Why Youth Ministry?

I was walking down Rokeby Rd today in Subiaco and had to pass some time so I dropped in to Dymocks bookstore to check out what they had on offer. Usually I browse for a pretty short period of time and then just leave but today a book peaked my interested and I eventually ended up buying it. The book is Teenagers – a natural history by David Bainbridge and it was published just this year. It mostly peaked my interest because I could tell that it was a secular approach to the history of teenagers which I figured could be a good read in light of my desire to write a book on why I am so interested in Youth Ministry.

About the book
The book is not ‘Christian’ and is basically an attempt to account for the phenomenon of teenagerdom from both a historical and evolutionary perspective. What I have read so far has been really, really  interesting regarless of one’s view on evolution and its role or non-role in the Christian worldview.  The book discusses what makes teenagers who they are and what the importance of adolescence is from a historical perspective. The first chapter gives an evolutionary history of ‘puberty’ and how humans correspond to other animals. Again, regardless of ones beliefs I have found this an interesting approach. Reading all about the physiological changes that take place, what causes them scientifically and what they ’cause’ in the teenager really opens your eyes to the everyday challenges that teenagers face from WITHIN their own bodies.

Some quotes from the book that I have found interesting or that I think could be useful in my book are as follows.

“The teenage years are in fact the most interesting of your life. Science says so. These years can also be the most positive – it all depends on what you make of them.” (Page 1)

“Everyone wants to give you advice on what you should and should not do, how you should do it and with whom you should do it. There soon arises in the young mind a suspicion that adults cannot really remember their own teenage years clearly enough to be able to give good advice. The suspicion feeds into a growing mistrust of authority, which gets even worse when teenagers discover that adults cherish such distrust in themselves, but dislike it in anyone under twenty years old.” (Page 2)

“As I have distilled the developmental biology, the paleoanthropology, the neuroscience, the physiology, the therapy and the politics, I have become ever more convinced that adolescence is the most crucial time of our lives.” (Page 3)

“It [puberty] was all much vaguer and mixed up than the books suggest, and perhaps it is that chaotic unpredictability that can lift a teenager to a higher, more intense level of experience than any other phase in our lives.” (Page 6)

“And the reason why being a teenager can seem more confusing than any other ‘life stage’ is that there are simply more things happening than at any other time – a teenager is neither a child nor an adult, but a complex mixture of both. These years are not a gap – rather they are a wonderfully exciting collision when all the different strands of our life get tangled together in a way that will never happen again.” (Page 7)

Put quite simply, the teenage years are virtually unique in our lifetime. We never again go through such radical change in such a short space of time. Our brain never again develops at the same rate as it does during adolescence. We never again have the same level of crazy hormones convulsing through our veins as we do during puberty. So what can teenagers do with all this craziness?

What does this have to do with Youth Ministry?
One of the topics that I wish to cover in my book is based on a discovery by the Barna group in a study some years ago. Basically they discovered that approximately 80% of people that will become Christian in their lifetime had significant involvement in some Christian setting or from some Christian person before the age of 20. 80%!! Now I obviously believe that God can win anyone over, but this statistical finding still says something important I believe in regards to ministry to youth and I think it is uniquely tied in with a teenagers physical and spiritual development. During the teenage years, as I have quoted above, so much is going on. Much of who we are to be as adults is developed and shaped in the teenage years. It is a transition phase from childhood to adulthood in every sense. The blueprint for how our brain will think, function and grow for the rest of our lives is virtually cemented before we have to get our first real job. If Christians don’t get a chance to influence this development we make it much harder, I believe, to reach people when they are older. It does happen, but it is much more difficult.

One of the difficulties of youth ministry is that the fruit may not be seen during these teenage years but the more I read about both youth ministry and the physiological development of teenagers, the more I am convinced that youth ministry is a pivotal ministry for the gospel. If we can help teenagers to catch the vision while they go through all these crazy changes, I believe we can both make their teenage years easier and also use their enthusiasm and energy to catalyse a whole new generation of followers of Jesus. Tonly Campolo once said something along the lines of  ‘the problem in youth ministry is not that teenagers don’t want to do anything, it is that we do not expect enough of them. Teenagers are more than willing to fight for a cause if they are invited and encouraged to take part.’ Are our youth ministries fighting hard enough to challenge our teenagers to use their adolescence to benefit society or do we just accept that teenagers are at best are difficult and at worst are good for nothing youth’s whose blatant disrespect for authority proves they are a lost cause? I’d prefer to fight for the former. As Bainbridge says, ‘These years can also be the most positive – it all depends on what you make of them.’