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Good morning. I'd like to invite you to see if you can find the red United Methodist hymnal in front of you. And join me, if you'll stand and sing number 715, Rejoice, the Lord is King. It's my pleasure to present our Robert F.

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Jones lecturer for the week, Dr. Kenda Creezy Dean, Associate Professor of Youth, Church, and Culture, and Director of the Tennant School of Christian Education at Princeton Theological Seminary. Dr. Dean is originally from Ohio, where she completed her undergraduate and master's study in speech communications from the University of Miami.

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She completed her Master of Divinity at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., and her Ph.D. in Practical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Reverend Dr. Dean is also an ordained United Methodist elder and has served several local churches and as a campus minister before beginning her doctoral work at Princeton.

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And perhaps most significantly, she ministers as wife to Kevin and mother to Brendan and Shannon. As a means of surveying the scope of her academic accomplishments, I'd like to offer a metaphor to characterize the significance of the role Kenda has played in her work. Throughout her academic career, Kenda has played the role of ambassador, one who crosses over from one side of a divide to meet those on the other side for the purpose of establishing common ground for common work. I met Kenda about 10 years ago when there were only a handful of folks interested in adolescents who were pursuing academic credentials.

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Perhaps more than any single person, Kenda has brought concerns of youth and ministry into the theological academy, and concerns of the academy to practitioners in the church, founding in 1996 the Princeton Institute in Youth Ministry. Her first book, The God-Bearing Life written with Ron Foster has become a classic in the field, bringing to focus an incarnational theology to ground our practice of youth ministry. In this little book, Kenda carefully crafts a sea of metaphors, reaching out to provide laypeople with theological images to guide their work, images such as tending the fire, sharing the mantle, hand-holding, and space-making.

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Kenda has also served as an ambassador across theological divides between liberals and conservatives. Her 1998 volume, Starting Right, crossed boundaries to include authors from a... across theological divides, helping us to establish an enormous common ground for further conversations which continue to this day. And her most recent book, Practicing Passion with Youth, provides youth workers with a helpful theological anthropology with which to consider youth and the gifts they bring for the church.

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Kenda gives active leadership to the International Association for the Study of Youth Ministry, exploring the concerns of youth ministry with scholars and practitioners from across the globe. You will also notice that Kendah's title is not Professor of Youth Ministry, but Professor of Church, Youth, and Culture, and as such, is concerned with holding many things together, crossing boundaries for the sake of the gospel, youth, and the healing of the world. She is currently serving as co-investigator with Christian Smith in the National Study of Youth and Religion, the most exhaustive study of youth and religion in history, and from which she will draw her lecture this morning.

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And finally, in perhaps one of her most challenging ambassadorial roles, Kenda has served as a United Methodist in a Presbyterian seminary. holding John Wesley in conversation with Calvin, Barth, and Moltmann. And so it is my pleasure to present my friend Kenda into our home, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Join me in welcoming Kenda Dean.

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That was really generous. That's what happens when they get your friends to introduce you. So it is an honor to be here and a joyful surprise to remember how many friends I have in Austin.

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Thank you for all that you've done to make this a feast of hospitality, especially to David and to Kristen Saldine, who is my friend from Princeton, who's now here. So it's been wonderful to be back with you. Pray with me. Gracious God, take over here.

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In Christ's name we pray. Amen. We're going to begin with an exercise in hermeneutics, and I know that there are some of you that are in some mythical overflow room somewhere, so just play along, okay? And what I want you to do is stick your finger up in the air, okay, over your head, and make a circle that's clockwise, okay?

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I know, that's to the right, yeah, yeah, okay? All you in the overflow room, I expect you to be doing this, okay? All right, now don't change anything. This is an exercise in hermeneutics, as I said, an exercise in your point of view.

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Don't change anything. But now bring your finger down to below your nose. OK, now which way? You've got to go below your nose like this, OK?

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Now which way is your finger going? Counterclockwise, right? Yeah, I know. Stop and think about that for a second.

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So up here, nothing's changed, but now it's going counterclockwise. Why is that? Yeah, you're looking at it from the other side of the clock. Your perspective has changed.

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So what that means is the facts are the same, but the reality is entirely different. Yeah, now you're going to be going around all day doing this, right? I got it. I got it.

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I want to suggest that our job as educators in the church is to help people, and in my case, young people in particular, to see their world, to see their lives, see their churches from a different angle, through the eyes of God, from God's side of the clock. That's our job as people in the educational ministry of the church, where the facts are the same, but the reality is entirely different. It makes everything look radically different.

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That's the goal of Christian formation, to help young people recognize that they're framed by grace, not by fate, when they recognize that having died with Christ and being raised again, when they go down under the water and are rescued again in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Jesus Christ in their baptism, the world is all the same, and yet somehow the world is entirely different. That's the theory. At least that's the way it ought to be.

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Here's a clip from a movie I'm sure you know. What I'd like to ask you to do is to turn to the person beside you or behind you or someplace that you might not know them yet, get to know who they are. And then answer a couple questions.

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And they're on this next slide here. What was it that first allowed you to see your life from God's side of the clock? And the second part of that question is, did that happen in the context of a congregation? Go.

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Shipjun. One more minute. I'm going to invite us back together. You'll have a chance to go back and continue these conversations as we talk here.

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Let me just ask for, out of curiosity, a show of hands. How many of you would say that your ability to see your life from God's side of the clock came in the context of congregation? That's about, there's about half of you. I don't know what life looks like in the overflow room, but that's about typical from other groups that I've talked to about this.

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The research from the National Study of Youth and Religion, if that research is correct, youth ministry in most congregations is not causing this change of perspective. In fact, youth ministry is not changing much of anything for the majority of the young people in the United States, according to this study. There are exceptions, and there are notable exceptions, but there are exceptions. So, for example, if we say that the kids know that God is good all the time, we need to unpack a little bit what they mean by that.

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This is a random selection of teenagers you're about to see that were surveyed by Group Magazine. And listen to the way they describe Jesus. This pretty well sums up the theological framework that most young people work with. Now, when I was invited to take part in the National Study of Youth and Religion a few years ago, what that involved were scholars from across the U.S.

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We interviewed a total of 3,300 teenagers. David said it was an exhaustive study. It was also an exhausting study. The kids were between the ages of 13 and 17.

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We followed up with about three-hour interviews with a select number of these. And they are now doing a longitudinal part of the study to see how the findings change as these kids enter college, which is not tabulated yet. There's a lot of interesting information. And somewhere, I think, in this room, there are handouts.

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Are there handouts somewhere in this room? Do you have them in your -- did you get them when you came in? Oh, that's perfect. Good job.

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And you don't have to refer to this. This is your take-home. This is the Reader's Digest version of the Chris Smith book, if you want the full-blown version of what these studies are. We're going to refer to just a little piece of this today.

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But the study's significance, I think, is this, and that is the way it reframes the issues facing youth ministry as issues of the church, okay? It's not just about youth, it's about the church. Specifically, the National Study for Youth and Religion points to a theological fault line that underlies churches of all traditions, but happens to be especially pronounced in mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic churches. The findings are summarized in Christmas books, Soul Searching, but we're going to lift up five of those findings to frame our discussion today.

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And then we're going to see what that means for our ministry together. First finding, teenagers are not hostile to religion. That's the good news. OK?

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On the whole, teenagers are, the language of the study is this, benignly positive about religion. In other words, and this is a quote, it's a very nice thing. Right? Now, this surprised the sociologists who were involved in the study because they expected to find rebellion and arguments and generation gaps and kids seeking a spirituality that was more in keeping with adolescence.

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None of this turned out to be true. Now, the bad news is, the reason they're not hostile It's not because they like Christianity. It's because they couldn't care less.

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They just don't care enough to fight about it. You only fight about things that you care about. And so Chris Smith's point on this is that the primary problem in most religious communities is not teen rebellion, but teenagers' benign whateverism. I'm seeing you nod.

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This looks familiar, yeah. The second finding. Teenagers mirror to an astonishing degree their parents' religious faith. In other words, we get what we are.

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Now, that sounds great until you realize the shape most people's parents' faith is in, right? And then you realize that, okay, well, the ho-hum faith of adolescence is pretty much reflecting the blase spirituality of mom and dad, too. That should concern not just the church, but society, because one of the findings corroborates a lot of other social science research that shows that the more significant, the more religion matters in a young person's life, the more likely they are to thrive on almost every scale of behavior that's ever been measured by sociologists.

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They do better in school. They have better relationships with their parents, with their peers. They have less risky behavior. They have a far more hopeful view of the future.

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They wear their seatbelts more often. It's true. The list goes on. All the things parents pray for escalate with religious significance.

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So religious identity affects more than just religious identity. The third finding is that there is an almost complete lack of theological language among teenagers. We're going to come back to this. But the only theological word most of the kids in this research knew was what?

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God. Right. They could say God. They completely shut down when it came to Jesus.

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You saw a little bit of this here. And they would start groping around for ways to talk about Jesus, very skittish about particularity. The least religiously articulate of all of the kids in the study were mainline Protestant kids. They were articulate about everything else, but not about religious language.

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Across the board, the researchers, myself included, got the feeling that this was the first time kids had ever been asked to put their religious sensibilities into words. In fact, a number of teenagers told us this. Now, there were some notable exceptions. Most of the exceptions came from three religious groups.

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Mormons, conservative Protestants, or black Protestants. Fourth finding. A minority of young people do say religion is important to them. And it's a significant minority.

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It's 40%. So two out of five kids do think religion is important. Now, whether they actually act like it's important to something else, again, only about 8% wind up factoring into what the study called the most highly devoted kids. These are the kids that basically do what you want them to do, right?

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Where they are actually getting some kind of a spirituality that they can take with them when they leave the church. But most of the religiously devoted kids, the most highly devoted kids, again, came from these three groups of teenagers, Mormons, conservative Protestants, or black Protestants. They were sprinkled across the board, but that's where most of them were. And I think it's safe to say that means that for the future of the church, this is where most of the religious leaders in the United States are going to come from, is one of these three groups.

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In fact, if you looked at where religious salience factored in, here's the list of how religious salience played out among these various groups. In order, the Mormon youth topped the charts on almost every scale. In fact, literally every scale. They light candles less than other youth.

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But other than that, just everything that they studied, the Mormons were at the top. You know who lights most candles, by the way? Jewish youth. Anyway, in order, this is where religious salience played out.

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So the kids to whom religion mattered the most, they understood it the best, it influenced their lives most significantly, this is how that played out. And you can see, one of the reasons, by the way, that Jewish kids are at the bottom is there are a lot of Jewish teenagers who don't see themselves as having a religious identity because they're Jewish, right? It's A cultural identity, so that's one of the reasons for that. A lot of times when I show people this list, we experience this thing that I've come to call Mormon envy, right?

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It's like, where do I sign up for this? I just want to be clear, they've got blase kids too. They just have fewer of them. And there are a couple other dynamics in the Mormon community which factor into this.

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For one thing, they have religious parents, right? And if kids mirror their parents' religiosity, you would expect there to be a higher degree of religion among Mormon teenagers. Religious parents also tend to be more likely, they're more likely to be in intact families and have a higher economic status. Those things are also positively correlated with religious significance.

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Okay, the most significant finding that we have to grapple with, and what we're going to spend the rest of the time this morning looking at, is at the bottom of the first page of your handout, if you care. And it comes from this finding that most teenagers, 60% of them, find religion completely inconsequential. It's a good thing, but in the end, it really doesn't matter.

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These kids come from across all religious traditions, but by far, the most of them were mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic. Now, it's not that they don't have a common faith. They do. The study called the common creed among these teenagers moralistic therapeutic deism.

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Some of you have heard this. It's A tacit, unacknowledged kind of faith that kids don't know that this is what they believe until you start talking to them, and then they can come up with it. But it's a powerful compass, and it looks something like this. If you were going to summarize moralistic therapeutic deism, you would say it helps you do good, it helps you feel good, and it turns God into the wallpaper.

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But here are the five things that the study pulled out as being components of this creed. God exists, who created and orders over the world and watches over life on earth. God wants us to be good, nice and fair to each other, like most of the world's religions teach. The central goal in life is to feel happy and to feel good about yourself.

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God doesn't need to be involved in my life unless I need God to solve a problem. And finally, good people, like good dogs, go to heaven when they die, right? All right.

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Now, it looks kind of Christian-ish on the outside, right? But its purpose is not to know and love God. Its purpose is to help people get along. Our teenagers live in a more pluralistic society than ever before, and they're very concerned with how they get along with people.

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And so part of the way to do that is to deep-six particularity anywhere they can. Now, if the goal of Christian churches is to help people get along, then we should have no trouble with moralistic therapeutic deism. And I think it's safe to say that the goal of many Protestant churches is to help people get along, is to lubricate social relationships. But if you scratch the surface of moralistic therapeutic deism,

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You're going to find that it has very little to do with the historic teachings of the Christian church. I want you to do an exercise with me. Say with me just the beginning of the Apostles' Creed. We're not going to go all the way through it.

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Just say with me. I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, Yeah, you guys descend into hell. The Methodists gave that up for Lent somewhere along the line.

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I don't know. Okay, that's far enough. Compare that to this. What's the difference?

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Jesus? What else? Yeah, right. What else?

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Go ahead. I'm sorry? Jesus died and rose again. We get some sense of what the rhythm of baptismal life is.

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What else? God is a parent, creation. What makes this different? What stands out here?

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Yeah, right. This is all about me. The Apostles' Creed is all about Jesus and God and the Triune Godhead and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So you've got a very different take on what funds this religious creed.

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Now, here's where the damning part of this study comes in. Smith and his colleagues are not content to leave moralistic therapeutic deism to teenagers. Since young people mirror almost perfectly the religious faith of their parents, Smith believes that moralistic therapeutic deism has, this is his quote, colonized American Christianity to the point that it is now, I'm quoting, the dominant religion in the U.S.

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having supplanted Christianity in American churches. Whoa. The real kicker is this. As a result of this,

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Young people don't practice moralistic therapeutic deism because they've misunderstood what we've taught them in church. They practice it because this is what we've taught them in church. I want you to go back to the person beside you. Take just a second.

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Is your church being colonized by moralistic therapeutic deism? Are you a moralistic therapeutic deist? Go. We're going to come back together again.

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All right, now what we're going to do here to frame how we take this home is we're going to look at the exceptions to this study. Those 8% of the kids, or even the 40%, who say that religion matters to them. and to see what they bring to the table that seems to offer a kind of foundation that allows them to resist moralistic therapeutic deism and allows them to see their world from the other side of the clock. Now, the truth is, these are coming, we're deriving this from their religious traditions as much as from individual teenagers, because, of course, you can't go out and, you know, we don't have the data on

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individual teenagers that we can generalize to that degree. But if we look at what their traditions offer, we're going to see some things that we might want to reclaim even in our own theological frameworks. Stephen Covey, you know, talks about the need when you're filling an aquarium, you've got to put the big rocks in first or there's not going to be room for them. So think of these four things as the four theological rocks we might need to get in first if we're going to help young people develop a consequential faith.

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Okay. The first is a creed to belief that assumes A consequential God. Now, by creed, I don't mean something that you memorize. That could take that form.

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What I'm talking about is a basic grammar, a vocabulary for faith that's words and gestures, you know, vocabulary is verbal as well as nonverbal, about a God who matters. It sounds like a no-brainer, but the most decisive aspect of religion is not how we practice it, but who we worship. What kind of God do we have? And do we have a God who, in the end, is worth worshipping?

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I think we misread that a lot with worship reform. We tend to think that attracting young people to worship means we have to, first of all, have an attractional kind of style of ministry that's going to get them to adopt a particular style. The truth is we never stop and look at, is the God that we're portraying a wimp?

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If so, we've got to look at our theology again, because it matters who we worship and not just how we worship. There are two ways in the study that teenagers said that they viewed God. The first I'm calling the cosmic genie approach. This is where God meets my needs, answers my wishes when called, but otherwise stays in the bottle unless I summon God.

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The other dimension that God took was as the divine guidance counselor. In this view of God, God listens, God makes me feel good, but really God doesn't intervene and do all that much. Now, if these are your two primary God images, No wonder teenagers are disappointed in God's performance, right?

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When that's your image of God, the worst thing God can do is to not grant your wish and not make you feel better. Of course, the problem is the God of Abraham and Mary never promised to grant our wishes or to make us feel better. The other problem is kids outgrow these God images. You get too old to believe in genies and you graduate from high school and you don't need a guidance counselor.

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So sociologists point out that our God images determine how we practice our faith. If we have a fearsome and terrible God image, we have a different way of practicing faith than if God is loving and affectionate. Rodney Stark did a study of religions around the world to try to figure out what it was that caused some religions to really change the way people acted in their daily life, and other religions to just sort of hang out there in the general culture. And what he found was that it boiled down to your God image.

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He found two things. First, gods that are personal, that are morally concerned with human beings. are more influential than gods who are distant or deist. And gods who are powerful, who can and do cross the distance between heaven and earth, who act in the world, were more influential than gods who were friendly or affectionate.

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I want you to be careful with the second one, because one of the distinctivenesses of Christianity is that Christianity does not oppose love and power. In Christianity, love is the power, right? Love comes through suffering that comes from loving somebody enough that you're willing to go to the cross for them.

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So love moves us when armies can't. Now the couch is you don't learn this grammar for faith in formal teaching any more than we learn the grammar of English in English class. You learn the parts of speech in English class, but you've got your grammar long before you got there. You already speak the language, right?

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So where do you learn it? How do you learn it? You know. Yeah, by hanging out with people who speak it.

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By being able to be immersed in a community that uses that grammar, that celebrates your first words, right? That from time to time corrects you when you say ain't. Okay? We're afraid to correct kids.

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That's how confirmation became the church's No Child Left Behind program. But anyway, it gives you, we've got plenty of opportunities to correct young people's grammar. If in English, if they talk baby talk at 16, we stop them and correct them and give them better language. We don't do that in the church.

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We allow them to talk about Noah and Jonah in the same kind of ways they learned it in first grade Sunday school all the way till they're 15 or 16 when they've got critical thinking abilities and we wonder why they don't buy it anymore. See, if we don't do this, if we don't give young people a grammar for their faith, all they're left with is a sense that God must be a feeling. Okay, well, if God is a feeling and God is good, then anything that feels good must be God, whether it's a roller coaster or an orgasm. We'll come back to that.

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Maybe not. The second theological rock, a community to belong to. The kids in the study who had a salient faith had very tight relationships with the religious community. To belong to the solidarity of a group, as you know, is a sacred thing for a teenager.

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Robert Wethno found, his research finds that only 40% of church-going teenagers will be church-going adults, okay? So think about the kids that are in your church that come regularly. Only 40% are going to worship as adults. Now, what's the distinguishing factor?

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It's not how often they attend. It's how much they sense they belong when they're there, okay? So a lot of research that's being done right now coming out of the philosophy of science is relevant to the way young people form community. Science is actually studying things like slime mold and ants.

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But basically, if you look at, the same thing holds true for teenagers who are getting their primary idiom for how they build community from cell phones. And what it looks like is this. We are influenced not by authority, but by proximity. Okay?

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The cell phone metaphor, go to the next slide there. This is my high-tech slide of how cell phones work. You've got to be close enough to a cell phone tower to catch the signal. That's why proximity is an issue.

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That's why, near where I live, you can't get any reception in Princeton, New Jersey, because there aren't enough towers, the Historical Society won't let you put them up, even if you dress them up like trees. So there aren't enough towers to catch the signals from each other. teenagers catch the signal from one another. That's how they build community.

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So take note, whenever kids use the we word, belonging to a group means influence. But also beware, because the higher the boundaries between groups, the more significant the influence is of those groups. And of course, Jesus came to lower boundaries between people rather than raise them. The third rock of consequential faith, a call to live out.

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Young people in the study with consequential faith had a strong sense of vocation. The clearest example of this is the Mormon teenagers who, from the time they're very young, prepare for what? A mission, right. And so the mission language is huge among Mormon young people.

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And you can interpret that any way you want, but they've got some sense that they have a purpose. This is a sense that your actions make a difference. that you contribute directly or indirectly to God's intentions for the universe. And kids who are moralistic therapeutic deists don't have any of this.

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They don't sense that their lives are connected to a larger story or that their actions have a larger context. They tend to have a very instrumental view of religion. that I am religious because it helps me. It helps me do stuff I want to do anyway.

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It makes me a good person. It helps me out when I'm in trouble. If I've got problems, I feel better. It makes me feel happy.

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It helps me have, it's spinal tap theology, right? I have a good time all the time. The Christian church counters this with the doctrine of vocation. When people do good, it's not because we're nice people.

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It's because we're responding to God's call. It's because we belong to a bigger story. It's because our actions have consequences beyond ourselves. Okay, the last theological rock for a consequential faith, a hope to hold on to.

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This is one of the biggest differences between the moralistic therapeutic DS teenagers and kids with salient faith. The kids who have consequential faith have a much, much more hopeful view of the future, a sense that the world really is going somewhere good in spite of everything, that somewhere finally things are going to go someplace important, and I've got a part to play in helping get it there. The church's term for this, of course, is eschatology, literally the study of the end. How does the story end?

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Does God win? Do we? It's one of the clearest differences between the kids with salient religious faith and moralistic therapeutic deists. The kids who do not have salient faith tend to be more anxious, more pessimistic, and more confused about the future.

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All right, so here we have it. We've got four parts now. We've got a creed to believe, a community to belong to, a call to live out, a hope to hold on to. That's our solution, right?

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That the way Christian education instills consequential faith is to provide young people with these things. This is where I want to be very careful, because the answer, of course, is no. It's true, sustainable faith can't last without these things. But the decisive question is, which creed?

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Which community? Which call? Which hope? Many movements throughout history have recognized the power of young people and the power of a consequential faith and have co-opted youthful passion for sometimes unholy ends.

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Okay, take a look at this. These represent, of course, Hitler Youth and Hamas, and the Boy Scouts are the benign version of this, okay? But still, they're co-opting the same kind of things for citizenship rather than for religious identity. These

00:36:49.760 - 00:37:08.560

summaries of what these organizations stand for. I got from the documents that these organizations publish about themselves. But you can see, just to compare, how these organizations would look at this and say, well, yeah, we do this. We provide young people with a creed and a community and a call and a hope, and it's all good.

00:37:10.160 - 00:37:38.880

My question is, what makes youth ministry different? Well, this is where we have to go back to the hermeneutical moment. Because unless we have a different perspective from which to view our work with teenagers, to help us see our lives and their lives from God's side of the clock, from the side of their baptism, then we might have youth work, but we don't have youth ministry. So what's that going to take?

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What will it take to approach youth ministry from the perspective of dying and rising again in Jesus Christ? I realize we could build a program There are people, people in Christian education are known for building programs out of rocks and cool whip if necessary. So, you know, that's always an option.

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But that's not what's going to help us here. What we need to do is figure out not how to build a program. But I think we have to start by teaching a language. Helping view our educational ministry with young people.

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as a language that helps them lay claim to a particular creed and a particular community and a particular call and a particular hope. That's a language that reflects the central rhythm of the Christian life, the dying and rising of baptism, losing ourselves to gain life, laying down our lives so other others may live, and that language starts, like all languages, with a word. In our case, the word, a word that is both spoken and incarnate, logos, the word of Jesus.

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Now, when I say we need to start with the word Jesus to a world full of mainline Protestants, people usually start lining up against the walls, right? I want to be clear, reclaiming a language for Jesus doesn't make the second person of the Trinity more important than the others. It just admits that there is a second person of the Trinity. The fact is that Christians do not know either the Creator or the Holy Spirit except through the lens, the hermeneutic, of Jesus Christ.

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And that hermeneutic is provided by the second person of the Trinity. If you have seen me, Jesus says, you have seen the Father. The one decisive word in Christianity and that leads to decisive practices that set us apart from Hamas or Boy Scouts or some of these other organizations is when we clearly and unmistakably and unapologetically talk about Jesus. Try finding the common ground between a bunch of Jewish Christians in the 1st century, a bunch of Celtic monks hanging out in Ireland in the Middle Ages, some Pentecostals in Kenya, and a roomful of Presbyterians in Austin.

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find the common ground. There isn't much except Jesus. Now, I want to be clear that we're not just talking about plugging in the word Jesus every few syllables when we speak. I don't know if you guys are South Park people, but Cartman on South Park, you know, manages to come up with a whole band based on this premise.

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If we're going to talk about Jesus credibly with teenagers, first of all, it can't just be with words. But the thing that we've got to start with is we have to start by relying on a theology that actually needs Jesus. OK? The question, the first question we've got to ask ourselves is, do we actually need Jesus in our churches?

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Or are we deep down really fine without it? Now, that's a question I won't have you talk about right now, but it's one to take home with you. because moralistic therapeutic deism doesn't need Jesus for salvation because nobody needs saving in moralistic therapeutic deism. Everybody's nice, right?

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We are our salvation. So why do we have to bother with Jesus Christ? So no wonder our young people have trouble saying the word of Jesus. Jesus is irrelevant in a whole lot of our churches.

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Sometimes we offer young people the WWJD Jesus. What would Jesus do, Jesus? The Jesus of the good example. And the only problem, that's fine, but the only problem with that is nobody rearranges their lives for a good example.

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They say, look, there goes Jesus, the good example, kind of like my uncle, you know? It's a very nice thing. People rearrange their lives because somebody loves them, because somebody says, I want you, I believe in you, I've got a plan for you, you haven't even imagined yet. Jesus doesn't overcome benign whateverism because he's a good example.

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He overcomes it because he's God. So my point is, Jesus isn't optional, even for mainline Protestants. Jesus is how God makes sense to us. And Jesus is how God makes sense to young people, too.

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Why? Because Jesus is incarnate as a person, a person who thinks they're to die for. And kids get that. Jesus is the first word of our faith language with teenagers.

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So what if we organize the way we approach Christian education with young people as though we were teaching them a language instead of giving them more religious stuff to do? So, for example, if we want teenagers to have a creed to believe for a consequential God, then they're going to need a grammar, a basic vocabulary that describes a God who loves them personally, a God who acts for them powerfully, a God who is the agent in their lives instead of somebody passive that sort of stands back in the balcony. There was a study, the Exemplary Youth Ministry Study that was completed the summer before last, studied all of these churches where kids had vital faith that was thriving, churches across denominations.

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And one of the common factors they found in the language of those young people who had vital, thriving faith was that God was the subject of sentences. So God acts. It's not like God receives. God is the actor.

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So you know how you learn a language like that? We've already said it. We immerse people in a community where people speak that language. So the question we have to ask is this.

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are the teenagers in our churches surrounded by people who speak the grammar of a personal and powerful God. Of course, we don't want just to teach them grammar. That's pretty boring. We want them also to be fluent in the language of faith, right?

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So they're going to have to be immersed in this community that doesn't just speak it to them, it gives them opportunities to speak it as well. So it becomes second nature to them. So they want to belong to a community that belongs to God. The reason Christians think Christian fellowship transforms us is not because of icebreakers.

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The reason is because, why? Wherever two or three are gathered, who is there? Yeah, there you go. I am in the midst of you.

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So the question is, are young people in your congregation immersed in a community where they belong enough to feel free to use the language of that community? Third, if we want them to have a sense that they're called to be part of God's ministry, that they have a call to live out, then they're going to need some space where they can get clear about what they mean. This would be the diction of faith. diction of your language is how clearly you speak it, how intelligible you are.

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Kids have to be able to experience the life everybody's talking about all the time. Faith language has to have a referent Youth need an opportunity to participate in the baptismal life, to take part in experiences where they lay down their lives to sacrifice something for somebody else, dying and rising experiences, because this is how the work of Jesus Christ becomes clear. The baptismal life becomes intelligible by doing and in learning a call to live out.

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So the question is, Do our churches give young people a chance to participate in that firsthand, in experiences of dying and rising and sacrificial love, in relationships and rituals that enact what faith is all about? And finally, if we want kids to have a hope to hold on to, a discernible reason to hang on to their faith in spite of everything, then we have to be able to keep our accent in the broader culture. We have to act differently, speak differently, be differently.

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We have to live like Jesus matters, in other words. And that means we live non-anxious, expectant lives of hope. And we invite young people into those lives with us. So the question is, how is your church keeping your accent, showing young people how to live differently in the broader culture?

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OK, now you can go back to your partner. Take just a second and look at these. Where is your church doing a good job helping young people speak of Jesus? Verbally, non-verbally?

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And where are you little rocky? Go. Take one more minute. All right, we're going to come back together one last time.

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You see, the point is that as long as we base Christian education for young people on religious indoctrination, on wholesome community involvement, on upward mobility, on the self-esteem movement, we might imitate the scouts in youth ministry, but we do not imitate Christ. One more thing. One of the most incontrovertible findings of the National Study of Youth and Religion, and the one that we did not need a national study to find out, is that parents generally get what they are when it comes to religion as in most things. Now that's as true for congregations as it is for families.

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We can expect the kids that we raise in our congregations to look a lot like us. So while we focus today on the faith of adolescents, I don't think we should leave this morning without turning the camera back on ourselves. Because the pivotal question is, do we practice the kind of faith we want our young people to have?

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Now, somewhere inside of me, my fear is that the answer is yes, we do. Maybe the simple truth is that the fact that our young people practice a default faith is because we do. Because, and more to the point, because moralistic therapeutic deism is the kind of faith we want them to have. Maybe we like the cult of nice better than we like Christianity.

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It gives us a not too religious kind of Christian-ish faith. It allows us and will allow our teenagers to do well while doing good. to be successful adults without turning into religious zealots, to notice others without ever actually having to lay their lives down for any of them. The cult of nice doesn't need Jesus, and therefore it changes nothing.

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I think if most young people find the church worthy of benign whateverism and no more, the indictment falls on us, not on them. The word to baptize, you probably know this, comes from an origin that means to overwhelm or to swamp. So in case you felt swamped this past year, now you know why.

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You're living into your baptismal life. And so as we take this baptismal rhythm back with us, back to the young people in our churches, back to our own faith, let's just close the day by reminding us how we got here, this great baptismal fonts in the back here. I'd like this half of the room to say to this half of the room, remember your baptism and be thankful, and then you guys say it back, okay? Remember your baptism and be thankful.

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Remember baptism and be thankful. Let's close by singing the doxology. Why don't we stand and sing? Praise God, from whom all where sins flow.

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Praise God, all creatures here be all. Praise God, all by the heavenly. Ghost Praise Father's Son and Holy Ghost Amen Thank you for coming. Thank you, Kenda, for those rich findings and provocative insights.

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I think we will have some time after Kenda's second address for questions and answers. So we'll reserve that after the second lecture, if that's okay. I think our time is running a little long.

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David, we have announcements? Got a couple of announcements this afternoon. There will be a moderated conversation with all of the lecturers, and we'll find out how much synchronicity there is between what is happening and I am already beginning to hear common language, maybe not common accents, but we're going to teach you an accent while you're here, Kenda.

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But some common language, and we hope that you will attend those moderated conversations. The other thing is that this evening, we are trying something new at Midwinter Lectures. Actually, it's not new. We're resurrecting an old custom, which is to have decade reunions.

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We are about to go into a series of lunches that will honor the classes of '52, '57, and '82. But this evening, there will be an opportunity for all of you to gather together in a decade reunion with people that you shared seminary with during the time you were there. And even if you are not a graduate of the business, as some of us who have been coming to lecture for most of our lives are not.

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We invite you to come and participate in those because they are intended for the whole community. We're not going to check your driver's license at the door to see which class you were in even. Just go to whichever one you have friends or where you would like to make some friends. We want this to be a part of your experience here and then of course tonight

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We have Albert and Gage for our midwinter lecture concert, and I think that they're going to be absolutely stunning, and we hope that you will all come and share the party that we're going to have this evening. Thank you.