Radical disciples. Counter-cultural prophets. Teenagers.
One of these things is not like the others … is that song going through your head? Does adolescence fit at all with the concept of revolutionary faith? Are young people today even thinking about faith at all? They aren’t exactly coming through our church doors in droves, asking questions and making commitments. Then again, they are seeking: they want to know who they are, what their purpose is in life, who’s going to love them, who’s going to be there for them, what’s worth living for and what’s worth dying for.
Kenda Creasy Dean is associate professor of youth, church, and culture at Princeton Theological Seminary and author of Practicing Passion: Youth and the Quest for a Passionate Church. She sums up adolescent passions as desires for steadfastness (“being there”), ecstasy (“being moved”) and intimacy (“being known”). With typical adolescent exuberance, teens seek these things with a passion. But are they seeking them in the church? Not so much.
They might have checked out church. They might even have been raised in the church. But when teens outgrow the simple theology of flannel board Bible stories and basic truths, if there isn’t a passionate theology waiting to challenge them, then they get the sense that they have outgrown church. “If commitment to Jesus Christ is not, ultimately, a life-and-death investment,” writes Dean, “then young people will invest their God-given passion elsewhere.” And there are plenty of lesser gods waiting to claim the young.
Writer and youth minister Cuyler Black writes that adolescents are like heat-seeking missiles; they can readily sense holy fire – where it is, and where it is not. Therefore, if we hope to ignite the faith of young people today, we must be on fire ourselves. However, it seems that most mainline Protestant churches have toned down passion and smoothed its rough edges so that worshippers’ expressions of faith fit nicely into the mould of decorum. In the name of dignity, perhaps, we’ve tucked passions away and forgotten about them because, you know, we wouldn’t want to look foolish in front of God or anything. And so, whether or not we are passionless, we appear that way to the youth who are so desperately seeking something “large enough to fill the existential cavern” that yawns within them.
Being a passionate Christian is, of course, about much more than Sunday morning worship services, and it goes beyond questions of vocation and purpose, too, although these are part of it. Douglas J. Brouwer, in his book What Am I Supposed To Do With My Life? says that vocation “includes all of life – everything we are, everything we do, everything we aspire to be.” To find meaning and purpose in life, Brouwer says, we must give ourselves away. This is truly counter-cultural. In a society that values and seeks self-fulfillment, living a life shaped by self-giving love is definitely an against-the-tide choice.
Being a passionate Christian is about finding our identity in being loved unconditionally by the God who will always and forever “be there” for us; it’s about living with wonder and thanksgiving, letting go of lesser gods and being free to “be moved” by amazing grace; and it’s about communion, enjoying and extending the friendship of God, and experiencing the intimacy found when we let ourselves “be known” by others. A life poured out in the counter-cultural practice of self-giving love bears witness to this passion.
If young people catch a glimpse of this passion when they look through the windows of our churches and the windows of our lives, they’ll take a second look. When they do, we need to be ready. This means dispensing with superficial theologies and being prepared to offer passionate, life-changing theology in their place. This has huge implications for how we approach youth ministry.
Youth ministry must never be about creating good teenagers and wholesome youth programs, and it must never be about keeping our young people in the church. Instead, our ministry to youth must be about helping them become radical disciples of Jesus Christ.
How do we do this? Beyond being, by the grace of God, models of radical discipleship ourselves, we can embrace a curriculum of passion, a focus on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that reveals the one Love that is both worth living for and worth dying for, and that takes adolescent desires and transforms them into sacrificial love. In addition, we can encourage and equip teens to adopt Christian practices – spiritual disciplines that create a framework for faith and that realign passions, refocusing them on their proper object, God, thereby loosening adolescents’ grip on lesser loves so they are free to accept and respond to God’s love.
All of this is going to produce some pretty weird kids, because as Dean writes, “immersing young people in practices of self-giving love in a self-fulfilling culture makes them subversive, dangerous, odd – much like the Christ they follow.” That’s exactly what we hope for them.
Getting back to the question: does adolescence fit with revolutionary faith? Absolutely. Young people are made for this bigger-than-self, against-the-tide life of passion. We all are, but young people are often more ready to commit to a life of radical discipleship than those of us who have been soaking in our culture’s ideologies and expectations for years. We could learn a lot from adolescent passion.
Dean concludes that “in the quest for a passionate church, young people prod us to be more than we have become. They ask only that we be who we say we are: people of Passion, who live for a love that is ‘to die for,’ and who ask them to do the same.”
