For the final segment of my series (see parts 1, 2, 3, 4), I focus on the area of congregational ministry I have the most experience with: the relationship between teens and the rest of the church. It’s my conviction that churches often approach youth ministry in ways that are counter-productive.

Youth and Adults Within the Congregation

Divisions among Christians indeed run deep, but generational alienation provides a realistic opportunity to practice reconciliation. While Warren and Kimball sidestep the issue by planting homogeneous churches for Boomers or Xers, a commitment to the church as the Body of Christ suggests another solution: learning to love those in our own churches who belong to other generations, and whom we see and ignore each week. In pursuing this goal, easing the generational divisions between teenagers and the rest of the congregation is a good way to start.

In recent decades, American parents have withdrawn from their teenagers’ lives, believing (incorrectly) that teens don’t want to spend time with them. Consequently, young people lose their connection to family, fail to develop a strong moral compass, and are forced to find their own way through life.

Many churches have taken a similar path: unsure of how to relate to teens, adults assume they will be happiest spending time with their peers, so they create a youth group where teens can be themselves.

But the goal of Christian discipleship is to develop Christlike selves, and that requires consistent personal contact with mature believers –– preferably from various generations and beginning with the teens’ parents –– whose faith they can emulate. To accomplish this goal within a youth group takes deliberate effort and hard work, because it’s always easier for a youth minister to keep parents happy by keeping their kids occupied than to connect those teens with their parents and other adults. A successful youth program can create the illusion of a single body without connecting young people to the church as a whole in any significant way.

The unintended lessons taught in isolated youth groups are subtle but destructive. Teens who grow up in a youth group that lacks strong connections with the church learn that their faith has no real connection to that of older adults, and that relationships with other generations (and anyone who is genuinely different from them) are too difficult and not worth pursuing. They learn that it’s okay to spend all their time with people who are mostly just like them (even the “different” people in the youth group are still teenagers). They aren’t expected to form relationships with adults in the church other than their parents, and as a result they don’t learn how to relate to other Christians as adults.

These teens are disappointed to find when they leave home that most churches are nothing like their youth group, so they lose interest –– unless they find a vibrant college or singles group, or a newly-planted church (following Kimball’s model) which does remind them of their youth group. If so, the cycle continues, with young people bouncing from congregation to congregation in search of a program that appeals to them at their particular time of life.

Can this really be what God intended for his Church?

What to do?

Wide-eyed idealism is no antidote for genuine differences, so this is no call for churches to scrap their youth programs and throw everyone in a room together. Young people have developmental needs which parents sometimes lack the skills to meet, and education ministries and youth ministries can help the church give young people appropriate spiritual nourishment. Such programs also remind the church to reach out to its youth rather than expect them to become adults on their own.

Still, to be an effective body, churches must resist the temptation to divide too strictly into age groups. It is of course appropriate for children and teens to have Sunday school lessons taught at their own level. However, classes and activities which can involve multiple generations should do so, and those that cannot should be balanced with focused efforts at other times to build relationships between young and old. Teachers can enlist teenagers as assistants for children’s classes; senior citizens can join young families for an evening of board games.

Many resources are available to help churches develop programs that cross generational lines. Two in particular are Mark DeVries’ Family-Based Youth Ministry and Diana Garland’s Family Ministry: A Comprehensive Guide.

But placing the burden for change on ministers and programs skirts the issue of loving one another. We should expect that God’s intention for the church depends not on the programs we devise but on the Holy Spirit manifesting itself among us in love.

Perhaps the best solution to intergenerational division is for each of us to deliberately walk up to someone in the Body to whom we don’t naturally relate, say hello, and learn who they are and how we can serve them. If we cannot bring ourselves to take that small risk, we will scarcely be prepared to face the greater challenges of racial and socio-economic division which remain before us.