I grew up when youth ministry in our church was known as BYF, Baptist Youth Fellowship. We went on hay rides, played games, had Bible sword drills and once a month joined the other churches in our association for a large youth gathering in one of our larger churches. It was fun and a good chance to learn about God and what the Bible teaches. Youth ministry today is much more serious. Not that there's not opportunities for fun and building relationships with other young people, but the challenges young people face today require much more from the youth leaders than what the youth leaders of my generation faced.
Recently, I had the opportunity to listen in to a ZOOM meeting where a global study of teens was shared. This study focused on 13-19 year-olds in twenty countries to better understand their religious beliefs and their challenges. Of the young people in the study, 43% were Christian, 23% were from other faiths, and 34% professed no religion with 20% of them committed to atheism or agnosticism. However. when a list of criteria was presented that would determine how many of the Christians were committed to the faith, that 43% dropped to only 7%.
Some of the interesting findings in the report noted that 52% of all the teens believe that all religions teach equally valid truths. Conservative Christians believe that only faith in Jesus Christ leads to salvation, but 53% of the Christian teens in the study believed that all faiths lead one to God.
When the study focused on issues the teens struggled with they found there were many. One in five teens feel sexually attracted to someone from the same gender in the previous few months. One in four admitted to having suicidal thoughts in the previous three months, and this included one in three teens from the US. The top factors that led to the suicidal thoughts were gender confusion, online bullying, same-sex attraction and depression. The study found that girls struggled more with these issues than the boys.
Only 53% of US teens believe that gender is determined at birth reflecting the trend we are seeing in our culture. Same-sex marriage is also growing in acceptance among teens with girls much more likely to say that marriage does not need to be exclusively between a man and woman. It was also found that a small percentage of teens view marriage as a lifetime commitment between two people.
While there were other interesting findings in the study, I will only mention two more, one negative and one positive. The negative one is that only one in 12 teens will talk to their pastor or study a religious text to find answers about the meaning of life. This indicates a real distrust that many teens have towards their religious leaders, which I sense reflects more on those of us in leadership than it does on the teens. We have not earned their trust.
The positive finding I'll mention is that 41% of the teens who do not attend church say they would if asked and another third reported they might attend a church if asked.
I doubt that the youth leaders I had growing up ever faced any of these challenges. Today, I would expect that all youth leaders do if they are listening to their teens. Many of our churches need to take a serious look at their youth ministries and ask if they are equipped to respond to their young people who are facing some of these challenges and questions. The decisions our young people make in their teens will impact the rest of their lives, and we need to do everything we can to help them make the best decisions.
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