As my regular readers are aware one of my interests and concerns is for the future of the church, especially as it relates to youth in the church and keeping them involved in the church.  Part of my interest of course is because my household is a bit of a focus group, research study, or test bed for youth in the church.  At the present time I have one who has left the mainline for an evangelical church, one who seems to be finding a home in the confessional leanings of the mainline, and one who is trying to find their way between those two.  I do however count myself fortunate that all three of my children are involved in active congregations.

So it was with much interest that I listened to the October 3rd edition of the White Horse Inn where host Michael Horton interviewed Kenda Creasy Dean, Methodist Elder and Princeton Theological Seminary professor, on her new book Almost Christian: What the faith of our teenagers is telling the American Church.  I have added this to my list of books to acquire (easy) and read (got to figure where in the queue to place it).  In the interview there was a ton of great information drawn from the National Study of Youth and Religion project and published in the book.  While a lot of the interview, and probably the book as well, was about the faith and beliefs of teenagers and “moralistic therapeutic deism”, what was of most interest to me was the discussion about the study’s findings related to what did, and did not, make youth stick with the church as they got older.  For all of the details on the nature of the teenagers’ faith, including the great description of it as “benign whateverism,” I encourage you to listen to all 33 minutes of the interview.

So, here are a couple of the quotes I found most informative, hopefully not too out of context  (listen to the interview for that), and cited statistics from Prof. Dean (not necessarily in order and somewhat edited from conversational language to written form):

[Talking about teens with highly devoted faiths] Four things stood out
for me: One was that they had what I call “a peculiar God story.” They
had a God story that was distinct to their community’s understanding of
the world. They were able to articulate that God story… The second
thing that they had was a community of faith that mattered to them
deeply and they felt like they belonged… The family sense was extended
to faith communities, and they also felt like they belonged spiritually
though. It wasn’t just a social connection, they really felt cosmically
connected to God in their congregations… The third thing was that
they had a sense of, I call it a sense of vocation, a sense of purpose, a
divinely inspired purpose maybe. A sense that God had put them here for
a reason and that reason was to help participate in God’s plan for the
world in some way. And the last thing, and this is really striking, is
that these particular kids, the highly devoted kids in the study, had
markedly higher levels of hope than anybody else.

The young people who have highly devoted faiths, that’s the 8% of the
kids in the study who actually did find faith as a pivot point around
which they organized their lives in explicit ways, had much stronger
connections to adults in their communities of faith, and to adults in
general, than their peers who did not have highly devoted faiths.  I
also think its true that we really tend to overestimate the amount of
time that young people are spending in congregations, even if they are
active in a congregation, they are likely to be around members of the
congregation an hour or two a week. And we overestimate the difference
that hour or two makes in their lives — they don’t actually have enough
time to form deep connections.  And over and over again studies show
that pastors think that people come to church because of the pastor or
because of their interest in deepening their faith or whatever.  Most
lay people say they come to church because of the relationships.

One of the interesting things about the longitudinal studies, one of the
findings was that the most significant factor in whether a young
person’s faith weathers the transition from high school to the young
adult years is the religiosity of parents while they were teenagers.

The interview has a great extended discussion about the use of the catechism and how it was intended for use within the household, even to the point of posting it on the dining room wall and discussing it around the dinner table.  Prof. Dean makes two interesting points about this beyond the value for teaching the faith.  The first is that it is being done in the household setting.  The second is that the catechism provides youth, and all of us for that matter, with a language to talk about our faith.  She points out that in the study most teenagers “have very, very few language resources when it comes to faith.”

Prof. Dean is an engaging speaker and produces a couple of good lines to make you smile:

What we haven’t been able to do very well is to tell the Christian story, or to teach the Christian story, in a way that it looks like it matters in this world of competing narratives…  [I]t means that young people need to be in contact with folks whose lives are demonstrably different because of their faith.  Because just hearing about it is like hearing Cinderella, and Cinderella doesn’t really make a difference about the way we live our lives — it’s a story we tell.  And for a lot of young people that’s the way they experience their encounter with the Christian story as well.

[Talking about parents letting children “chose for themselves”] Well the
way we let them chose for themselves for a couple of generations was to
just sort of assume that when they got old enough we might expose them
to religion but we wouldn’t actually teach them anything because we want
them to be free to chose for themselves.  And the interesting thing is
we don’t have that confidence when it comes to Algebra, but somehow when
it comes to faith we just sort of thought it would emerge when the time
is right.

And a finding that runs counter to many mainline churches I know and to Prof. Dean’s expectations:

[Talking about vocation and social justice and mainline youth being less likely to associate moral responsibility with following Jesus Christ.] There may be less living it out, but there is certainly less living it out and connecting it to your faith.  And as a mainline Protestant this finding horrified me — this is like “oh man, how have we missed this?” But I think one of the reasons is mainline Protestants… we tend to shy away from any kind of God language whatsoever. Well, the effect of that is, you might be the most socially active congregation in the world but if you never connected it to your faith young people obviously assume it’s because you are nice people.  We go on these mission trips where we never talk about God because we are nice people, not because we are Christian and this is how Christ called us to treat one another. In fact one of the findings in the longitudinal study is that when it comes down to it the practices that matter in helping faith endure past the high school years prayer and reading the Bible matter a lot.  Going on mission trips don’t make a bit of difference.

Kenda Creasy Dean has a lot to say about how youth and young adults get integrated into the church — in fact one of the chapters in her book is titled “Mormon Envy.”  This integration of young people is something I have also come to appreciate about the LDS church.  The LDS communities have several features that make them particularly good at passing on their faith.  For more on this I would point you to a Beliefnet blog Flunking Sainthood and their comments on Dean’s book.  Here are a couple of relevant quotes from the interview:

What Mormons have that other communities have not really looked at as intentionally is faithful parents.  It’s one of the most striking findings from the study is how closely young peoples’ faith mirrors their parents’ faith.  As you know, families are the most important faith community if you’re part of the Church of Latter Day Saints. But parents are hugely influential as conduits of faith in Mormon families.  That tends to be less true for example, I’m a mainline Protestant, for mainline Protestants a common scenario would be that parents will think faith is important but they don’t have enough faith formation themselves to have any confidence at handing it on to their children themselves.  So, they take their kids to church to “get them done” by the professionals who can hand on faith in their stead.  Well, that turns out not be be as effective as when it is passed on in the context of a family community.

I think a lot of Protestants tend to think, and I tend to think this way myself, “my kids didn’t get this while they were in high school, but there is plenty of time, they’ll get it eventually.” … Mormon urgency doesn’t allow for that.

Based on my experience and previous reading these are the quotes that really resonated with me from an interview that was full of interesting data and interpretation.  And one of the things that I very much appreciated was Prof. Dean’s acknowledgement of the number of times where the data surprised her.

What is the message for the church?  For me it is a validation that we need to invite the youth to be active members of the church, not just attending services and youth group on Sunday, but encouraging them to be active in some area of ministry in the congregation where they build relationships across generations, we can challenge them to do something, and through their activity they can not just hear, but participate in the God story of the congregation.  Secondly, we need to communicate to parents how important a role they play — that they can not leave the religious education of their kids to the church but they have to be the primary educators.  And then the church has to give them the tools to do that.

If you want more on-line there is an excerpt from the book available and another interview on Patheos.

To close, here is a quote Prof. Dean gave from Tony Campolo –

Addendum: Now, here is an interesting parallel that arose yesterday in our church’s education hour.  My friend Scott was teaching a class based on Albert Raboteau‘s book Slave Religion.  After discussing how slave owners used Christianity as a justification for having slaves but then kept the religion from them someone asked the obvious question, “why would a slave convert to Christianity if it justified their oppression?”  Scott summarized the answer from Raboteau (p. 244-246) as 1) The Bible provided a language to talk to God, 2) they saw the parallel of their situation to the story of Israel in bondage in Egypt and their liberation, and 3) it provided hope for the future, particularly regarding eternity.  I was struck by how these three paralleled Dean’s points about the highly devoted youth — How the Israel story for the slaves is part of their God story that is distinct to the community’s understanding of the world.  How they both find the distinctive of hope and eschatological vision.  And while there is not really a parallel in Dean’s four central characteristics of devoted teens to the language point, it does correspond to how the highly devoted teens have acquired the language to talk about God.  Another distinctive of later Slave Religion that was mentioned but not included in this list was the high-level community structure and participatory worship, especially regarding singing. I was struck by how these characteristics of, shall I say, devoted Christianity are similar across cultural contexts.