As a youth leader and teacher of semi-interested teens, you have a third alternative besides either hoping they are safely in the faith or writing them off as a loss. You can penetrate their world when you start to uncover what they actually believe.
My husband and I want to share some practical suggestions from our experiences.
1. Let’s say you are concerned about popular music’s effect on your young people. Have a party and invite them to bring their favorite records. (Not their favorite Christian records—their favorite records.) You will catch knowing glances and a few snickers and probably get, “You don’t want to hear my favorite records!”
What you learn: that if you intend to tell your young people the evils of popular music, you are not cautioning against some insidious influence out on the fringe of their consciences: you are talking about their favorite records. Imagine a systematic put-down of your favorite TV shows or your best-loved books. Do you feel your defenses rise? If so, you may distantly agree that your choices have their negative side, but you still intend to go on living with them. The kids are no different. Sharing your students’ feelings you can treat them more tenderly as together you examine the influences in which all of you steep your lives.
2. Opinion polls are effective—if students know you aren’t (a) only testing their retention of Sunday school material, or (b) planning to show the results to the pastor.
I was enlightened by a sex questionnaire I used with a youth group in a conservative evangelical church. Asked about sexual activity in or out of marriage, most students checked the statement, “This is up to each couple’s conscience, and what they decide will be right for them.” Most also believed that the Bible’s approach to sex is largely “Don’t.” Confronted with a look at the Song of Songs, one girl announced “This shouldn’t be in the Bible!” Her words said she had somehow acquired another standard for what is biblical than what is in the Bible. This led to studies of “Things You Didn’t Know Were in the Bible.”
We asked one Sunday school class to write out what they would say if God inquired, “Why should you go to heaven?” There were nearly as many opinions as students—from a correct but stilted, “I’ve accepted Christ as my personal Savior” to “I’ve tried to do what’s right,” “I don’t think I should go to heaven,” “I live without hate,” and “I’d like to know more about You.” We could then intelligently discuss Christ’s atonement.
3. Scripture itself is a good candidate for the discovery of true student attitudes. Conservative church kids will agree that Bible study is important. What are their reactions when you open the Bible? If they are distracted and bored you will help them by raising the possibility that they don’t believe the Bible is important. They may go on for years agreeing in principle, but disagreeing with their lives, becoming adults to whom the Bible remains, in fact, insignificant.
4. Listen to your teens’ casual-sounding comments. A high school senior tells us she knows it is always a mistake to marry a non-Christian; but in the case of her boyfriend, she says, she will make an exception. Well-learned truth has become inconsequential: she believes it is perfectly all right to marry a non-Christian. Remarks like hers can lend reason to mysteries such as why young adults tend to drift from the church after they get married.
5. Whatever your subject in Sunday school or Bible study, work at asking students for their views. And don’t squelch them once they have spoken the truth.
Your own opinions, of course, cannot go undefended. Challenge unorthodox views by asking questions: “Why do you believe that? How do you know? How did you reach that conclusion?” Lead students into the Word, encouraging them to analyze and compare their views with Scripture. Ask how they know what is true. You can’t force them to believe the Bible, but you can help them realize what they are actually deciding.
If you falter in a biblical response to a question, promise to study and tackle it later. Students physically relax when the teacher says. “I don’t know, but let’s see what we can figure out.”
Most of all, you must have a genuine interest in what young people think!
This is not the most comfortable way to teach. But when you try it, your students stop being a bunch. You realize they are thinking individuals with individual world views, young humans whose wildest ideas don’t scare you. They are the thoughts of real people, who, when you show you care for them, will offer you the chance to butt your ideas against theirs.
