Beyond Doubting Alone - (from Tuesday January 24th)

Let’s start with the two research stats that framed my session on engaging the wavering faith of youth in doubt:

            70% of young people report they doubt their faith

            Less than 5% ever sit down and talk about it.

Wow!

This was the video our session opened with.

(Note: it contains some strong language.)

Newsflash – Doubt can be a pretty toxic problem when it isn’t expressed in a caring environment.  Did I hear her correctly?  She took away Christmas?

SO, what do we know about the 70%?  First, their doubts about their faith started as early as junior high school.  These doubts were not usually tied to church doctrine, but more tied to life circumstances.  Most of the 70% saw their doubts as beneficial to their faith in hindsight.  The nature of their doubts fell into four main categories (obviously with a great deal of variety within each category):

            - Does God exist?

            - Does God love me?

            - Am I living as, and doing what, God wants me to?

            - Is Christianity true / the only way to God?

We also know that the 70% described the times when they had doubts as traumatic; producing fear, anxiety, and insecurity.  We know their doubts lived out as a personal crisis; they didn’t just doubt God, but doubted themselves because of it.  An the unanimous consensus of the very large majority say that in their times of doubt, the church did not minister well; rarely even addressing it, and in the few instances when their doubts were addressed, the response was filled with platitudes.

The church has two primary responses to doubt:

1.) Pushing away – this response incorporates all the “you go sort out your doubts, I’ll pray for you, and we’ll be glad to welcome you back when you’ve figured it out” approaches.  It’s worth noting that even Martin Luther King Jr. experienced this approach when he openly doubted the resurrection in his youth group.  We also looked at some responses that were more congruent with quarantine protocols.

2.) Embrace – these are all the responses that draw the doubting teenager in, hold them close, but never actually address the doubts they’re having.  This tends to be because doubting is often treated as an apologetic issue, not a pastoral care issue.  It’s seen as a phase we all go through … but that approach is very much like watching someone fall out of a tree and break their arm, only to walk over to where they’re lying on the ground and tell them “Yeah I broke my arm once.  I remember how painful it was.  Don’t worry, you’ll heal up fine.”

The sad part is, both these responses end in the same result … the teenager doubts alone.

We spent a large part of the time working with actual case studies from the research.  There was a strong recurring theme that the congregation is responsible for the faith development of the person who doubts, not just when they have it all together.  This, of course, seems so obvious, yet we fail to live it out in our congregational contexts.

“Uncertainty is a wonderful reminder of that nagging little

detail I often forget, which is that I am not God.” — John Ortberg

How do we go about changing congregational culture to respond to this?  What do you think?