Faith-Sustaining Factors

Here’s the big idea for this post: “No model of youth ministry or set of practices can substitute for a congregation-wide commitment to young people.”  So if you want to know whom to blame — it is not the youth pastor, the parents, or the youth. The solution to creating faith-sustaining churches is a church commitment to young people. So argues Thomas E. Bergler, From Here to Maturity: Overcoming the Juvenilization of American Christianity.

Studies have examined intensively what distinguishes devoted young adults from less-than-devoted young adults, and what distinguishes those who carry on and move into maturity from those who don’t, and what distinguishes churches where this happens from churches where this maturity does not happen.

In the EYM model (Exemplary Youth Ministry) find seven elements and then they discuss in total forty-four elements at work in churches where young adults mature into mature believers. For instance, they have a category they call “vital, maturing faith” and find these seven elements:

1. Seeking Spiritual Growth 2. Possessing a Vital Faith 3. Making the Christian Faith a Way of Life 4. Practicing Faith in Community 5. Possessing a Positive Spirit 6. Living a Life of Service 7. Exercising Moral Responsibility (86).

Bergler modifies this list (and I’ll get to that) but more important is this very important claims about the intersection of churches and youth ministries:

It is the culture of the whole church that is most influential in nurturing youth of vital Christian faith. The genius of these churches seems best described as a systemic mix of theology, values, people, relationships, expectations, and activities. It appears that a culture of the Spirit emerges with its pervasive and distinct dynamics and atmosphere that is more powerful than its component parts (87).

Maturity occurs for young adults as it does for adults — in the context of a church that cares and works on maturation! My own studies have taught me time and time again that the church is at the center of spiritual maturity, and it not the means of my personal maturation. No, it is the context of maturation itself. Hence, my new book A Fellowship of Differents.

Bergler, however, reframes the whole into six vital “faith sustaining factors”:

1. Strong parental faith

2. Multiple religious experiences.

3. A strong belief system

4. Frequent prayer

5. Frequent Bible reading

6. Several adult friends in the congregation.

What is perhaps most significant here is that Bergler knows that not everyone has #1 and so he has sketched Six paths from strong teenage faith to strong emerging adult faith, and provides a wonderful chart of this on p. 94. E.g., here is Path 5:

Low parental religious service attendance and importance of faith + Teen has many adults in religious congregation to turn to for help and support + Teen has no doubts about religious beliefs + Teen frequently prays and reads Scripture => vital emerging adult faith. But he works this out for six different paths that lead to faith, while he also has three paths that do not lead to strong emerging adult faith.