By Jack Wilkie
There aren’t many things more annoying than a bait-and-switch. You see the advertisement for a great deal, one you don’t think you can pass up. You go to make your purchase and walk in saying you’d like to buy one of those things you saw in the ad. “Sorry, we don’t have any more of those,” or, “You can still have that, but you’re going to have to buy all of these extras and pay these fees to get the advertised deal,” or, “Well, if you had read the fine print…”
Naturally, your feelings toward that retailer aren’t terribly positive. You don’t trust them and you don’t want to set foot in their store again. And this, in large part, is exactly why we’re losing our youth in the church.
How are the two connected, you ask? Consider what passes for spirituality among young people today. Fortunately, we live in the age of social media and don’t have to look far to see what the youth have to say about what they think is spiritually significant. If you are friends with any church teens or follow any on Twitter you’re familiar with the kinds of posts I’m talking about.
“Just got home from camp. So spiritually uplifting!”
“Went to the youth rally at such-and-such church today. Such an encouraging time!”
“Mission trip to Mexico was amazing!”
I’m not saying anything is inherently wrong with these events or activities. What I am saying, though, is we’re giving the youth a very warped sense of spirituality if that’s what they associate with the Christian life. They think a spiritual boost is a shot in the arm event where they go away and participate in a lot of fun activities and do some teen-specific, Bible-related stuff while they are there.As they become adults those events aren’t offered to them anymore, and they feel disconnected with the church and struggle to develop their spiritual lives within the context of daily life and church involvement.
Why shouldn’t they? They are conditioned to believe that feeling a deep spiritual connection with God and their church family is one thing, and then they grow out of the age where these events are targeted at them and spirituality becomes something entirely different. We do our best to engage and even entertain them to sell them on the church and then assume they’ll make the jump from that to normal, adult Christianity. That’s what we call a bait and switch, and that’s one of the reasons why we don’t have 25-year-olds in many of our churches every Sunday.
Two quick solutions in this area:

  1. Let’s be intentional when it comes to teaching about different experiences in life. We should always be spiritually minded, and along with that will come time for work, time for fun, and time to fellowship, and sometimes those things will all mix. But to confine spirituality or a high point in our closeness to God to certain unsustainable events is unwise. “Draw near to God” is a constant command (James 4:8). They need to know that the Christian walk is not all sunshine and roses, that sometimes it’s really difficult. They need to have discipleship modeled for them in a way that they can follow the path every day through life’s highs and lows rather than thinking that they are spiritually connecting with God only when they feel the extreme emotional highs of these teen-specific events. There’s nothing wrong with having good, clean fun with God-honoring people, but if summer camp is what they come to think church should be, we’ll never recapture that for them and the disconnect will set in (as it so often has). Camp, rallies, or whatever else cannot be falsely sold as the definition of spirituality, and they can’t be where teaching and training stops.
  2. Let’s be intentional about everyone’s roles. The Bible (and the New Testament in particular) has no real distinction for how to treat teenagers, only children and adults. Children are to be brought up in the fear of the Lord (Deuteronomy 6, Proverbs 22:6, Ephesians 6, etc.) by their parents or spiritually adoptive mentors for those who don’t have parents. Adults are to be trained as disciples per the Great Commission and the apostolic example in Acts. Any attempt to muddle the roles and stages of training by developing an interim, fully catered church experience marketed to bring them in for nothing but a good time relies on the wisdom of man and will fail, as it has.

We can’t afford to develop more distrust and disconnection with the church. We need youth who are trained to serve rather than be served, and who understand spirituality as part of the everyday Christian life rather than merely highs experienced at man-made events and the lows that come in between. Don’t take this article as saying that camps, mission trips, or youth rallies are bad. It’s how we sell them and how we follow up that determines if we are failing the youth or helping them truly grow.
If they leave such events thinking that’s what it feels like to be spiritually strong, they will only be let down throughout the year and, as they outgrow such events, throughout their lives. Spirituality is about our personal connection with God and the work He does through us to spread that to others. People buy in to authenticity, and that’s what the church needs. We can’t be something we’re not. Let’s just be the genuine article, as advertised in the Scriptures.