Something Worth Dying For: The Adult Abandonment of Adolescents

I'm still reading and digesting The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry and I hope to engage more deeply in particular essays which pique my interest. In Kenda Dean's essay entitled "Proclaiming Salvation" I've run into something that I am ashamed to say I haven't spent much time thinking about: the adult abandonment of adolescents.

"Although youth pull away from adults at more or less the same rate they have for generations, the adult abandonment of youth in the late twentieth century reached new and unprecedented proportions. Parents, for instance, spend 40 percent less time with their children than a generation ago" (The Theological Turn, 72)

This is one of the issues raised by the makers of Divided and, while I disagree with their ultimate conclusion, I think I might agree that youth ministry - or at least parents' willingness to give their kids faith and identity formation to youth ministry - has certainly made the situation harder for young people today.

As Dean notes, in previous generations even adolescent rebellion facilitated at least some form of connection between adolescents and previous generations:

"The much-maligned adolescent "rebellion" of the 1960's allowed youth to remain connected with significant adults while at the same time distancing themselves from them. Except in its most destructive varieties, rebellion actually serves identity formation by helping one generation establish autonomy from the generation that has gone before -- while at the same time acknowledging the older generation's presence and influence. Thirty years ago, adults controlled access to society's primary decision-making, education and earning power, and they functioned as gatekeepers for information necessary to participate fully in the institutions of the American middle class. In short, they served young people's best interest to eventually identify themselves as grown-ups" (73).

Today, however, the situation is quite different. Adults and children are taught to prolong their adolescence and, when this is not the case, the lines between childhood and adulthood are so blurred that adults and youth are both ill-equipped to face the challenges of contemporary culture as human beings, much less as faithful followers of Jesus.

This whole debacle reminded me of a video clip I watched recently from The Work of the People (a company whose resources I use regularly in my work with both adults and young people) in which Stanley Hauerwas pinpoints the failure of adults to provide young people with a faith worth dying for:



We (meaning adults who currently serve as role models for young people) have thus far been unable to offer a faith to the next generation to which they feel compelled to bear witness. It isn't that Christianity has lost its power or that the cross of Christ was for nothing, it's that we have not fully understood it ourselves and, therefore, we have not given our young people anything meaningful to live for (much less to die for).

Perhaps I'm overstating the problem but it seems to me that the problem with adolescents today is as much a problem with adults and with our own faithfulness (or lack thereof).