2022 would be the 10th year since I was invited to serve in the youth leadership. I recently stepped down and will look back on the experience fondly. While there have been many encouraging moments such as seeing a youth thinking seriously about baptism, there are also times where I felt helpless and crushed such as seeing a youth move further away from God. No one feels this anguish and grief more than the youth’s parents. Conversations with these parents are often heart-breaking as they share their efforts to bring their youths to church, but the youth doesn’t reciprocate. What can the parent do then? After conversing with multiple youths and parents, I outline 3 practical steps that parents can do to better guide our youth’s personal walk with God.
1) Listen
The age-old adage is that we are to listen more than we speak because we are given 2 ears and 1 mouth. This is however counter intuitive to the Asian style of parenting where it is more common for the child to listen to the parent instead of the parent listening to the child. As parents, you have walked the faith far longer and often feel like you understand what needs to be told to ‘fix’ the problems that your youth has. However, every youth is unique and similarly, their faith and walk with God. Very often, I hear the youths share that they feel their parents do not understand them and often just talk over them. At best this leads to the youths selectively listening to what the parents tell them, and at worse this leads to the youths closing up and not sharing much of their lives to their parents. It is through such times where youths start to keep struggles about their faith to themselves and gather material from online resources or friends instead of going back to you or to the bible. Hence, it is important to just listen to your youth and hear his views. This will give us not just more insight into their worldview but also show that you are not there to impose your worldview but hope to guide them. So, I encourage all of us to just sit down and listen. Employ active listening techniques such as summarizing and repeating back what your youth has said or deferring judgment by allowing your youth to finish their point before asking questions. These techniques can really work miracles in relationships and provide a way for us to still be in our youths’ lives. Very often, all a youth needs to know is that their concerns and feelings about Christianity is real and that there is someone who understands and is willing to journey with them.
2) Giving them a choice
It is often unthinkable to most parents to give youths a choice to go to church. For parents, they know how important it is in their lives to believe in God and the joy it brings. There is a lot of fear that if parents give their youths the choice to go to church it could mean no turning back. Hence, instead parents insist their youths to come along even when youths no longer desire to have a relationship with God or have many doubts about the faith. Parents hope that if they get their youth to go to church week after week, a message in the church will one day change their hearts and they are willing to come to church again.
It is a nice idea theoretically, but very often I see the story gets played out very differently. Youths that are forced to go to church feels restricted and imprisoned. They are in church physically but mentally they are somewhere else. They get angry with their parents or God, angry that they are forced to worship someone they don’t understand.
Parents of youths are in a pivotal moment of their youth’s lives and it’s important how we show who is God to them at this moment. If the impression we leave to our youths who are currently searching is that the God we worship is one that forces them to worship Him, it is very likely that we are pushing them further away from God and not closer. Our God is a God that gives all of us a choice, and a very apt parable that highlights this is the parable of the prodigal son. The father in this story did not force his son to stay with him where he is well provided for. He instead gave him the freedom to explore the world and choose how he want to live out his life. The prodigal son came back in the end, realising that what his father has is much better than what the world is offering.
I dare not promise that when we give our youths the same freedom as the prodigal son, the same happy ending ensues. A youth’s faith is ultimately his own and no matter what we do it has to be the youth’s own desire to want to go to church and have a r/s with God. However, I believe we run a higher chance of letting the youth build that desire when we emulate God’s desire to give us the freedom to worship Him.
3) Living out your Christian Faith
If we allow our youth to not go to church, how can the message of God reach him you ask. This brings me to my final but most effective thing we can do, and that is to live out our faith. In my past 9 years in the youth ministry, the youths that have showed the greatest desire for God have been the ones who frequently quoted their family members as role models. In the recent youth camp, Sean shared how his father wakes up at 5am daily to read the bible and Ryan shared how his grandmother spends a large portion of her week pursuing and learning the Word. These family figures have been an inspiration for these youths and they long to model their behaviours. We don’t have to live perfect lives, but we must show that we are trying every single day and we long, yearn and desire to worship Christ. When our youths see that God is so precious to us, they will eventually wonder about the goodness of God and hopefully one day seek it with the same fervour. This is the best way any parent can reach out to their youth.
Conclusion
It is a heart-breaking thing to hear a youth share that church is no longer relevant to their lives. However, let’s view this positively as a chance for our youths to own their faiths and see how God can personally work in their lives. Everybody’s spiritual walk is a journey that they must walk themselves. Parents and youth leaders can only do so much and serve as a guide for them. Nevertheless, let’s have faith in the almighty God and the Gospel. The multiple detours our youths take may be necessary before they come out having a stronger ownership of their faith and a better appreciation in the gift of Salvation that God has given us. In the meantime, let’s act as the best guides possible by 1) listening to them 2) giving them a choice and 3) living out our faith.
