Imagine the following three scenarios:
A parent emails you saying her child will not be able to attend your upcoming mission trip meeting, despite the fact they signed a covenant agreeing to prioritize these trip meetings ahead of other scheduling conflicts, including sports. From this email, it’s cleat the parent and child fully expect you to allow her to miss the meeting. After all, how can the church—an institution that’s supposedly all about grace—actually enforce anything?
A graduate of your youth ministry decides to attend the local community college. Because your church doesn’t have a young adult ministry, he asks to continue participating in your youth ministry as a student. You agree, believing that if you don’t, he will be unable to find his place in your congregation and, as a result, leave.
Another graduate of your youth ministry, now 26 years old, unemployed and living in her parents’ basement, asks you to allow her to take a group of teens to a summer Bible camp. In your follow-up conversation, she tells you how life-changing that experience was for her. It quickly becomes clear that her interest in taking teens to this camp has little to do with them. Instead, it has everything to do with giving her the spiritual high she’s long since forgotten.
At first, it’s likely these scenarios appear unrelated. In truth, however, they are.
Each of these scenarios is, in some way, related to brain development. More specifically, each contributes to or points to the emergence of extended adolescence.
To be clear, science supports this idea of extended adolescence. Research now says young people’s brains aren’t fully developed until they reach their mid-20s. Certainly, as a youth worker, I can’t argue with that. I can, however, argue that extended adolescence isn’t just a scientific phenomenon. It’s also a cultural one to which our churches are contributing.
We treat our teens as children, making their spirituality overly dependent on and connected to our youth ministries. At the same time, we wonder why their faith isn’t well-formed, lasting or consequential.
Maybe there’s actually a connection between these two things. Maybe the formation of a well-formed, lasting, consequential faith requires us to treat the teens in our congregations as apprentice adults who are capable of making decisions and owning their consequences.
If that’s the case, then rather than consistently using grace to excuse poor choices, let’s hold teens accountable for the commitments they make. Doing so gently reminds teens that the world doesn’t revolve around them. Beyond that, let’s help teens use their newly acquired gift of abstract thinking to speculate about and process the potential outcomes their choices might yield. Let’s stop affirming the false promise they hear elsewhere: “You can and should do it all.” Instead, we should dare to be countercultural and admit: “You can’t do it all, and it’s OK—in fact, preferable—to do less.”
Rather than warehouse teens in our youth ministries after high school graduation because we fear they’re not yet ready to handle any part of the church that’s not focused solely on them, let’s offer teens opportunities to connect with people of other ages. Let’s stop segregating and start integrating. Rather than take teens out of big church for their own youth worship services, let’s give them opportunities to serve in our congregations’ worship life. That way, after high school graduation, they’ll know their place in the larger congregation.
Instead of only celebrating the teens who undergo transformation during mountaintop experiences such as camps and mission trips, let’s affirm and applaud those students who are committed to walking with Christ each and every day. Let’s give those students the language to describe their everyday struggles and experiences, as well as the forum to do so. Let’s champion their testimonies and equip them continually to recognize God’s work in their daily lives, knowing that most of life is, in fact, lived not on the mountaintop, but in the daily grind.
As a youth worker, I desperately hope that in 10, 20 or 30 years, the teens I’m currently working with will be adult followers of Jesus, committed to and seeking Christ in every aspect of their lives.
For that to happen, our jobs can’t be limited to the spiritual realm for the faith formation of teens. It also must include helping teens mature into adulthood. Wouldn’t you agree?
