Owning Faith

Reimagining the Role of Church and Family in the Faith Journey of Teenagers

Ron Bruner, Dudley Chancey

• Publisher: Leafwood Publishers
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780891126096
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

More than ever, young disciples want relationships with their parents and other adults; Owning Faith helps older disciples understand how to honor and nurture relationships that last a lifetime.Today's adolescents face an uphill climb as they seek to own their faith. And while it's easy to think that what they really need is an expert, Owning Faith lets you in on God's big secret: what they need more than anything else is you. Owning Faith is an accessible guide into the adventure-filled spiritual journey of adolescents. If you would like to learn how to be a wise and compassionate companion who can make an eternal difference in the lives of youth, Owning Faith will show you how.

1

YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO DO THIS BY YOURSELF

Dudley Chancey

Bud and Temp, two country boys from Frederick, Oklahoma, did what many would consider unthinkable. Without parents along, at ages nine and five, they set out on horseback on a solo, one-thousand-mile round trip. This interstate journey was organized by their father, who felt that his boys needed a test. How would they do on their own? His thinking was that if they did well, they might set out on an even greater adventure.

Bud and Temp did win their father’s approval, so he organized a longer trip for them, this time from Oklahoma to New York. The prize: the opportunity to meet Theodore Roosevelt. In later years, Bud and Temp traveled to New Mexico, New York City, and San Francisco. Eventually, Bud became a lawyer, and Temp worked in the oil and gas industry.

Times have really, really changed. I do not know of a parent who would intentionally let one of their children at five years of age ride a horse by themselves for one thousand miles, (unless of course, his or her nine-year-old brother would be tagging along). Is the world today more dangerous? I doubt it; we just know of danger instantly now, almost every minute of the day from everywhere around the world. Instant access to news has caused many of us to live in an almost constant state of fear and anxiety.

Out of concern, or perhaps reacting to this pervasive fear, some parents have adopted a hovering, helicopter style of parenting (please read the sidebar). They monitor their kids and remain in constant contact with them.

However, as practitioners and researchers with over two hundred combined years of ministry experience and teaching, the contributors to this book find it intriguing that helicopter parenting often doesn’t cross over into the spiritual lives of children and adolescents. How and why do parents seemingly turn off this excessive concern when they assess the spiritual lives of their children? Why are they not outwardly concerned about the spiritual destiny of their progeny?

Helicopter parenting refers to “a style of parents who are over-focused on their children,” says Carolyn Daitch, PhD, author of Anxiety Disorders: The Go-To Guide. “They typically take too much responsibility for their children’s experiences and, specifically, their successes or failures,” Daitch says. Ann Dunnewold., author of Even June Cleaver Would Forget the Juice Box, calls it “overparenting.” “It means being involved in a child’s life in a way that is overcontrolling, overprotecting, and overperfecting, in a way that is in excess of responsible parenting,” Dunnewold explains.

Why do parents hover?

• Fear of dire consequences for their children
• Feelings of anxiety about the world surrounding us
• Overcompensation for their own past experiences
• Peer pressure from other parents

Many well-meaning parents who know it is their responsibility to bring up their children to know God simply seem to lack an understanding of how to pass on their faith. These parents attend church on Sundays fairly regularly, and they bring their kids to plenty of faith-based events. But on the whole, they leave the work up to “the professionals,” and they have unusual ideas about what “the work” of youth ministry actually involves.¹ In fact, I have had parents walk up to me right after I had baptized their teen and hug me and say, “It’s over,” as in, “We did it . . . we got him/her into the club. We’re done.”

A good question to ask here is, “How did we get this way?”

I must confess that, while I was working as a youth minister for years, instead of serving in a facilitating role, I often took the main-teacher role away from parents. Many of us who did youth ministry in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, realize now that this was not a good thing.² While all of us would also agree that we did do some good, perhaps much more could have been done if we had helped parents facilitate a more biblical model of ongoing, transformative, spiritual journeys for their children.

Today many of us who serve as youth ministers or who train youth ministers are trying hard to give the spiritual formation of children and adolescents back to parents.³ While this is good, throwing the role completely back into the laps of parents does not necessarily result in a more biblical model. Jesus said, Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them . . . and teaching them . . .” The process of making disciples requires more than one person (but it certainly must begin with parents). The concept of being the church requires more than one person. God made us relational. We need others. It does take a village—a church, a family—to accomplish effective spiritual formation in our children and adolescents.

Discipling is not a one-time thing—it is a lifetime venture. Our research, both past and present, indicates that children and adolescents who had several adults involved in their lives to disciple them during their spiritual journey tend to remain faithful to the church and strong in their relationship with Christ in their college years.⁴

Perhaps the most important research completed to date on churched adolescents and their parents in North America found that these teens were a little less “religious” than their parents.⁵ This is good news if their parents were spiritual giants—not good news if the parents were only passively involved in church. Parents are the models. Another finding of the first wave of this massive study was that “churched teens cannot articulate their faith.” In the second wave of the study, the researchers found that the parents of these teens also could not articulate their faith. The apple does not fall far from the tree.

So, how should we respond to this reality? We can beat ourselves up and wring our hands in despair. I think this is what the evil one would have us do: to feel helpless and hopeless about being the spiritual leaders God made us to be. Perhaps there is another way to think about what to do.

We can blame society, culture, modernity, and post-modernity. While these certainly provide context, we still have to own up to our lives. I use a small paperback book in one of my graduate classes at Oklahoma Christian University. It is actually a class about evangelism. ⁶ The book’s author, Walter Brueggemann, may be on to something when, in chapter three of that book, he compares Christians today to Israel of the Old Testament. Israel seems to have amnesia. They have forgotten from whom all blessings flow. They have forgotten who they are. They have forgotten why they exist. They have forgotten that they are the light to the nations. They have forgotten that they were given the responsibility to pass the story on to every generation. They have forgotten.

Walter Brueggemann makes a case that the purpose of evangelism is to bring outsiders in. A close second purpose of evangelism is to get insiders (the forgetters) to remember. Israel forgot its core memory. This forgetting put the entire nation in jeopardy. The very existence of Israel was doomed because they forgot the story, the memory. These insiders (who made the covenant with God) became hollow and uncaring, following idols of their time. Thereby they were completely cutting themselves off from the blessings, demands, and joys they once had in their relationship with God.

Could it be that we as the insiders today (the church) have a similar case of amnesia? Have we lost the memory of “so great a salvation”—so much so that we cannot pass it on to our children? Have our tremendous wealth and blessings and our self-sufficient individualism distanced us from our greatest duty? Brueggemann compares what we need to do to with what happened in early Bible times when the nation of Israel, God’s chosen people, forgot God:

• Today, we need a modern “back to the scroll” movement which is not scholastic in its intent, but which entertains the wild images and awesome possibilities of the Scriptures as life-defining.
• We need a disciplined, intentional relearning of the specific, detailed substance of the memory, with an awareness that these specifics touch every aspect of our life, both for joy and for obedience.
• We need a bodily act of vulnerability, so that the claim of this memory touches our marrow in unmistakable ways.⁷

Why Now?

I have plenty of things to do in life. I’m sure I am too busy. My coeditor Ron is very busy too. We have day jobs, and we do ministry with children and teens all over this country in other venues of our lives. We love what we do. Do you remember the Jaws movie? “Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water . . .” Well, just when we thought we were finished with children, along came two granddaughters for me. Ron now has four.

Maybe it was the grandkid thing that kicked us into thinking more about the spiritual development of children and teens. You ask yourself, “Did I do a good enough job with my boys in their faith development that they can pass it on to their children?” Both Ron and I know that this is not the case with many of our church people. Why? What causes so many of us to drop the ball in this area? How can we be so concerned about what college our child gets into but not seem to be aware of whether or not he/she gets into heaven? Can we blame it all on North American culture? Can we blame the church? The sad thing is that there really isn’t even much blaming going on. In comparison to all the other issues in our lives, sustaining spirituality in future generations doesn’t even appear on the radar.

Both Ron and I have done research on teens, children, intergenerational ministry, parenting, and other areas related to families. Both of us have been paid youth ministers. We also have done youth ministry unpaid (paid and unpaid are almost identical). We love teens and their families. Years ago we realized that to get a teen to own their own faith would take more than us. Ron and I now know the importance of parents being the number one influence in their children’s lives. From our own parenting experiences, we also know this is a tough job. Along with the other writers in this book, we realized way back and may be even more aware today that we must surround ourselves and our children with Christlike peers and adults to assist our kids in their faith journeys. While I love the hiking quote—You don’t know if you don’t go!—I also know that you don’t go alone.

Somewhere during our travels to conferences last year, Ron and I began thinking about how we could help get the word out that it truly does take a whole village (intentional, intergenerational—parents, family, community, church) to move children along in their faith journeys. As we sat up at night and talked about this, we decided it would be wise to get other people involved in such a project. We began asking insightful folks who loved children and teens and their families to think about contributing a chapter to a book like this. What you hold here is the fruit of those seeds.

The writers in this book have been or still are youth ministers, professors, parents, grandparents, lovers of young people. We want all children to know Christ—to love God and to love others. We do not want to forget—and we do not want them to forget—what the Lord has done for us.

One would think that, given all the miracles the Israelites witnessed and the miracles people saw Jesus do, no one would forget. But they did, and we still do. So the Bible reinforces the concept of telling the stories to every generation. We cannot afford to skip even one generation. We have to keep telling the Bible stories. We have to tell our stories. We have to tell The Story. This book is filled with stories of faith and practical information. The contributors to this book have given their lives to pass on The Story. In the pages that follow you will be challenged and encouraged to begin or keep on sharing your story along with The Story. Our prayers are that parents and youth ministers and youth workers will be encouraged and challenged to do this. We must do this!

In the endnotes you can find many links to extra reading. We have also set up a website (www.teendisciples.org) with articles and links to other resources to use in classes or at home to help parents in this daunting task. God bless you as you grow in your faith and walk by your children’s sides while pointing them to Jesus.

SECTION ONE

Whose Job Is Youth Ministry Anyway?

2

TO BE A PARENT IS TO BE A YOUTH MINISTER

Robert Oglesby

I had dreaded this night for eighteen years. It wasn’t a surprise, so I couldn’t claim I didn’t see it coming. Sociologists call it a “family developmental transition.” It was one of those marker moments as a parent: our first child was about to leave for college.

We all went to dinner. We shared some laughs, a little last-minute advice, and then drove back to the house to pack a few items for her dorm room. My wife started to get weepy the moment we pulled into our driveway; she quickly gathered the items for my daughter and put them into Lauren’s car. She hugged our daughter quickly because she was struggling not be reduced to a puddle of tears, then she ran inside the house to cry. Tonight would mean for us the closing of a chapter of life.

I told Lauren that I was proud of her and hoped she would enjoy the journey ahead. She gave me a quick hug, and I watched her taillights disappear as she pulled out of our cul-de-sac and headed to her new home in a college dorm. I stayed downstairs for a few minutes wondering how she would adjust to life in a dorm. What friends would she choose? Would she thrive ...