In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Last week we talked about a recent study entitled Renegotiating Faith, concerned with changes in society that are making it harder for young Christians to reach anything approximating traditional adulthood, or to express conclusive or life-long support for any given set of religious beliefs in a pluralistic and increasingly fragmented society.
Tom: That’s a major cultural upheaval, and we are trying to treat it that way. IC and I were chewing over suggestions about what churches might be able to do to counter it.
Despite Best Intentions
Immanuel Can: Well, here are some things that are definitely counterproductive to creating committed, healthy young adults: protecting them, providing for them, programming for them, paying for them, not making any demands or expectations of them, entertaining them …
Tom: Wait, stop …
IC: Over-educating them, putting them in sports instead of spiritual and service activities, not teaching them how to work, making them go to post-secondary ed right out of high school, lecturing them, treating them as sexless and incompetent beings, catering to their delusions, making them fearful of the world.
Anything else, Tom? Because I think we’re doing all of these things right now.
Tom: You are so right. I will confess that with three kids of my own, I did a few of these crazy, stupid things involuntarily. I just hadn’t thought through what the consequences might be, and I had probably bought into a bunch of modern tropes about what kids “need” to succeed. But nothing about what most evangelical Christian parents are doing for their teens these days is either biblical or logical. In many cases, it sets up one’s child for a giant spiritual defeat. It’s like stealing those smooth stones from David’s purse before he encounters Goliath. For good, loving, parental reasons, of course. You might hurt yourself with stones!
More Chances to Fail
IC: That’s the thing, it’s all so well-intended and so completely disastrous. What the developing teen needs is not for us to solve their problems for them, but to introduce them to ways of solving problems for themselves. And in matters of spiritual growth, we start far, far too late to place spiritual challenges, responsibilities and burdens on our children … with the result that they grow up with neither the will nor the experience to navigate for themselves. Then we’re surprised when we send them off to university or work and never get them back, spiritually speaking. But it’s a disaster we’ve been preparing years ahead.
As the survey puts it, “Young adults [need] less protection and more opportunity to fail, and to learn from failure.” We’re so terrified of allowing any failure, we’re keeping our young people from growing up.
Tom: I think that’s right. We imagine that what worked for us or for our parents will necessarily work for our children, when the world has changed almost unimaginably since our parents were the most prominent generation. What our kids need is not to be prevented from clashing with reality, but to clash with reality alongside a loving, biblically literate friend who has been there before, struggled with the same questions, and knows from hard-won experience that the best arguments of the enemy are hilarious nonsense that we should giggle at rather than panic when confronted with.
The Value of Mentoring
IC: Ah, that word “alongside”. The survey has a lot to say about the value of mentoring. A mentor is quite different from a parent. A parent is the person who diapered you, wiped your runny nose, and made you behave when you were little. To become an adult, one has to break away from all that, and begin to face the world on one’s own terms. That’s why a parent can almost never be a mentor to his own children. To have somebody “alongside” is very, very useful: to have somebody controlling, leading, instructing, demanding, or paving the way is totally counterproductive to becoming adult.
Tom: Agreed. The men who got me out among the people of God and doing anything useful in my early twenties were no relation to my family and had no stake in me personally. They just happened to come alongside and see someone they could help learn to use his spiritual gift as the Head of the Church intended. I have probably helped others the same way, usually to a greater extent the more their success or failure had nothing to do with me.
IC: Mentors can be key in a number of ways. The study quotes Leighton Ford, who goes out of his way to distinguish mentoring from discipling, coaching, counseling or teaching (and above all, from parenting):
“The focus of spiritual mentoring ... is to help people pay attention to what God is doing in their lives and to respond. It is not ‘directing’ others in the sense of imposing an agenda on them and telling them what to do. Rather it is meant to be friends, who listen deeply, and who may point out what God is doing and help them to discern God’s agenda.”
“Intergenerational friendship” is another term the study uses. “Being a mirror” is another. But providing young adults with a clearer vision of possible futures and of their own capabilities is equally important.
Tom: Doesn’t sound like the kind of relationship that happens accidentally. It’s an investment.
A Plausible Course Forward
IC: Right. This relationship is at once purposeful and non-controlling:
“One expert talked about young adults having a ‘blurred path’ as the reason they delay making adult commitments. He went on to say that a mentor can help address this blurred path by painting a picture of what might lie ahead. The painting is not what lies down the path, it is a plausible course forward along the blurred path. Significantly, the ‘mentor-painter’ is an adult who cares for them. It is not enough to have a vision of a plausible future. That vision must be provided by someone who is trusted.”
Another thing the mentor does is to help the young adult negotiate a new relationship with the Christian community different from the one they had as a child. Firstly, as the study noted, “Many young adults talked about how they did not know what they were good at until someone else identified it.” The church community can be slow to see the potential of a young adult in a new relationship, especially because young adults will change things — sometimes, quite radically. Advocating — helping the local church to see the value and potential of this new young adult as they come into their own strength — is another thing a mentor can and should do.
Tom: Even with best intentions, I’m not sure all Christians would be equally useful at mentoring. It’s not just the time required, there’s a lot of discernment necessary.
Passing the Baton
IC: True. Finally, a mentor provides ongoing morale support. As the study says, “It is difficult to overstate the young adult’s need for encouragement.” Just knowing that a calm older listener is aware of one’s struggles is often more important for the young adult than having a solution presented. It’s about keeping up the young adult’s spirits while they navigate their own solutions, rather than in making solutions happen.
Tom: I really like the idea, and I know one guy my own age who is doing something quite like this to help a younger believer at a critical crossroads. It’s definitely a valuable service. But I’m thinking most local churches will not have a large number of older men and women capable or willing to provide this level of commitment. And, of course, the young person needs to buy in as well. I had two of these “mentor” types for a few months in the eighties, but only because I committed to spending an entire summer serving at a Christian camp, which provided both the time and opportunity. Nobody in my local church at the time could have done the same things for me.
IC: Right. It’s like in a relay race: there are two men running together … one finishing his run, and the other just starting. But if the baton’s going to get passed, then there has to be one man reaching forward, and another man reaching back. Mentoring doesn’t work unless both the older man is willing to reach out and the younger to trust and accept the friendship. So it’s a two-sided thing. But I also think it’s the pattern of scripture. It’s Paul preparing Timothy, Elisha taking up Elijah’s cloak, Joshua receiving the authority of Moses … and the Lord training his disciples to take over his work after his ascension.
The Shortcomings of Programs
Tom: So, just to recap here, we’ve got a couple of ways to respond to this five-to-seven-year delay in coming to a mature commitment to how one is going to live. We want to ensure nobody rushes straight from high school into higher education without a little time in the workforce first. Then we’ve got mentoring as not just a good tactic, but as the pattern of scripture.
I’d still like to think there are ways of fighting back against this cultural shift rather than just accepting it. One of the biggest ways to prepare young teens for what’s ahead is to be very frank about the potential challenges and pitfalls to faith that they will shortly be facing. I find youth programs in churches these days are pretty tepid affairs. We seem grateful the kids show up at all and often let them passively drift along, rather than doing anything to build them up, challenge them, or get them involved in service. Let’s finish up by talking a little more about how to do that.
IC: Yes, get them involved with service, and do it while they’re young. As the survey notes, “Programmatic ministry … tends to be mismatched with psychosocial development phases.” What that means is basically that after a young person hits puberty, we should stop doing everything for them, and start to add challenges to them to start serving — in small ways, at first, and then in larger ways, as they develop.
Tom: That’s a lot earlier than we usually do it.
IC: This gets at another common church problem, too: the much-lamented lack of the middle generations (say from 30-60) in teaching, leading and serving. The reason for that, I think, is that in spite of our youth programs, we have lacked a good strategy for educating and training young adults into the skills and habit of such things. Not surprisingly, when the demands of higher education, then marriage and career kick in, they feel too busy and too incapable of sustaining a service life as well; and it hasn’t been their priority, because we’ve been programming for them, instead of integrating them in the life and service of the church.
Avoiding the Traps
Tom: I agree, but before we worry about the long-term spiritual trajectory and usefulness of those who hang around the local church between 30 and 60, we have to get them there first. And I’m thinking that young people who get committed to serving the Lord in their teens — who are studying, getting into the Word and learning to feed others — are much less likely to get drawn into the various faith-destroying traps waiting for them in higher education.
IC: That brings up a third problem: the church’s difficulty with change. Because of the missing input of these middle generations, many local churches are too slow to adapt to new challenges and opportunities, and then fail to make changes in a gradual and principled way when those changes are eventually forced to come. Having a smooth continuum between generations would make change less radical and timelier. But we need the input of the new generations early on, if we’re to be alert to coming challenges from our social environment, so we can react in principled, biblical ways.
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