Nothing in my youth ministry experience had prepared me for this tension-filled moment. I was set to give the Saturday night sex talk to 200 high school students. Unfortunately, Seth’s girlfriend spoke right before me.
The plan had been for a mature Christian student to share a personal lesson from God about faith and sexuality. As the attractive speaker walked to the mic, she caught the attention of the usually disinterested guys at the back of the room.
“Last year when I was a freshman, I started going out with Seth,” she began. “During our first few months together, we knew God wanted us to remain pure; so we did everything we could to avoid the temptation—until one night when things got a little crazy, and we had sex.”
The room was dead silent. Where was this going?
“It was the first time for both of us, and we felt incredibly guilty. For the next few weeks we asked for God’s forgiveness and spent time reading the Bible together to come to a better understanding of how God wants us to experience our sexuality. It became clear to us that God wants us to feel good and be happy. Since then, we’ve been having sex regularly.”
My jaw dropped. The crowd erupted in applause, especially from the back of the room. As the student walked back to her seat, her youth pastor squeezed her shoulder as he whispered, “Great job!” in her ear. By the way, I’m not making any of this up.
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism
That happened 15 years ago. It shook me up so much that I have thought about it ever since. How did that beautiful sophomore come to that conclusion? Something in our youth ministry model was—is—malfunctioning.
My strong suspicions were recently confirmed by hard data and observations reported by sociologist Christian Smith. Smith has published the results of ongoing research in a book written with Melinda Lundquist Denton, entitled Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2005).
Smith describes an emerging new faith he tags as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. The dominant beliefs are that God wants us to be good, happy, and feel good; God’s there for us when we need His help; and if we’re good, we’ll go to heaven.
Does this sound familiar? It’s all around us. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism provides a framework that allows our youth-group kids, like Seth and his girlfriend, to live by some frightening theological conclusions. What should we be doing about it?
Steps to Spiritual Maturity
If we’re going to take kids deeper, away from Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and an immature spirituality, to spiritual maturity in which they live out Jesus’ message, what should we be doing differently? Here are five suggestions— imperatives?—for equipping students to live out their faith in God’s world.
1. Tend to your owntheological and spiritual vitality.
James Emery White, in his book A Mind for God, quotes Billy Graham as saying, “I’ve preached too much and studied too little.” We get locked into believing that a set of skills and the right programs and games are going to lead students to spiritual maturity—as if youth ministry is only what we do.
I believe we would see a radical change in students if we viewed youth ministry more as who we are.
In youth ministry we are not just called to be with students. We are first called to be about a life-changing message and its way of life, which is the substance we pass on as we spend time with kids.
Pray for and pursue a passion and hunger for God that is fed by study, reflection, and meditation on God’s Word. Develop a reading list that’s deep and wide in theology, missions theory, cultural critique, spiritual disciplines, and biblical studies. While under our care, our students will go no deeper than we go ourselves.
2. Rethink your theology of conversion.
We’ve reduced conversion to a numbers game. Raised hands and walks forward are counted as “decisions” for Christ. Yet the evidence seems to indicate that many of these decisions may have been solely about raising a hand or walking forward— and nothing else. Maybe it’s time for us to ask them to raise their hands or come forward only if they’re willing to spend nine to 12 months with us looking at what it means to live in God’s Kingdom.
Salvation makes a person free from sin and a slave to righteousness. Our kids must understand that they are re-birthed people, living every second of new life on this earth under the reign of the King who has made them His own by calling them into His Kingdom.
3. Cultivate the life of the mind.
In today’s culture, kids are being pounded with more information than was any prior generation. This rapid-fire barrage comes from every direction, and it’s only going to get more fast and furious. Shouldn’t we be training our students to move from a posture of mindless consumption and into a posture of mindful critique?
Spiritual formation includes discipleship of the mind. For too long we’ve taught kids what to think. Our culture requires us to teach them how to think. A great place to start is with an intentional effort to incorporate skills and practice for evaluating media (music, TV, film, advertising) from a Christian perspective.
4. Focus on the integration of faith into all of life.
I’ve heard Christians respond to accusations of hypocrisy from the watching world with an admission that yes, we are all hypocrites. In fact, Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven. OK, I can agree with that. But all too often it’s a copout.
Our faith fails to intersect with our vocation, our academics, our relationships, our sexuality, our leisure, and so on. This dis-integrated faith is not only anti-biblical, it’s killing us and our presence in God’s world. A human being is designed to be an integrated whole, where every area of life God claims as “Mine!”
We must not only be teaching this truth to our kids, we must be walking through life with them showing them how to integrate their faith into every nook and cranny of life. Make a list of everything the kids you know do and are. Now ask yourself: Have I told and shown them how God’s Kingdom is to rule that area of their lives?
5. Fight materialism and injustice.
When you read the Gospels, it becomes clear that Jesus spoke more about the dangers of money and wealth than He did about heaven and hell. It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that those dangers don’t apply to us or our kids. After all, we possess very little compared with guys like Donald Trump and Bill Gates. But in the global order of things, Americans sit somewhere in the top 5 percent of the richest people in the world.
Perhaps that’s why materialism is the greatest ignored and unaddressed sin of the American church. We must challenge materialism and promote economic and racial justice if we want our kids to become mature citizens of God’s Kingdom.
Here’s a practical suggestion that might sound harsh: stop taking expensive ski trips. Such high-end youth group events foster lofty expectations, materialism, and a sense of entitlement. Instead, focus your efforts on missions and service.
In his bestselling book Season of Life (Simon Schuster, 2004), Jeffrey Marx follows a season of high school football at Baltimore’s Gilman School. At the cookout following the team’s first preseason scrimmage, one of the moms approached head coach Biff Poggi to ask how successful he thought the boys were going to be. “I have no idea,” Biff said. “Won’t really know for 20 years.”
Are we thinking that way about how we do youth ministry?
Walt Mueller is the founder and president of the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding (www.cpyu.org). He is the author of several books, including Engaging the Soul of Youth Culture: Bridging Teen Worldviews and Christian Truth and Understanding Today’s Youth Culture.
