During our meeting today, I said something that pastor asked me to share with you, and I'm happy to do so here. I'll keep the heart of the matter to a paragraph, but I also want to share part of my own faith formation story here as a way of explaining why I state this:
Youth Faith Formation, and thereby youth & family ministry, to me, must be a form of agency building. By this I mean that my role as a leader isn't to just to share what theologians have said over the years, and even what I believe or what we believe as the LCGS community. Youth Ministry as agency means that I equip and build experiences for youth in a (mostly) safe environment that encourages and inspires them to share their time, talents and gifts in ways that they're passionate about. It is about collaboration and believing that the holy spirit will work in our experiences together. In other words, I may open a door for communication and confidence, but a good number of the ideas and questions and ways in which we enact the gospel together comes from them. For me, it's about building a foundation for them from which they feel confident to speak about faith and calling and passion--hopefully all from experience that they will carry with them into an adulthood of faith.
This desire to make faith formation something in which youth voices and questions are heard actually comes from a pretty painful loss in my own life while I was in college. But to start at the beginning...
Jessica* was assigned my 'care' when I started as a freshman in HS. It was tradition in our youth group (about 60-80 HS kids) for every freshman to have a junior or senior "big brother" (for guys) or "big sister" and get together at least once a semester. Jessica was different--we were on drama team together, she took me to Monday morning prayer group and school afterward, and we were both in bible quizzing though on different teams (not familiar? Check it out some basics from: http://www.parkridgefmc.org/ministries/bible_quizzing) , swing choir and choir at school. She actually wasn't the first Big sister assigned to me, but when my senior found herself overwhelmed, Jessica, a junior, stepped in probably because of our already established connections. We stayed pretty close through her graduation, and it would be unfair for me to say that I didn't view her as a bit of a hero. This girl knew the quizzing material we studied forwards and backwards. Chapter and verse, thematic consistencies across a book, between books, and she took me to pray meeting and school every Monday morning. She was someone I felt comfortable asking just about everything when it came to faith--and she had answers she was confident in.
We ended up at the same college, but had grown apart by the time I started there two years after her. We both served on the school newspaper writing staff, but she was an art major and I was in English and Psychology--not crossing paths outside of the paper very often. Right before she graduated, she wrote an article she titled, something akin to "I kissed Christianity goodbye and you should too," in which she talked about how her experiences in religion courses made her start to question everything she knew about God and how that questioning made her leave faith behind.
I was broken by this--not only because I felt like I'd lost her, but because, as adults/professors started airing their hurt from her words....one was her dad. He then voiced concerns with the religion department, and a lot of that pressure, that hurt, landed on a close family friend who was department head, and on my dad who was also a member of the religion department. It became about families wounding families, all in the name of trying to re-claim Jessica's former Christian beliefs and bring her back into the church.
Sadly, though she lives in this area still, we haven't talked in about 10 years, and I have no idea if she's rejoined the church or continued to believe that Jesus' message was a lie. The thing that separated her and I, as best as I could figure it out, was that I was encouraged from an early age to question and search. While she and many others in middle school were attending Christian rock concerts and rallies, I did too. But my dad also took me on the college freshman Chicago faith weekend while I was in middle school. At the age of 13, I was going to Roman Catholic, Baptist, AME, and Episcopal churches--along with visit Jewish Temple, Muslim Mosque services and Q& A sessions, Ba'hai temple and their Q & A sessions, Christian communes and hanging out with a number of college freshman and sophomores who had questions and answers of their own. It was challenging, to be sure, and I'm sure in those times that I said, as a 13 year old excitedly to my dad that I thought Ba'hai made a great deal of sense and I was drawn to their peaceful ways that HE was scared--but he and my mom gave me the agency I needed to explore, to ask questions, to explore my passions through missions trips and conversations and opportunities to listen and come to my own conclusions.
See, it's SCARY. There is no guarantee that the searching and the building of experiences or collaborations with youth in the church will bring them to think exactly as we do about Jesus and Christianity, but often in the searching and the building up, the faith becomes their own. What happens to a young person's faith when they are actively searching, the combining their passions and callings, questioning and reading scripture and talking with others about what they think they might believe? They come to beliefs that are authentically what they think and believe--and this, more than anything else, is what I think left Jessica feeling so bereft of faith--she wasn't sure if she believed it because someone told her to, or because she thought it was true.
I hope that another college student, another set of parents, another church and college community never has to go through something as painful as watching and experiencing Jessica lose her faith and her faith community so violently and angrily as what I saw--so many were hurt. Giving agency and encouraging youth to be guided by the still small voice of God in their own lives, is the way that makes that seem most plausible to me. I can't tell them what to think--only that it is good to think, to question, to explore, and to love God in whatever ways they can.
**a Pseudonym to protect the identities of others involved
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