” movement in the business world, says that there are three crucial questions that eighty percent of people cannot answer with any measure of confidence. The questions are:

What is my job?
What in it really counts?
How well am I doing?

Lovett H. Weems, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Church Leadership and Director of the G. Douglass Lewis Center for Church Leadership, is editor and principal writer for Leading Ideas.

Copyright © 2005 by the G. Douglass Lewis Center for Church Leadership. Leading Ideas material may be freely distributed with attribution (exclusive of material protected by separate copyright).