Why I Didn't RebelSample

Giving Kids a Faith that Matters

Meet Jason. Jason came from the perfect Christian family—parents ran the youth group, he played on the worship team, and their whole family drove bus-loads of kids to youth conferences all over the country. Jason loved church during high school—he had friends there, there was free pizza at youth group, and he thrived being in the band.

But when he went to university in another town three hours away, he didn't seek out a new place to worship.

When his mom asked him why he hadn’t gone to church his entire first semester at college, he just shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, “I still believe in God. I just don’t really think I need to go to church. What’s the point?”

Interestingly, many families with kids who rebel had thrown themselves into church when the kids were growing up. They volunteered multiple times a week, but it didn’t seem to be enough for their kids to internalize their faith. And that’s because these families treat church like a club, not a team. Families who treat church like a club have a church focus—families who act like a team have a kingdom focus. Faith goes beyond the four walls of the church. Their primary dedication wasn’t to the church—it was to furthering God’s kingdom on earth, which naturally means that their volunteering and efforts weren’t all directed towards their church.

As a millennial, the way families approach church doesn’t always mesh with our values and experiences. Kids can hear what’s going on across the world with a touch of a button. The world is smaller than it’s ever been before, and we’ve grown up with so much more awareness of the horrors in this world than any generation before us. We want justice, yet it seems so often that what churches want is just to become a bigger church. It's about perpetuating itself, rather than attacking some of these huge problems we see in Twitter everyday.

Many teens who didn’t rebel had families who threw themselves into God’s work outside of the church:

• Jennifer’s family did medical missions trips to Guatemala
• The Connelly family moved from the cushy suburbs to the inner city to be a light in a place of hurt
• My family went on missions trips to Kenya and had a Christmas tradition of donating through Harvest of Hope catalogues

Faith needs to be bigger than the four walls of your church. Think back on your family’s experiences with faith. Are you living with a church focus, or a kingdom focus? Are you allowing your children to be part of that kingdom focus?

Church for teens is so often focused on being fun. But maybe what they need isn’t more fun. Maybe they need to be a part of something that matters.