Last month, I began re-reading Mark DeVries' book, Family-Based Youth Ministry.  It is my attempt to be sure we are on the best path to raising our youth to be mature Christians.  The more we know, the more we can support all of the youth in our church family, and the more we can expect from them.  I ended my article with a challenge to see more youth in worship on a regular basis.

This month, I read that the DeVries' (and many others) believe the root reason for our inability to lead our young people to mature Christian adulthood is that our culture and our churches have systematically isolated young people from the very relationships that are most likely to lead them to maturity.   He says, "young people grow to maturity in general, and to maturity in Christ in particular, by being around people who exhibit such maturity themselves."  He points out a study that revealed teenagers spend less than 7% of their waking hours with any adults, while spending approximately half of their time with their peers.*  And this was YEARS before smartphones!!  When our young people are around adults, they are often being entertained or taught or directed by adults.  There is often little dialogue or conversation allowing for youth to simply be with adults and share conversations.  As we know, their schedules are so packed that even if adults were available there would be little opportunity to spend time with them.

Harvard psychiatrist Armand Nicholi found that American parents spend less time with their children than do parents in any other country in the world.  Sixty years ago, families worked and ate together by necessity. Teenagers and parents had little choice but to spend hours and hours together.  As a result, young people couldn't avoid observing and listening in on the adult world, giving youth exposure that laid a natural track into adulthood.

So how do churches do in connecting the age groups?  Well, for several generations, churches isolated our youth from the rest of the church and it hasn't done them or our churches any favors.  We call it the "one-eared Mickey Mouse" and it looks like this:

So how do churches contribute to the gap between youth and adults?  Well, some churches have youth gatherings separate from the rest of the church on Sunday evenings.  Some churches have separate youth worship services altogether. In worship, youth sit separate from their parents (e.g.) in the balcony. Youth go on youth mission trips with only a handful of adults.  There are separate youth budgets, youth rooms, youth choirs, youth conferences, youth retreats, youth worship services, youth ministers and on and on.

DeVries' is right to observe that "when leaders in American churches began to see teenagers' growing disinterest with the church, they responded like a good mechanic: isolate and fix.  Church leaders assumed that by isolating the youth department into its own independent subgroup, they could create a curriculum that would instill all the values necessary for youth to grow to mature Christian adulthood.  But the Christian community is not a machine.  In fact, the "solution" of isolation created a much worse problem. 

                "Because teenagers are an integral part of the body of Christ, perhaps we would be better off to approach this problem less as a mechanic would and more as a physician would.  When an organ is removed from a living body, that organ dies, and often the body dies along with it.  The same principle is true in the body of Christ.  Teenagers grow toward mature Christian adulthood when they are connected to the total body of Christ, not isolated from it."...

For the rest of the letter, CLICK HERE

...Are we perfect? No, but we are working on reconnecting all of our age groups to the total body of Christ. That is community.  That is church.