Sandie’s blue eyes bulged with fear, and her thin cheeks were paler than usual. She stared at me for a moment, then slipped out of sight over the cliff.
It had taken a week to get her to this point, but finally she was doing something she had sworn she would never try. Sandie, the frightened little sixth-grader, was rappelling. After she reached the bottom of the cliff and stopped bouncing with excitement, I asked what she thought.
“I want to go again!”
Later I asked the rest of the group what had been the best moment of camp. Most of them said it was the seventy-foot drop off the cliff. “Now I really know what trust means,” one girl said. She had learned in a way no classroom could teach her.
And once again a heresy proved false. There is no truth in the saying “You can’t teach junior highers anything, so just keep them busy until they are in high school.”
To many people, junior high ministry is nothing more than a holding effort, a place for the church to entertain the young and the restless. Too often adults consider young adolescents hopeless cases who are best left bouncing around a padded youth room; or worse yet, they are ignored. While excitable at times, they are not hopeless cases, and they can learn.
Research studies of young teens consider this the perfect age to teach them. Between 1840 and 1970, the onset of puberty dropped from seventeen to thirteen, and by now it has dipped to as low as eleven for some girls. With puberty comes the beginnings of adult thought. Jean Piaget, the Swiss pioneer in developmental psychology, has pinned down the beginning of abstract thought to around eleven or twelve years of age.
“I found myself thinking about my future,” said one young girl, “and then I began to think about why I was thinking about my future, and then I began to think about why I was thinking about why I was thinking about my future.” What a perfect example of what Piaget calls formal thought! Many researchers claim this kind of thinking is the first stage in a process that enables us to choose values.
Imagine the thoughts of a junior higher sitting in front of a pile of values passed down from parents, teachers, and friends. “God, hmmm, pretty boring; I’ll chuck that one. What’s this—’Succeed at all costs?’ Sounds hard, but I’ll give it a try. Ah, now this one is more like it—’Party till you drop!’ I can live with that!” On and on the process goes until he has chosen the standards he will live by.
The point is, we often ignore adolescents at the most crucial stage of development. At a time when junior highers are questioning all their hand-me-down values, the church is sometimes not even part of the procedure. Why?
There are many reasons, ranging from an unfounded fear of eleven- to fourteen-year-olds to just plain ignorance of the need. The main reason, however, appears hidden in the idea that youth are “the leaders of tomorrow.” While this is true, it is also a mind-set that keeps youth from reaching their potential today. Too often we look at the future and lose the present.
I discovered this flaw in myself a few years ago at yet another camp. One of my first duties as junior high director at Cherry Creek Presbyterian Church was running a summer retreat. After I struggled through all the minor details of renting a camp and planning a program, I thought I had the job done.
Then I ran through the list of students who had signed up. I panicked. I didn’t have enough male leaders. I was forced to press a “mature” eighth-grader into action.
Visions of Todd’s marauders terrorizing the girls’ cabins haunted me. I was even afraid to tell my pastor my plans. Yet by the end of the week-long camp, Todd’s cabin was one of the best. Quite by accident I had failed to look at Todd as a future leader and had actually taken him for what he was: a real person with real abilities today.
Viewing adolescents as a future commodity subtracts from their present value, but worse, it traps them in a void of nonpersonhood. While their minds and bodies are straining for adulthood, the church is telling them their feelings are trivial.
When I first began youth work, a friend asked me what would possess me to spend my spare time baby-sitting other people’s problems. I didn’t have a good answer, but Barry St. Clair gave me a comeback in a Moody Monthly article. “They don’t need baby sitters,” he wrote. “The nineteen million high school students in America are in trouble.” Then he listed the all too common and all too serious problems they face.
Immediately I recognized them as the same problems junior highers battle. Family breakups, drugs, suicide, and any number of troubles hit any age. Junior highers are not exempt simply because we do not consider them old enough to have real problems.
What would possess me to spend time with these kids? A God-given desire to disciple them. Just as St. Clair suggested, the answer lies in taking them seriously, even at an age that has seldom been taken seriously.
Youth work must move toward discipleship and away from entertainment. That does not mean we should bore the kids with deep discussions; it means we should be willing to try new approaches.
Christ pioneered a new approach by living the kingdom of God on earth even though his method of teaching through small groups was already popular. It was the combination of the two ideas that was exceptional. I am convinced that for junior highers, modeling Christianity in small groups is the exceptional combination youth workers need to make today.
A few years ago a co-worker proposed we build our fledgling junior high program around small discipleship groups. I naively agreed. We designed the groups to demand commitment and intimate sharing with other Christians. The guiding thought was “If you don’t want to study, don’t come.”
We were shocked when twenty signed up. That meant from a group of about thirty, the majority were begging for personal association with an adult Christian. But, because adults willing to disciple young adolescents were in short supply, we had only three leaders to spread around. Each of us took a group of four or five kids and met weekly to study, pray, and occasionally just have fun. The remaining kids had to wait. And the waiting list grew as the kids in the small groups began to have a positive influence on the large group. We rejoiced over the numbers and cried over the lack of leaders.
We zealously began recruiting warm bodies for our great program. Then the problems began. A couple of the warm bodies turned cold, and so did the kids in their groups. Four of the most dependable kids in the youth group quit attending large-group events, and one even made slams at me and the program in general: “Man, that’s an ugly shirt!” and “You have too many leaders.”
After a few months, I finally figured out what he was really saying. His first comment was merely a childish way to win my attention, but the second was a mature criticism of how I had lost control of his Bible study’s leader.
His particular leader had dropped out of the large group activities and often canceled their weekly Bible study. That had been topped off with only rare visits from other leaders. It became easy to see why these kids lost their commitment. They had gone from core figures to forgotten members.
I learned the hard way: A plan can succeed only if all in it own it.
Soon another problem popped up. The kids were coming to Bible study confused by the books we used. The books were good for adults but bombed at the junior high level. We searched for study guides written for junior highers, and finally, a couple of frustrating years later, we found Putting God First by Jim Burns.
Now the kids were coming to studies with answers to their questions. They no longer joked about “the stupid books”; they actually liked Bible study again. The small groups were teaching them to think. God was no longer a factor they were willing to throw out.
To this day, the friendships and values formed in those groups are intact. Many of those same kids are now leaders in the high school group, a couple are considering full-time ministry, and one, at age thirteen, has preached his first sermon to our congregation. God is busy, even with young adolescents.
The move is on, the focus is shifting, as it did years ago when youth work attention moved from college to high school youth. The focus today is heading toward junior high. Junior highers are unique—a subculture all to themselves. And as on any foreign mission field, we must contextualize the gospel to the target culture. The kids in our churches can learn, but many times our traditional methods fall flat. That’s the time to be brave and experiment.
Camps, for example, can teach first and entertain second. An example of this is a weekend retreat we held last fall.
We arrived at the camp and gave the kids a snack while we set up Monopoly boards. They played Monopoly for an hour, enjoyably—until we stopped the game and told them the money in their hands was all they had to live on for the rest of the weekend.
We then gave them a list of costs. We charged them for everything from their own sleeping bags and clothes to the meals and camp games. All items were very expensive. Soon many kids were out of money and humor.
“All right, we’ve had enough of this. I didn’t pay to come on this retreat to be mistreated!” whined one with a sour look on his face.
“You’re not having fun?” I asked, trying not to laugh. “Why don’t you go play pool or something?”
“Funny. I don’t even have enough money for lunch.” He stormed away.
Then a wonderful thing happened. They rebelled. The entire group pooled their money and threw it at my feet.
“If that isn’t enough money for all of us to eat and play any game we want, then none of us will do anything for the rest of your stupid retreat!” United they stood. They were angry, but they had done what we wanted them to do. Right then we sat down and discussed things.
“You guys have any questions?” I asked, knowing full well they had more than questions.
“Why did you ruin this retreat? This is the worst one I have ever been on,” one girl complained.
“Can anyone answer that?” I replied. The kid the group would later call The Preacher raised his hand.
“Um, was it to show us how much money means to us?” That comment lit the fuse of a discussion that lasted about an hour. During that time I was amazed at what had actually taken place in the twenty-four hours of the game.
“I really liked how the guys bought us lunch so we could play games later,” one girl volunteered with her eye on a certain guy.
“Yeah, I was out of money and the guys in my cabin said not to worry because they would take care of me,” said a little guy who was usually left out of everything.
Soon they were all wrapped up in war stones about how they had shared or how someone had shared with them. All I had to do was sit there and watch God work.
Their timing was superb. I wanted them to learn from the experience no matter how it unfolded, but they didn’t even force me to use my weekend contingency plans. We finished off with games that night and worship the next morning.
Our purpose was to teach them about putting other gods before God; they learned that and more. In one hands-on weekend, they had learned about the two greatest commandments. Most of them still remember.
Teaching junior highers is not easy, and teaching them with creativity is even harder. But they can be taught. God’s ability to empower leaders and the junior highers’ eagerness to learn are powerful elements that combine to make a ministry with everlasting results.
When I took a chance, like Sandie, and backed off the cliff, God showed me I am much more than a baby sitter. I am a pastor to a group ripe to hear the truth in a relevant way. I have discovered that the saying “You can’t teach junior highers anything” is a figment of one’s lack of imagination.
—Eugene C. Scott
Aurora, Colorado
Copyright © 1986 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
