Claiming Our Place of Influence in the Lives of our Youth

Ask most adults in a congregation who has the greatest influence in the lives of our youth and most people would answer, “it’s their peers,” or “it’s the media.” Indeed peer pressure is a dominant force in the life of any teenager. Acceptance by one’s peers is vital to the self-esteem of any person, but it is even more important to an adolescent who is in the process of forming his or her own self-identity.

At the same time our young people today are exposed to a mind boggling 3,000 advertising images a day! Cable and Satellite TV now offer an unprecedented number of options for viewing. Do you remember when you were lucky to get all three major networks? And the Internet now connects our youth with computers around the world through which they can access information (both good and bad), and communicate with peers instantaneously. It is mind boggling to imagine how differently today’s youth experience the world as compared to those just 10 or 15 years ago.

It is no wonder that adults very quickly give in to the notion that peers and media now hold a greater influence on youth than was once the case.

While this might be our impression, reality is far different. The old adage that “the more things change the more they stay the same” holds true with youth these days as well. Wayne Rice, in his outstanding book, Junior High Ministry: A guide to early adolescence for youth workers, writes that even today youth look first to their parents for advice and guidance on the foundational issues of life.1 Yes, a teenager might want to dress like the kids are dressing at school, but when it comes to issues such as matters of faith, he or she will listen first to mom and dad. This is why it is so important for our congregations to be supporting parents in their vital role of passing on faith to the next generation.

Furthermore, Rice notes, after parents the second greatest influence in a young person’s life can be found among adults in their extended family. Here youth indicate that grandparents, older siblings, aunts and uncles, and others who are part of their extended family also have great influence in their life’s direction.

Next in the order of influence come other adults outside the home. This includes teachers, coaches, youth workers, Sunday school teachers, pastors, neighbors, bosses, and the parents of their peers. It is only after all of these adults that we finally we get to the peer group, and coming in a distant fifth is the media.

The good news is that youth are looking to the significant adults around them to provide meaning, direction, and an example for living life. What is alarming, however, is that studies show that youth are spending less and less time under the care and mentorship of loving adults. One study, now over a decade old, indicated that teenagers spend less than 7 percent of their waking hours with adults, while spending half of their time with peers (Csikzentmihalyi & Larson, 1984). The Rev. Mark Devries in his book Family Based Youth Ministry, notes that in most phases of our society (the home, the neighborhood, the church), we have increasingly pushed youth to the margins and have cut off interactions between them and influential adults.2 Increasingly our children are spending more and more of their time alone, or with only limited adult interaction. What this means is that while our youth look to adults for guidance and instruction on navigating the complexity of life, we adults have largely removed ourselves from their field of vision. As a result, they turn elsewhere.

What is the message to the church today? We need to be reminded of the promise that we make at each baptism in our congregation to stand with the parents and sponsors in bringing up this child to love the Lord, and to lead him or her to the point of accepting Jesus Christ as their Savior. This means that one of the best things that we can do for youth ministry is to support the parents of our youth with prayer, encouragement, and programming to help them remain effective in their task of love. It also calls us to involve the entire congregation in providing mentorship to our youth. Let’s not leave youth ministry to a nice young couple, or a paid youth director, and ask them to keep the youth “in line, and out of sight.” Rather it is time for all adults to assume part of the job of mentoring our young people by doing things such as participating with youth on service projects; inviting youth to work with adults in providing ministry to younger children, inviting youth to sing not just in the “youth choir” but in the adult choir where they interact with still more adults; invite youth to be ushers not just on youth Sunday, but as part of the regular rotation of ushers (which means that yes, we might have an usher show up wearing jeans and tennis shoes), and allow youth to have voice in the planning of the weekly worship service. Finally it means adults taking seriously the role of Christ in their own daily lives, and so loving that relationship with Him that they want it desperately for their own children and the youth of the church. While creative programming, charismatic youth leaders, and contemporary music can sometimes help in this task, this ultimately depends on people being willing to connect with youth not because they are the future of the church, but because they need Christ to help them live their life today.

Our youth are calling us to be an influence in their lives by all that we do and say. Let us not remove them from their peers or the Internet, but provide for them a sacred map to navigate the path of faith in Christ.