This past year, my 3-year-old was hanging out in my office while his brother was at preschool. Suddenly, he stopped playing and pointed to an object on my desk. He kept pointing and proceeded to ask what this strange object was that he never had seen before and appeared almost alien to him.
I looked at him, puzzled, unsure about what had piqued his curiosity. Everything on my desk was pretty typical and standard for an office. Working out the puzzle with my 3-year-old, I discovered he was pointing to my office phone. It dawned on me that he’d never seen a phone with cord and buttons on a base, forget the old rotary-dial type—one of those really would throw him for a loop. For him, this was a piece of equipment straight from the history books. The only phones known to him are our cell phones.
This got me thinking about how quickly technology is changing everything. I began wondering what other objects and ways of living will be outdated by the time he reaches high school. Neurological studies have shown that our immersion in the digital age is changing the way we process reality in our minds, which consequently has impacted the way we think and practice discipleship.
How We Love God with Our Minds
Jesus’ words in
For the longest time, neuroscientists thought that after a certain age, the brain became immutable and stopped developing new connections. This thinking has shifted dramatically in recent decades as neuroscientists now are arguing that our brains—adult and teenage—are in a state of flux throughout life, what they have termed plasticity. As we live, our life experiences either form new neural connections or reinforce and strengthen old ones through repeated experiences that form behaviors and habits. This could be why habits are so hard to break. It’s not simply a matter of stopping a behavior; breaking a habit means shrinking a reinforced neural connection.
The constant barrage of images and information has changed the way we think and decreased our ability to focus. Nicholas Carr, in his Pulitzer Prize finalist book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to our Brains examined multiple studies related to the impact technology is having our minds. In one study, he found that it only takes five days, spending an hour a day on the Internet, for the rewiring of our brains to begin. Psychologists have noted this rewiring is impacting essential emotions we so often prize in discipleship. Carr notes, “The experiment, say the scholars, indicates that the more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience the subtlest, most distinctively human forms of empathy, compassion and other emotions.”1 To cultivate compassion, love, joy and the other fruits of the spirit, we must be willing to build opportunities for students to move at a different rhythm. Discipleship in the digital age requires a willingness to cultivate an environment which is often antithetical to the speed of current culture.
The Necessity of Space
The digital mind isn’t always wired for slowness and silence. As so many stories in the Bible indicate, creating space for quiet, slow and reflection requires a willingness to live with a little uncertainty and trust where God is leading and how He is speaking. Abram lived with a promise, not always sure where the journey would lead. The desire to live with this connectedness to God is lost in an age of selfies and easy contact.
Creativity also often is lost in this age. In those moments when we aren’t constantly distracted by email, text messages and social media, our brains have an opportunity to rest and begin to reimagine life. Being formed into the image of Jesus requires creating opportunities for this to occur so youth can spend time imagining how their lives might look different as they are formed more into the image of Christ. Our devotions cannot always be about providing video clips, Scripture passages and ideas to consume. Our devotions have to create space in which our youth are allowed to ruminate and explore what the message might mean for their own lives, to imagine their lives differently.
This change in discipleship does not happen overnight. Considering Paul’s suggestion of starting with spiritual milk and moving on to more solid foods (
The Teleological Goal of Discipleship
When we think about discipleship, I imagine most of us consider discipleship is a means to a stronger, personal relationship with Jesus. Honestly, I think this response is shortsighted and misses the mark of discipleship. Youth ministry developed as a response to the idea of adolescence, a new life-stage in industrialized nations that’s not considered in less developed countries. Formation of an identity is crucial in this stage of life in America, and this has been the foundation for youth ministry discipleship paradigms for the past 50 years. This individual focus is a product of our culture more than it is a result of Jesus’ teachings. The apostle Paul challenged the church in Philippi to “…work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you…” (
Beyond that, I have witnessed youth struggle with the contrast of the love of Jesus and the reality of theodicy.
After Beth and I had been married for a few years, we were ready to expand our family. Knowing miscarriages are not uncommon, we decided we wouldn’t make any announcements to family or friends until we were close to the end of the first trimester. After hearing our baby’s heartbeat for the first time, we began sharing the exciting news. A couple weeks later, we were back at the doctor’s office, where we learned we had lost our child. I was so angry and wondering where God possibly could be in the midst of this tragedy.
My faith was shattered. As news spread, I was amazed as friends we had known for years shared with us their own painful experiences of lost pregnancies. Our faith was renewed not by any individual efforts on our own, but by being embraced by a community of friends who understood our pain.
Similarly, in sitting with youth who have lost peers, the typical clichéd answers seldom provide comfort. Rather, what helps the most is having a community with whom to grieve and walk through the valley, which sustains the growth and development of faith in trying times.
We place too much emphasis on individuals at the cost of community. Identity and discipleship are nourished and enriched from participation in the community of God. When students are baptized in our churches, I don’t want them merely to say they are making a commitment to God. I also want them to say they are choosing to participate in and share life with a community.
Recently on our high school road trip, we stopped at The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. As our youth quickly were making their way through the museum, I began to panic, wondering if they were making any relevant connections. My fears were allayed that evening as we gathered for devotion and began sharing our experiences at the museum. Our coming together as a community to process this experience was impacted more as our adults who came on the trip began to share experiences of what life was like for them during the Civil Rights Movement. Reflecting on
We are relational beings, and if we hope to encourage youth to embrace discipleship, it starts with the development of the community of faith that encourages community moments. We need to introduce them to people who will be present in times of struggle. Discipleship understood in this manner becomes something focused not on the formation of an autonomous individual, but the formation of a community from which the individual is nourished. A community which testifies to the presence of God found in each other and the places of life where creativity flourishes is where the discovery of self happens. Teenagers are wired for this kind of environment. It’s time for those of us who lead them to pay attention and create an environment where real, brain-appropriate discipleship can happen.
1 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton’s Company, 2010), p. 221.
