Jesus isn't cool

CRAMMING MORE than 50 high school students into a small room for weekly Bible study is challenging, but getting them to talk about sex is not. When the questioning hand of one 15-year-old boy shot up in the back of the room, I braced myself. "Is masturbation a sin?--I really gotta know."

I was proud of him, but not for his honesty and openness. Talking explicitly about sex is easy for MTV-watching teens. Using a word like sin is much harder. As Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, authors of Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, observe, few teens think seriously about theologically explicit words like resurrection, redemption, sanctification and sin.

Smith and Denton's findings beg for a response from those working in youth ministry. They describe teens as "incredibly inarticulate" about their faith, and they say mainline teens are "among the least religiously articulate of all teens." Most Christian teens are "at best only tenuously Christian," having confused Christianity with "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."

Given this state of affairs, what does effective youth ministry look like? We must help teens think about, practice and experience the theological details that make Christianity distinct.

A recent encounter with a pair of street preachers in our gentrified, suburban downtown illustrates one such important detail.

"Turn from Hell! Believe in Jesus!" said the huge sign held by a man whose booming voice reiterated this refrain to hundreds on crowded sidewalks. His younger partner on the opposite corner shouted equally obnoxious phrases.

"What do you think of them?" I asked one of my high school students.

"I don't like it when people are too religious," she said, visibly irritated by the preachers. Her comment suggested she is one of the many teens who described themselves as "religious but not too religious" to Smith and Denton.

"What does 'too religious' mean?" I prompted.

After several attempts at being more descriptive she concluded: "well you know what I mean..."

"No, what do you mean?" My unwillingness to appease her annoyed her a little.

"I guess it's just not my thing," she said, as if it was a matter of consumer preference. "It's not a very good way to attract non-Christians," she suggested.

"What is a good way?" I asked.

"I just think they should be a lot nicer about it," she said. "They're sort of offensive."

"Right, sort of offensive," I said. "Like when Jesus preached his first sermon and made everyone so mad they tried to kill him. He was, like, sort of offensive. You know what I mean ..."

It turned out, she did not know what I meant. She knew Jesus was no bombastic street preacher, but this new detail challenged her previous conception and invited her to rethink her image of Jesus as someone who would "go along to get along." Her furrowed brow revealed a storm of mental dissonance--the hard thinking that precedes theological insight. Perhaps there was more to Jesus than she thought.

We often fail to help teens think carefully about their faith and about the details of scripture, worship and Christian practices. Getting kids to like church is itself an accomplishment, and parents want ministers to succeed at that. Not surprisingly, Smith and Denton describe youth ministers as under great pressure to keep kids entertained.

One common strategy involves front-loading youth programming with fun activities, hoping to sneak in a little Bible teaching at the end. The point is not to do anything too weighty that would turn kids off. Keep it light; keep it fun. Large youth events, like Christian concerts, appeal to youth ministers with their ability to entertain kids while simultaneously conveying a positive, family-friendly alternative to things like MTV. This stuff works to a degree: as Smith and Denton show, "religion actually does influence positive outcomes" and religious teens tend to do better than nonreligious teens.

But teens don't need Jesus to be crucified and raised from the dead to have positive outcomes and pursue family friendly alternatives to MTV. Values like being positive, encouraging and tolerant are already widely available in the culture. When kids realize this, and many do, they struggle to articulate the difference that faith makes. It didn't surprise me that many teens told Smith and Denton, "I guess it'll be more important when I'm older."

One student I know didn't want to wait to know this difference, so he participated in his church's "40 Days of Purpose" campaign, hoping that an exploration of Rick Warren's popular book The Purpose Driven Life would help. Instead, he reached this conclusion: "I don't understand why you need God for a sense of purpose, self-esteem, or whatever ... lots of people have that without God." This young man was onto something.