Doing Church for Teens Counter-Culturally

     A hungry family goes to a family restaurant. The father takes his wife's coat while the kids scoot into the booth. The waitress arrives with a high chair and some crayons for the youngest child and a stack of menus for everyone else. There is a brisk dispensing of napkin wrapped cutlery and then the anxious parents, having surveyed the stack of menus, ask the waitress if they have anything at the restaurant for teens, indicating their oldest, a fifteen year old scarcely shorter than the parents themselves. The waitress is understandably perplexed by the question.

     Sometimes we're asked what we at Furnace Brook have for teens and one way to answer that would be to say that we have nothing for teens. There is no youth group, not a lot by way of teen Bible study or small group, and what fun events we have for that age group are occasional and ad hoc.

     But the real answer to the question of what we have for teens is everything . . . everything, that is, that we have for adults.

     If we have worship that looks for and finds God's glory, if we have preaching that is sound and challenging, if our fellowship is sweet and sharpens, if we have important work to be done it means that we have lots for teens, doesn't it?

     At our church the teens eat off the adult menu and I make no apologies for that. That's how it should be. In the Jewish tradition the transition to adult participation in the community of faith is marked at about 13 years old and that seems about right to me.

      So we have teens on the worship team, organizing church wide events, being trained to take over ministries and so on.

     They listen to the sermons and look to the pastor for shepherding and it seems very simple and straightforward.

     What's remarkable is how counter-cultural this approach is, counter-cultural both in the church and in the broader culture. That has made me feel insecure at times. We have all been trained by the church and the culture to treat teens so very differently, to be fearful of "losing them." It feels much safer to regard them as overgrown children than to treat them like aspiring adults, grown-ups in training.

     But it's consistent with the Bible and it's effective and so what if there aren't many others doing it this way? In fact, part of our ministry to the culture is to resist the culture.

     Consider this push back. Our teens will not be cossetted, nor segregated. There's not room in the nest for perpetual fledglings, not when there's so much flying to be done.