Kill Your Youth Group! | Backpack Radio Reflection Episode #35

Kill Your Youth Group! [05/29/2011]

• In which Pastor Vermon says, “I’m black, so I’m naturally cool.”
• In which a question is begged: Is the Gospel boring?
• In which we learn the meaning of  “adultolescence” and it hurts.

I listened to this one because I’m scared of teenagers. Even though the rumor is that I once was one, and even though I spend a chunk of my day with them. Just today, in fact, I sat behind a desk and listened to them positively butcher Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (I’m a teacher). And yesterday, I heard the following snippet of conversation about the movie Gravity:

Jane: "I'm never going into space."
John: "Jane, you may be forced to one day."

They’re amusing creatures, aren't? The problem is that I’m just not there anymore, and so they’re a little mysterious too. I used to speak the language of rock n’ roll, but my rock n’ roll is passé now. Once upon a time, I related to the emotional and moody ones, but Kurt Cobain is dead, kids aren't really so angst -y anymore, and now I think like a mom. Plus, the gospel of my former teenaged self is not a gospel worth spreading.

So, there’s this problem: how do we meet teenagers where they’re at, and how do we meet them with Truth?

This episode tackled my problem.  First, let’s follow Pastor Bob’s lead in making sure we identify the show’s subtitle, lest you think this broadcast is a recipe for murder. The subtitle is “The Steady Decline of Faith in Youth.” Teenagers raised in the church are leaving the church. When they grow up, they take off. The Youth Groups aren't working.

The introduction to the show included some daunting stats.

According to a 2002 Southern Baptist Council on Family Life study, about 88% of Evangelical Christian kids leave the church shortly after high school. Other studies are not encouraging.

Then, a group of sociologists, including Christian Smith, the co-author of Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (2005), has dubbed the belief system of these teenage Christian casualties Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.  Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is expressed in the following (kinda quoted, kinda paraphrased) five tenets:

1. There is a God.
2. God wants people to be good.
3. The main purpose of life is to be happy.
4. God doesn't need to be involved in our personal lives unless we’re in a bind.
5. Good people go to heaven.

So what’s the deal?

Vermon offers a good critique, suggesting that there’s a difference between the Youth Group and a Youth Ministry. Jim Rayburn, the founder of Young Life, is quoted as saying, “It’s a sin to bore a kid with the gospel.” The implication is that too much theology and too much Bible and too much talk of sin is boring. This, of course, begs the question, Is the Gospel boring?

Vermon emphasizes the need for the real Gospel, rather than one belonging to an “emaciated God.”

One last thing to spark your interest. The Backpack guys mention how the “teenager” is a modern concept and how we've even extended our youth to include “adultolescence”; our twenties are now designated as our time to find ourselves. We postpone responsibility.

I know I definitely postponed adulthood in my twenties, which really shook things up when I ended up married at thirty-four and a mom at thirty-six. I was, if you must know, forcibly removed from my search for self by a tragic car accident at twenty-eight (in Africa! Where I was finding myself!). Which was too bad, because I had been hoping to backpack through Latin America at some point, and I was thinking of going for another college degree because I still wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to be when I grew up—though it might involve animals or photography, as long as no math were involved.

Here’s the thing, which the show does touch upon: Youth Group Culture, with its emphasis on a fun albeit shallow and transient time, is focused on self. It naturally leads to adultolescence. Adultolescence may be the saddest thing of all, since one can at least say about teenagers, “Well, they’re just kids.” Can’t say that about the adultolescents out there!

How do you fix it? What does it mean to be God-centered rather than pizza-oriented? What is a vital youth ministry? How do we speak to where kids are without catering to the places they do not need to be? Does that make sense?

Teenagers are special. Despite my removal from their reality, I get this. I have a sense of their topsy-turvy psyches, their seemingly unique and nameless longings, their new abilities. They too hunger and thirst. But the pizza will not cut it.

About Vermon’s quote on being cool, I just wanted to include that one.

Jennifer Bell is mostly a writer, but she's also an English teacher. The author of two books of fiction, she lives with her husband and two kids in Phoenix.