By Debra-Lynn B. Hook
Bringing Up Mommy
Special to Tribune News Service
Every Sunday afternoon, my 17-year-old son stops what he’s doing and voluntarily drives to a church up the road to be with a couple dozen of his friends.
They eat. They play games. They make and serve meals for the hungry. Sometimes they go on extended trips -- most recently to New York, where they spent a week staffing Harlem soup kitchens and Brooklyn food pantries and reflecting on their rapidly evolving world views.
Anybody who has belonged to a Christian church in the past 50 years recognizes this as a church youth group.
It’s an institution that’s been around since the 1940s when a Presbyterian minister started Young Life to help students learn about Christianity.
It’s also an institution being labeled, of late, a failure.
“To read books on youth ministry these days, it is hard not to get the sense that this experiment we call youth ministry in the local church has failed,” blogs Dave Wright, coordinator for youth ministry in the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina. “Seventy percent of young people will drop out of church after high school, and only 35 percent will return to regular attendance.”
Other church watchers tag youth groups a failure, because leaders don’t put enough emphasis on religious teaching, because young people are leaving meetings full of pizza instead of Scripture.
“The state of youth ministry is not good,” blogs evangelical seminarian and Christian activist Andy Gill. “We’ve danced around the issue saying it lightly and gently. Or either being in complete denial of it. It’s time to man up and step up. Take on courage, live out our faith and preach the word of God.”
I am admittedly not a minister with a vested interest in church growth, nor an evangelical Christian, nor even an official member of a church. I am merely the parent of a teen-ager living in an age of mixed moral messages, far-flung extended family support and religious schism, in a culture where discussion of values inside the public-school classroom can get you in trouble with the law.
And I see my son’s youth group as a godsend.
Within my son's group, two meetings a month are devoted to fun events like broom ball or other games, while two are devoted to service projects and attendant opportunities for reflective conversation. Values are understood explicitly because they are supported during group interactions. They are understood implicitly because the group meets under a church roof. As for religion, students take turns leading a prayer at the end of each meeting. A couple of times a year, the pastor visits the group to talk about such heady matters as sexuality.
Parent co-leader Gayle Wall, a teacher by profession and mother of one of the students, believes the secret to running a successful youth group is listening to what the kids say they want.
“We had a planning meeting, and they told us they did not want religion, religion, religion,” says Ms. Wall. “They wanted fun and service work.”
A good youth group fills a niche not filled by school or soccer or the school choir. And if learning to give to others is the only takeaway, in fact, Ms. Wall says she’s done her job.
“If cutting out a time slot for service in their lives --- if that’s a part of their lives for the rest of our their lives -- then we accomplished something,” she says.
Clearly, I recognize that my son’s youth group under the auspices of the progressive-leaning United Church of Christ might not share the same mission as all churches. In a recent online survey conducted by the conservative National Center for Family-Integrated Churches, 55 percent of parent respondents said they were concerned that youth ministry doesn’t properly train “mature believers.”
I meanwhile believe we are throwing the baby out with the bath water when we fail to recognize that church youth groups have more to offer than the future promise of religious affiliation.
This past Sunday, students who traveled on this latest mission trip to New York led services at the UCC church. Students played piano and sang Michael Jackson lyrics, "It don’t matter if you’re black or white” to the mostly white congregation. Students stood, one by one, and spoke of where they saw the face of Christ during their trip.
A few students spoke at length about their experiences, among them 18-year-old Sandra Creech, a graduating senior raised in our small college town in the Midwest, whose work in inner-city New York was providing child care for the toddlers of incarcerated parents.
Based on statistics, Sandra may not step foot in a church again after this last youth-group gathering.
Based on another set of statistics, the children she tended could end up in prison like their parents.
They included a 2-year-old boy, who spent his time with Sandra feeding her pretend soup, who Sandra said "liked to be held and to wrap his entire hand around my one finger and lead me around the room,” and who transformed Sandra in the process.
“I realized on this trip, through this experience, with this youth group, why God has us help others. It isn’t to change the one huge world that he created, but rather to change all the billions of individual little worlds that exist for all of us,” said Sandra. “The future isn’t life. Today is life. Right now, the moments we are living and breathing in -- these are real and tangible, and the future is all speculation. Changing this child’s today, by making him laugh and smile, was indeed changing his life. By making him happy I didn’t change the world, but maybe I changed his world.”
The same could be said for church youth groups. The future for our teen-agers’ religious affinity is speculation. Today is life. Changing a young person’s today is indeed changing her life.
--Journalist Debra-Lynn B. Hook of Kent, Ohio, has been writing about family life since 1988 when she was pregnant with the first of her three children. Her blog is http://www.debralynn-bloopbloopotter.blogspot.com. Her web site is www.debralynnhook.com. E-mails are welcome at dlbhook@yahoo.com.
