THE QUEENSLAND BAPTIST

Is church relevant to youth?

Queensland Baptist state youth coordinator, David Toscano, sees a need in churches across Queensland.

He believes that youth ministries in churches should be more culturally relevant, and that churches need to change more than just the type of music they play if they want to reach the youth of today.

“There is a deepening gap between the relevance of church and youth ministry,” David says, “We’ve basically just updated the music. We haven’t changed the culture. We have gone from a three hymn sandwich to a three Hillsong sandwich, but we haven’t changed to a more interactive style of service and a more relevant time for services to occur.

“This needs to happen so we can take the Gospel to the next generation. If we fail to grapple that, we’ll lose them. We’ve already lost Generation X to a large extent because the church’s time frame didn’t catch up. So Generation Y is the one we need to focus on.”

David is keen to see church held in places like schools and skating parks, and stresses that they must have a stronger impact on relationships.

“We took a team of about seven youth pastors away for a retreat at the start of the year and looked at the signs of a healthy youth ministry. It moved away from the standard stuff like leadership and program styles to multigenerational things, where the younger generation is investing in the older generation, and the older generation is investing in the younger generation, key concepts like that.

“They don’t define the way the program happens, but they impact the way we ‘do’ ministry, by saying these are our objectives: to see young people have a thirst for God. To have love expressed within the youth ministry. To move from a youth group, which is about programs, to a youth ministry, which can start with one young person. If a church has one young person, they can have a youth ministry.”

David also sees the need for teenagers to own the Christian faith for themselves, rather than just accepting it as it was handed down from their parents.

“We should be encouraging young people to see their relationship with God outside the bounds of a religious institution,” he says, “to see it as a spiritually significant relationship that influences the way they live.

“We recently had 28 students in Queensland from the USA’s Southern Baptist Convention. One of them commented that he had realised Southern Baptists could be legalistic in their approach, especially when it comes to issues of consumption of alcohol. Those students hadn’t been given the opportunity to work through the rationale of why they won’t drink. You just don’t do it, it’s an evil thing to do.

“Often when kids are given the opportunity to work through these things themselves, they come up with the same conclusions, but it’s something that they’re owning, rather than something that’s imposed on them.” Imposing a set of beliefs on children without letting them draw their own conclusions can have a negative effect on the child’s spiritual life, says David.

“Young people need the opportunity to deconstruct the cultural traditions that the church imposes on them and reconstruct their own values based on God’s word,” he says.

“Recently I met a woman who grew up in a Brethren congregation. She is vehemently opposed to Christianity and what Christians stand for. She believes in parts of the Old Testament, believes that there is only one God; no trinity. After about two hours of talking with her, I found out that there were two main things that contributed to this response. Fear of the rapture and the inability of the people in her church to respond to her questions.

“She was freaked out about the rapture. There were times when [as a child] she would lie awake at night and it was quiet in the house and she was petrified that Jesus had come back and her parents had been taken and she’d been left behind. We instill a fear of Jesus coming back in kids. The people in her church were encouraging a response in her based on fear, rather than a response based on reconciliation and relationship.

“She had read in the Old Testament, “The Lord your God, the Lord is One” and then she was taught from the New Testament that Jesus is God and that the Holy Spirit is God. When she asked questions about it, her questions were dismissed as being terrible questions to ask. She was told that her questions would hurt other people and that they were not questions that a good Christian child would ask.

“Because of her inability to find answers to those questions, she responded with total disbelief. Those responses have changed the course of her journey.

“I encourage people to deconstruct the traditions that we impose on youth. It’s like we’ve built up a dam wall for a young person, made up of what they should believe. We should encourage them to pull it all down and look at each brick and reassemble those bricks.

“Instead, what often happens is as soon as there’s a breach in the dam wall, the youth leader or pastor or the parent will get some mud and patch it up quickly to stop the breach. We can’t let that happen, because it ends up becoming a dam wall made of mud, rather than solid brick. We need to let a bit of the water flow out and then see this dam wall built slowly in a secure fashion.

“We need to give kids permission to wrestle with these issues.”

by Lynne Stringer courtesy of The Queensland Baptist

23rd September 2002

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