I have been in lots of churches over the years and I often get asked what I believe about various things: women in ministry, grace, the future, unity in the Church etc. I have views on those things, but I rarely get asked how I practice what I believe about those things. When Jesus’ disciples wanted to talk to Jesus about prayer they didn’t ask Him what he believed about prayer and whether he could teach them about it. They asked him how to do it: ‘One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he had finished one of His disciples said, “Lord, teach us how to pray.”’ (Luke 11:1)
If we think about our discipleship programmes and Bible studies for young people, are we actually making disciples? Are they immersed in the ‘how’ of our Christian faith? Just sticking with prayer for a moment, if it is true that, as Spurgeon said, ‘All the Christian virtues are locked up in the word prayer,’ how are we not all over this all of the time? We have amazing resources such as Prayer Spaces In Schools and the excellent 24/7 Prayer movement, but where is the ‘how’ of prayer that we are sharing with our young people? A moment or experience will not sustain their life in Christ.
Jesus also talks to his disciples about love and belief. I think sometimes we get a fix on the amazing truth that God loves us, and miss the teaching from Jesus about what we will do if we love him. Do we show our young people ‘how’ to love Jesus? Again, Jesus tells his disciples what to do. In John 14 he lays out what will happen: ‘If anyone loves me, he will keep my word; and my father will love him, and we will come to him and make our abode with him.’ (John 14:23)
It feels as I write that I am reaching for something I am still trying to grasp the truth of but I know that what has been the staple diet of youth discipleship just doesn't do it. It isn’t working for most of our young people. It’s easy to despair and reel off the stats of how many young people started out with the family of God have left it over the last 30 years, but I want to turn to Hebrews. It seems the writer puts his finger on some stuff that would be helpful for us. He is banging his head against a brick wall, getting fed up because it seems they are ‘no longer trying to understand.’ He feels like giving up, it sounds as if they already have and then he says: ‘In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not aquatinted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use, have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.’(Hebrews 5:13-15)
There is plenty in this passage but here are a couple things we should consider as we disciple young people:
- When the writer says ‘by constant use’, it’s not about us constantly banging on about stuff, it’s about the young people themselves training daily. This is not a youth group activity, this is the young people taking hold of their faith and living it.
- The need to ‘distinguish good from evil,’ is the crux of our problem with discipleship: are we telling our young people what is right and wrong or are they beginning to discern how to distinguish for themselves as they mature and grow?
Encouraging our young people to become disciples is ultimately not reliant on what we have taught them but on how they choose to live in the light of that teaching. However, linked to this is an emphasis on us as leaders: ‘Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate them.’ (Hebrews 13:7)
This is a challenging verse! The focus here is not on what we have taught but who we are. The sense in this verse is that your young people won’t remember anything you said to them - but they will remember the kind of person you were. If the Bible says this stuff why is so much youth work practice focused on teaching rather than simply living in community?
Can we change our youth work? Can we re-discover a discipleship of young people where they discover their faith through watching our lives and we trust the Holy Spirit to be at work in their lives when they are not in the youth group?
