c. 2000 Religion News Service

LOUISVILLE, Ky. _ Young people today don’t have the same memories as their parents; theirs is not a world in which the whole town stopped for church on Sunday mornings.

Indeed, even if they’re being raised in Christianity, their friends and classmates, even their families, may include Buddhists and Muslims and Hindus and Jews and people who’ve grown up with no religion at all.

The class entering college this fall _ those born in 1982 _ don’t remember Ronald Reagan’s presidency firsthand. They “have always had an answering machine” and “cannot fathom not having a remote control,” Robert Franklin Jr., president of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, told a recent conference here. For them, the Vietnam War is as distant as the Civil War, and “their lifetime has always included AIDS.”

How Christian churches can reach these young people _ young people saturated by the media, whose sense of time and the connectedness of the world is different _ is a challenge for religious institutions which themselves are struggling with plummeting memberships and, when confronted with a new idea, can be as awkward and uncomfortable as a teen-ager on a first date.

The conference at which Franklin spoke, “Youth and the Life of the Christian Faith,” brought people involved in youth ministry to Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary to discuss what does and does not work with young people. The conference, sponsored by The Louisville Institute and the seminary’s Center for Congregations and Family Ministries, found the model many white Protestant churches use _ hiring a young, charismatic, guitar-strumming youth minister _ often results in teen-agers more dedicated to the youth minister, who then moves on to another job, than they are to a deepening and authentic Christian faith.

Some who work in youth ministry, both in urban areas and smaller towns, spoke of seeing what one described as “a kind of a hardness and a kind of disinterest” toward Christianity among students as early as sixth grade. But others said the adults need to try to scratch that surface _ a resistance sometimes formed by a bad encounter with religion that seemed too authoritarian, too hypocritical, or just downright boring _ and to let teen-agers know they are accepted, even with their questions.

Young people long for an encounter with God, not just religious talk, said Mark Yaconelli, co-director of the Youth Ministry and Spirituality Project at San Francisco Theological Seminary. And churches need to let young people honestly confront both their skepticism and their faith.

Franklin spoke of his own experience. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he was involved with a black, working-class church located in the heart of the Robert Taylor housing project.

When women Sunday school teachers began complaining about young boys in their classrooms they couldn’t control, the pastor walked Franklin around from class to class, gathered up the troublemakers and told him: “OK, this is your group.” Franklin and the boys started calling themselves “The Big Ten” _ theirs was the 10th Sunday school class in the church. And it became a place where Franklin tried to put into practice some of the theory regarding developmental stages of the adolescent “wonder years” he was learning at the university.

“The wonder years are years of searching and questioning” and “they don’t end at the close of adolescence,” Franklin said. Adults in churches can help young people by admitting they don’t have all the answers, he said, and by being willing to “share the scandal of our own search.”

Charles R. Foster, a United Methodist minister and a professor of religion and education at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, discouraged the idea of youth ministry that puts teen-agers off in a room in the basement with their youth minister, separated from the rest of the congregation.

Too often, he said, the unstated purpose has been to keep the teen-agers off the streets, to “control their so-called proclivity to excess.”

But there hasn’t always been a willingness, Foster said, to tolerate the questioning of adolescents. Adults are much more willing to allow younger children to ask questions about God. When adults won’t listen to teen-agers’ doubts _ doubts about such profound issues as why God permits suffering in the world and whether there is life after death _ then churches “alienate youth from their deepest theological yearnings,” Foster said.

Researchers also are seeing signs that different cultural and religious groups have their own distinct ideas of how best to work with youth.

Two sociologists from Illinois, for example, discussed what they called “very fresh” research on religious institutions that seem to work for teen-agers and young adults.

In studying African-American churches, they found the young people weren’t usually separated from the rest of the congregation. Church was intergenerational and offered a sense of extended family. At a Friday “youth night” at an apostolic church in south Chicago, for example, middle-aged women outnumbered the teen-agers. “We must come,” one woman told R. Stephen Warner, a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “We’re coming to support them,” and, she acknowledged, “to keep an eye on the young people” as well.

And Muslims, while adhering strictly to the gender separation their religion considers customary, typically practiced age-blended worship as well, with fathers praying side-by-side with their sons in the mosques, and mothers with their daughters.

But sociologist Rhys Williams, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, also observed an intense commitment among Muslims to religious education, fueled in part by the desire of immigrants to pass on their faith to their children who are growing up a part of American culture.

Williams said the researchers met young Muslim women who are religiously observant, wearing traditional Muslim clothing, but also are clearly “very self-confident, self-possessed, achievement-oriented Americans. In the middle of a conversation about the Koran they’ll pull out their cell phones and Palm Pilots.”

For parents to be involved in trying to pass on religious faith to their children, “there has to be a belief on the part of parents that churches offer something unique,” something their children won’t get through basketball or band, said Penny Edgell Becker, a sociology professor at Cornell University.

In a world with many options, and no dominant culture, Warner said, people of faith “must communicate a sense of specialness and difference in what we have to pass on.”

DEA END SCANLON