Youth ministry will never be truly "Christian..."

...until it can help young people and their parents (especially their parents) learn that discipleship must involve earnest daily prayer and daily devoted reading of Scripture. In my experience the very idea of sitting down, saying a prayer and reading the Bible for longer than, say, a minute or two is something that most young people and their parents simply cannot countenance.

"What is there within the Bible? What sort of house is it to which the Bible is the door? What sort of country is spread before our eyes when we throw the Bible open?" (Barth, The Strange New World Within the Bible).

How can we ever hope that the young will discover this new world within the Scriptures? How do we expect their lives to be transformed by the Gospel if they do not read it? We cannot ignore the Bible - no matter what issues we may have with the world presented therein.

**UPDATE**

I suppose what I'm getting at is that many young Christians -- especially those who've grown up in the "fun and games" culture of American youth ministry -- don't believe that the Bible is really all that important to Christian faith formation.

Tragically, many pastors are either unwilling to trust the Scriptures for their own faith formation or they do not know how to communicate the importance - not to mention the content - of Scripture to young people without twisting it to make it more palatable or relevant. I love Bonhoeffer's advice in this regard, "Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic…Do no defend God’s Word but testify to it…Trust to the word. It is a ship loaded to the very limits of its capacity."