This was not the first conversation of this kind that I’ve had with former students, and it won’t be the last. A lot has been said during the past few years about high school graduates walking away from the faith during their college years. It seems as if many youth workers are wrestling with how ineffective our programming is at helping teens keep their faith in college. Despite all the negativity this is drawing from so many in youth ministry, I have concluded that it’s a good thing.
Faith Development
When it comes to the development of their faith, there are two main ways students discover their theology. First, they are taught. This is a fairly standard approach in the church. We surround young people with adults who have been there, done that, and equip them to impart their wisdom, biblical knowledge and life lessons to the students. The hope and expectation is that through this process, students will graduate with a wealth of knowledge and know all the right and wrong answers when it comes to issues of morality and faith.
With this in mind, though, honestly take a moment and think about your own personal faith. What has lead to growth in your relationship with Jesus and your beliefs through the years? What originally drew you to Jesus in the first place?
Personally, every time I ask those questions, and as I think about my own faith development, the answers are always the same: experiences. Typically, they are experiences—often painful ones—that force us to explore our previously held beliefs more deeply while we compare and contrast them with new beliefs we encounter.
This is the second way our students can learn and develop theology, and according to clinical and developmental psychologist James Marcia, it is absolutely crucial. Marcia surmised that every adolescent needed two crucial things during their teenage years for healthy identity formation: exploration and commitment. He wrote that one of two most crucial areas that this is especially true is one’s ideology1 (i.e., one’s beliefs and doctrines that guide everything we do). Without healthy exploration, you can’t have a real commitment to something. Instead it’s just a regurgitation of information or acting in a way we think we are supposed to act in a given moment.
Yet it seems that so often exploration and experience take a back seat in youth ministries. As Lem Usita, youth ministry professor at San Diego Christian College, discussed at The Youth Cartel’s Summit in 2013 in his talk “Identity Formation in the Youth Worker,” college often is the first time many Christian students are given a chance to explore their faith compared to other environments where they’re told what to believe. As our students are met with deeper thinking, new ideas and challenges they have not encountered before, they reconsider what parents, their churches and youth workers told them.
As I talk with students such as Joe, I don’t hear them saying they want anything to do with faith or that they’re walking away from God. Instead, I hear student who’re very engaged with their faith, though they aren’t necessarily going to church. It’s a good thing that students are making decisions for themselves and working through multiple viewpoints to get to that conclusion, because that is what leads to a deeper faith.
It’s also good because it challenges us to rethink our programs and how we help our students leave our programs with a theology of their own rather than ours, their parent’s, our churches’ or our denominations’. As many have suggested, a recommitment to apologetics and an increase in teaching to ensure our students have all the correct answers with which to combat the world, I think the answer is the opposite. We as youth workers need to do less teaching and create more settings that help students explore different beliefs, ask questions and wrestle with their faith.
Creating an Explorative Culture in Our Youth Ministries
For some, the idea of helping students explore multiple worldviews within the context of church can be a scary idea. However, it’s important to realize that most of our students already are doing so elsewhere. With full access to the Internet, students have access to worlds of information; unfortunately, because our culture has a tolerant view of every religion except for Christianity, students are forced to explore their beliefs in almost every other avenue of their lives.
It’s time for us to start creating environments where questions and different opinions are welcomed and met with tolerance and loving challenge. Specifically, there are three things we can do within our ministries to come alongside our students and help them more deeply explore and develop their beliefs.
1) We need to let them know that any question is OK.
When it comes to certain questions regarding faith, morals and beliefs, too many of us in the church just cut off the conversation, or (worse) the relationship, rather than diving into a great conversation by asking questions and helping students explore what is going on inside them. Because the root of so many questions that students ask (such as those dealing with sexuality, creation, morality, etc.) deal with identity and the answer to: “Who am I?” when we cut off questions, we essentially are telling students they don’t matter.
I love what Brock Morgan expresses in Youth Ministry in a Post-Christian World: “We should create an atmosphere where students feel free to express who they are in the moment and what they believe this afternoon—even if it’s all going to be different tomorrow. In the midst of the adolescent roller coaster ride, the grace we give them might be one of the only places where they’ll find it.”
2) We need to be clear about the truth of the Bible.
I fully and unapologetically believe the Bible is the full Word of God. I also believe Scripture gives us the fullest, clearest and most direct view of Truth, and that that Truth is absolute. However, the Bible is not exclusive to truth. Said slightly another way, there is one absolute Truth that exists, but that does not mean everything else is absolutely wrong.
In some way, shape or form, I’d argue that most belief systems share some overlap with Christian teachings on which we could agree and affirm. Again, I’m not saying we have to agree about everything, but there are glimpses of truth in lots of other worldviews. For example, a Buddhist’s commitment to a non-materialistic life, a Muslim’s dedication to prayer, or a scientist’s understanding of how the world works can be embraced as things that can challenge and complement a relationship with Christ. The problem we run into when we consciously or unconsciously present the idea that truth is exclusive to the Bible is that we give our students the idea that they have to pick one or the other; as noted, it’s a choice the Bible and the church is losing.
3) We need to teach students how to engage with Scripture and not just give them the answers.
For many of our students, they depend on adults to explain the Bible to them. The problem is revealed when that particular adult isn’t around anymore. Thanks to a plethora of apps and Internet sites, it’s pretty easy to access a wealth of information to help us understand Scripture. We need to teach students how to use the tools available to them so they can use their intellect when it comes to the Bible and not just their feelings or experiences. A passage of Scripture can’t mean something now that it didn’t mean at the time, so once we understand the original meaning of a Bible verse, then we can translate that same message to how it applies to our daily lives, aka hermeneutics.
It is far more important for a student to own his or her own beliefs and be able to articulate and defend them intellectually and experientially, even if they contradict what we believe. My prayer is that we all would teach in a way that as our students explore their faith by asking questions and digging more deeply into conversation with one another, they at the same time will fall in love with Jesus passionately and unapologetically.
1James E. Marcia, “Ego-Identity Status,” in Michael Argyle, Social Encounters (Penguin 1973) p. 340.
