Jesus said loving God is “the first and greatest commandment.” What does it mean to love God, and how can youth workers help kids love Him? To find out, we talked to Mark Matlock, Lilly Lewin, Neely McQueen and Fred Edie.
Mark Matlock is executive director of Youth Specialties and the founder of Wisdom Works. Each year during the Planet Wisdom tour, Mark presents biblical truths to thousands of teenagers. He’s the author of several books, including Smart Faith: Loving Your God with All Your Mind, which he co-authored with J.P. Moreland.
Believing girls can change the world, Neely McQueen has been loving God by investing in junior high and high school girls for more than 15 years. She’s the author of 99 Things Every Girl Should Know: Practical Insights for Loving God, Yourself and Others.
A worship curator, Lilly Lewin is passionate about helping people connect with God through experiential worship. She’s the co-author of Sacred Space: A Hands-On Guide to Creating Multisensory Worship Experiences for Youth Ministry.
For Fred Edie, loving God and worship are inseparable. An associate professor of Christian education at Duke, Fred studies the relationship between worship and Christian identity. He’s the author of Book, Bath, Table and Time: Christian Worship as Source and Resource for Youth Ministry.
YouthWorker Journal: Jesus told His disciples to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind” (
Lilly Lewin: To love with all of whom we are, something we don’t get unless we love ourselves and feel love from someone else. Then we can say, “I can experience God that way.”
Fred Edie: We’re to love God in response to God’s love for us. Love for God, self and neighbor is the most important thing to Jesus. More than talkers, thinkers or creators, humans are lovers. Our intellect, emotion, soulful imagination and bodily strength support love. This is manifested in worship. When we praise God, we’re formed into affections of awe, mercy, compassion and neighborly love. Our praise to God overflows into love of self and neighbor.
YWJ: Why might youth struggle to love God?
Mark Matlock: Teens aren’t seeing people integrate God into every aspect of their lives. Teens see their parents behave one way at church, another at home and another at work. They don’t see a consistent thread that runs throughout. That leads to divided living. Teens also don’t know how to trust an invisible God.
Neely McQueen: It’s easy to teach students an emotional way of loving. Students powerfully encounter God’s love in worship. That triggers an emotional part of who we are. Then when something logical conflicts with that emotion, they’re trapped. Faith is a thought-out thing, not just an emotional feeling.
Lilly: Technology, because it fills up so much of their lives—the constant media presence in teens’ lives says they’re fine. Teens, who already think they’re invincible, question why they need God.
Fred: Youths’ capacities for love are misdirected by consumerist culture. The church also distorts Christian love, framing God’s love for teens in terms of romantic intimacy—God as a bff who totally gets them, an emotionally available “wonderful (clinical) counselor” who meets their intimacy and self-esteem needs but doesn’t meddle in their lives.
YWJ: Perhaps youth also struggle to love God because of their busyness. Do you think it’s possible for overscheduled youth to love God even if they don’t prioritize church over other things?
Mark: We see prioritization as putting something over something else in a schedule. We think that if teens have conflicts with our programs, they don’t value God. That’s our problem. As youth workers, we need to ask, “How do we serve teens in the time they have with what they need to grow spiritually?” Help students find ways to be with God during the immovable barriers of their lives. Don’t expect every teen to be involved in youth group every time. Be creative and give them multiple options to engage.
Neely: Our language needs to change. We say life is worship; but in practical terms, it’s limited to church. We say, “Come to this event,” instead of helping students worship in their schools. We need to model what it looks like to love God outside the four walls of the church.
Fred: The issue is less about guilting students into reprioritizing than it is about reclaiming the gospel. No other way of life is more compelling than the Christian life. There’s no such thing as solitary Christianity. The only way Christian faith exists is through the church. Severed from the organism, members wither and die.
YWJ: Our students’ busyness resembles that of Martha in
Mark: Much of church is centered around Martha-type experiences. We’re so busy preparing the space for God that we forget to spend time with Him when we’re there. We need to teach the school of Mary in our gatherings by utilizing contemplative elements and recognizing that every student is in a different place in his or her spiritual journey.
Neely: Make room in your programs for being moments such as silence, opportunities to explore God’s Word, communion and times of reflection. If someone glimpses God’s love, he or she will want to experience it again and again.
Lilly: We’re missing it when it comes to creating space for students to listen to and hear from God. We say, “Who wants to hear from God?” Then we never give them space. If we want students to have faith throughout their lives, we need to give them tools to create space for God in their real lives. Make worship tactile. Be experiential. This takes longer and is more dangerous; but when we do this, we’re free to let the Holy Spirit be the teacher and to curate our students’ gifts, whatever they are.
YWJ: How can worship help students develop a lifelong love for God?
Neely: Worship awakens the soul to be loved and to love deeply. Students always experience something in worship. Sometimes it’s negative. Sometimes it touches their emotions and their need to connect. Worship allows for thinking about who God is.
Fred: Worship invites young people into the presence of holy mystery. Entering God’s presence is transformational. We’ve done a good job inviting youths’ “Guitar Hero” aspirations into worship, but we’ve done little to cultivate their spirituality by way of engagement with sacraments. Provide youth with the means to engage with ritual symbols, to play with metaphor and poetry, to invite their gifts for liturgical leadership and bring them into close proximity with the church’s liturgical holy things: book, bath, table and time.
YWJ: How can youth workers move students from obeying doctrine to loving God?
Mark: Jesus said, “If you love Me, you’ll obey Me.” If we love God, we have no problem with obedience. We love the things God loves and hates what He hates.
Neely: Instead of just giving students steps to love God, model how to respond to God’s love. After all, we love God because He first loved us. When students understand God’s radical love for them, they’ll act.
Lilly: There are two kinds of students: Church kids who’ve learned a bunch of stuff, know too much and haven’t applied it; and students who have no biblical memory. In general, students don’t know what doctrine is, so we need to tell God’s story in a way so people can grasp it. For example, every teen wants to fall in love. What does it mean to fall and stay in love with someone? To love someone is not infatuation; it’s not just physical. Love goes into knowing and honoring someone.
Fred: We’ve managed to construe doctrine as little more than legalistic accretion that gets in the way of me and Jesus loving each other. That’s a problem. Doctrinal literacy is essential to true love and devotion to God. By its nature, faith seeks understanding. The trick is to order youths’ worship to the triune God.
YWJ: What advice do you have for youth workers who discover their own love for God has grown cold?
Mark: Our relationship with God is constantly a matter of closing the space between us. Each night, I review my day and celebrate the things that were in line with God’s character. I think about the things that separated me from God. By doing this, I keep accounted with God, which keeps the space from growing too distant.
Neely: Take a break for a day or a week. When we miss this, we burn out quickly. We get angry. We lose sight of why we got into ministry and blame God for where we ended up. Find someone to speak into your life, to be a voice of accountability and encouragement and to remind you of who God is.
Lilly: Practice a Sabbath. I had a great gift from a pastor who sent me on a silent retreat. I was so burned out. I went for five days, and it saved my life. Now it’s an annual thing I do to quiet my brain so I can hear God. Baby-step into that. Turn off the radio when you drive, or turn off the computer for one night.
Fred: Hold on to the claim that we follow a God who is making all things new. Part of the gift of corporate worship is that individuals who’ve lost their way can rely on the community to believe, worship and intercede for them even if they can’t get it together at present. Allow for the possibility that loving relationships ebb and flow with time. Study. Ministry students almost always find they become capable of loving God and themselves in more faithful ways. It’s called transformation. God is in that business.
YWJ: What else do we need to know?
Lilly: We’re not always good at sharing our pain. We want people to fall in love with Jesus, so we don’t share the broken pieces of our lives. Sharing that pain is a big piece of helping students fall in love with God. A lot of times, we talk about loving God in the wrong terms. We say it in terms of finding God, but God’s already found us. We just haven’t always figured it out yet.
Fred: The burden is on adults to witness to a God who is adventuresome and whose love is radically demanding. Like Kenda Dean says, youth are already passionate; we need to proclaim a God worth living and dying for.
Recommended Resources:
Smart Faith: Loving Your God with All Your Mind by J.P. Moreland and Mark Matlock
Wisdom on Growing in Christ by Mark Matlock
The Way of the Heart: Desert Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry by Henri Nouwen
My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers
Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home by Richard Foster
Celebrations of Discipline by Richard Foster
Contemplative Youth Ministry: Practicing the Presence of Jesus by Mark Yaconelli
Growing Souls: Experiments in Contemplative Youth Ministry by Mark Yaconelli
Book, Bath, Table and Time by Fred Edie
Holy Things for Youth Ministry: 13 Practical Sessions by Brian Hardesty-Crouch
What’s So Amazing About Grace? by Phillip Yancey
The Gift of Grace by Max Lucado
Shaped by the Story: Helping Students Encounter God in a New Way by Michael Novelli
Enter the Story: 7 Experiences to Unlock the Bible for Your Students by Michael Novelli
Sacred Space: A Hands-On Guide to Creating Multisensory Worship Experiences for Youth Ministry by Dan Kimball and Lily Lewin
Presence-Centered Youth Ministry by Mike King
Curating Worship by Jonny Baker
The Art of Curating Worship: Reshaping the Role of Worship Leader by Mark Pierson
