Youth workers long for teenagers to develop a consequential faith that impacts every facet of their lives. Yet, in a world where church seems to be becoming less relevant to many people, we struggle to pass on a transformational faith to our teens.
Kenda Creasy Dean shares your concern. In her new book Almost Christian, the Associate Professor of Youth, Church and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary digs into research from the National Study of Youth and Religion to paint a picture of teens’ faith and issues a wake up call to the church.
Youth Worker Journal: The title of your new book is Almost Christian. What does it mean for a teenager to be “almost Christian”?
Kenda Creasy Dean: It means to be Christian in name as opposed to heart and spirit, to receive the teachings of the church without having them make a claim on you.
YWJ: The subtitle of Almost Christian is What the Faith of our Teenagers is Telling the American Church. What is teenage faith telling the church?
Kenda: That adults are living a lukewarm Christianity that young people are emulating. It’s human to want teenagers to have faith that helps them fit in, makes them successful and helps them do well while doing good. The problem is that’s not what Jesus taught, and it’s not the way the early church lived. The faith that teens have looks very much like the faith of their parents. It’s not shaking up their lives in any discernable way. Lots of kids say they’re Christians, but almost none of them think it really matters.
YWJ: You and Christian Smith (Soul Searching) use data from the National Study of Youth and Religion and say many teenagers practice “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” (MTD). What is MTD and how is it different from consequential Christian faith?
Kenda: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is the belief that religion helps you do and feel good, but God is like the wallpaper—in the background, present but unnoticed, inactive in human affairs. Teens are going along with MTD, but they’re not buying it as something they want to hold close to them. Consequential faith makes a difference in the way you live and orient yourself. It’s the integrating identity of our lives.
YWJ: In Almost Christian, you talk about how we “teach young people baseball, but we expose them to faith.” What’s the difference between teaching and exposing teens to faith?
Kenda: People don’t want to coerce their kids into faith. Often parents say, “We want to expose our kids to religion. Then we’re going to let them choose for themselves.” That’s naïve. Teaching is not indoctrination or coercion. It’s purposefully passing on something that matters. We talk about it, model it and construct opportunities to practice it. We don’t just expose our children to things that matter. Can you imagine the disaster we’d have if we simply “exposed” teenagers to driving? We teach them to drive because driving well matters. Why are we more concerned about teaching teenagers to drive than to follow Christ?
YWJ: Almost Christian points out how inarticulate teens are in matters of their faith. How can we teach teens the vocabulary of faith?
Kenda: Acquiring a language requires being immersed in a community that speaks it. If teenagers aren’t talking about faith, they’re not spending much time in communities where faith is spoken, starting with their families and congregations. Language only rings true when it expresses the reality it points to. It’s got to be lived out.
YWJ: Almost Christian distinguishes between “Jesus-talk” and “God-talk.” Why is “Jesus-talk” important to the faith formation of teens?
Kenda: You can’t be a Christian if Jesus is absent. That’s a hard sell with teens. If youth think Christianity is primarily about feeling good, then you don’t need Jesus. Acknowledging Jesus might make people think you can’t get along with others.
The more particular we become about our faith, the more we risk being labeled. We confuse particularity with being exclusivists. We solve the problem by defaulting to generic “God-talk” to avoid Christianity’s particulars. It misses the point that what’s particular about Jesus is that through Him, God embraces all people, whether they recognize God’s embrace or not.
YWJ: The National Study of Religion and Youth revealed that “when belief and social outcomes are measured, Mormon kids tend to be on top.” What can Mormons teach Christians about how to pass on our faith effectively?
Kenda: Intentionality makes a difference. The Mormon approach to religious formation is stunningly intentional. Many Mormon youth get up at 5 a.m. for seminary, which is like confirmation. Parents also make a difference. Mormon parents tend to be highly religious themselves, and we know that teenagers mirror their parents’ faith. Finally, a sense of belonging in a faith community makes a difference. There’s powerful socialization that occurs in communities that have strong boundaries.
YWJ: Almost Christian reminds us, “The law called upon Jewish parents to show their children godliness—to teach them, talk to them, embody for them their own delight in the Lord, 24/7.” How can we show teens godliness?
Kenda: Show teenagers what it looks like to be a bona fide grown up with faith. Be the person who notices kids week after week. Be in a teaching role. Be the kind of parent who, when our kids describe us, faith is a word that comes to mind. These things are so obvious that we think they don’t matter. We’ve created all these ways to get kids “done” by church professionals. Programs don’t add up to a hill of beans compared to having someone walk alongside teenagers as a Christian adult.
YWJ: What are spiritual apprenticeships, and why are they important?
Kenda: In the Middle Ages, individuals had what could be called a spiritual mother or father who acted as a spiritual director, a mentor who took an interest in another’s spiritual growth and agreed to come alongside him or her in the faith journey.
Nowadays, you can’t just pull an adult out of the congregation and say, “We want to apprentice this teen to you.” We have to help adults understand the importance of what they have to offer, whether it’s a skill, an outlook on life or just showing teens how to be Christian adults. There are ways we can structure apprenticeships. One church I know had a car ministry. The men in the congregation’s car group brought on some teenage guys to help them. By youth and adults hanging out over a carburetor, those guys came to know what it means to be a man of faith.
YWJ: Almost Christian claims “the activities that we assign to young people do not prepare them for full participation in Christian life.” How can we better prepare students to participate in Christian life?
Kenda: Have them do ministry. If teenagers are the congregation’s babysitters, [then] approach babysitting as ministry rather than a task adults don’t want to do or as a role designed to keep young people occupied. If kids are always ministered to, they learn to be very good consumers. If kids grow up doing ministry, they’ll do ministry as adults instead of expecting to be objects of ministry.
YWJ: Knowing how important parents and spiritual mentors are in a teen’s faith formation, what do you see the role of youth ministry programs being?
Kenda: First, ministry with young people requires ministry with parents. Parents are the most important spiritual mentors in a teenager’s life, but few parents realize it or feel prepared for this role. Addressing teenagers’ faith without simultaneously addressing parents’ faith is like trying to fill a bathtub without a plug.
Second, when you’ve got more than five people, you have to structure things. Programs never replace relationships, but they can create space and offer nutrients for relationships that wouldn’t take root otherwise. Ideally, a youth program allows teenagers to befriend people who are united in Christ but not much else. It allows teens to create paths where youth and Christian adults can practice together being faithful to God and each other.
YWJ: In Almost Christian, you claim the question is no longer, “How can we keep young people in the church?” but instead, “Does the church matter?” How would you answer that question?
Kenda: The church as it’s called into being by Christ matters. The church as we’ve come to know it plays a very insignificant role for most people. For most teenagers, congregations matter more. Teens respond better to concrete local communities than to abstract, universal ideals. They respond well to the people who surround them in their lives of faith. The way a community embraces young people—even those who don’t return the embrace—is significant.
YWJ: One of your conclusions in Almost Christian is that “When it comes to vapid Christianity, teenagers are not the problem—the church is the problem. The church has the solution.” What’s the solution?
Kenda: The story of God’s unconditional love and grace in Jesus, which demonstrates a kind of love that’s more significant than doing good deeds or filling personal needs. There’s nothing more consequential than love worth dying for. That kind of love is only possible through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. That’s the church’s story if we’ll just tell it. When I say, “tell,” don’t tell it to while away the time. Tell it because it’s our family’s story. We enter the world in a particular way because of it. It’s who we are. The church tells this story to young people for the same reason we tell stories of grandparents around the dinner table—so our children will know whose blood courses through their veins, so they’ll know who they are, why we live as we do and why these things matter.
YWJ: What else do you want to tell youth workers?
Kenda: What you do matters. The ministry you have, the life you live, the kids you come into contact with—these things matter in ways that are not always evident. What you do matters—not just to young people—but to parents, too. It matters to the church if we’re ever going to be more than we’ve become. When teens see the church acting like less than envoys of Christ’s love in the world, they rightly call us out for being frauds. We should listen. If the church can get beyond self-preservation and model a way of life that embodies God’s self-giving love for others, then we might be a church that matters again. If anyone is going to lead the way in becoming that kind of church, it will be young people. This makes youth ministry the place to start.
Kenda Creasy Dean’s Almost Christian is published by Oxford University Press (OUP.com).
See CNN report here.
