This is addressed to clergy and parents first, and to anyone else interested second.

This is the first of two articles.

At no other time in history has youth been so heavily emphasized in culture (both secular and Christian).  From the point of view of churches that still have a large number of children and teenagers, the emphasis on the youth guides every decision these churches make.  This ranges all the way from the age of the pastor who is chosen to shepherd the church to how the layout of the church is set up to what type of music is used in worship to how many activities are offered for the youth.  (At this point I want you to start thinking about what is missing from this picture).

From a spiritual point of view, such emphasis is bizarre, and it is more shaped by 20^th century youth culture than anything else.  It is nothing less than the idolization of people from their late teens through their early 20s.

What I have described above is the aerial view.

Now let’s go down to the street level view. Such an emphasis on youth can sometimes (although not all the time) compromise the principles that make us Orthodox Christians.  For example, I have often heard that “We need to keep the youth in the Church” when justifying a questionable decision such as having heavy metal music for “worship.”  The reality is such a decision only appeals to the fleeting tastes of the youth.  “It will keep them in the Church” they say.

Other times, content of the sermons is compromised become nothing more than self-help and self-improvement, which is a modern watered-down philosophy that is built on the desire to be productive in an increasingly fast-paced world, and it is otally centered on our selves rather than centered on Christ.  “But it will keep them in the Church,” they say.

The people who show such “concern” for the youth will use their positions in the church’s service to schedule a lot of meetings for the youth throughout the week (Bible Studies, Wednesday night youth meetings, hymnology classes, Sunday School, and outings), and as as true for anything to be meaningful, the frequency of such meetings will bring down their quality.  “But it will keep them in the Church,” they say.

Justifying decisions by saying, “It will keep youth in the Church” is nothing more than tribalism and busyness rather than the inculcation of a Christ-centered way of life in the young.   The Church will (and often has) failed at forming authentic Christian understanding.  Such lack of understanding in both those who serve and the young who are catered to brings in non-Christian ways of thinking into the Church.

But have you noticed what’s missing yet?

What’s missing is a preparation for adulthood as Christians.  It was missing when the “concern” for the youth drove all the decisions in the Church; it was also missing when all these meetings were created that kept the youth busy.  Such a way of doing things does not prepare anyone to be an adult who is a Christian. With such a system, once the youth reach adulthood, their spiritual lives will become stagnant at best.

Yet there is something interesting happening: The rise of attention to public intellectuals like Jordan Peterson has revealed a deep hunger for an adulthood that no longer exists in the West.  This hunger is also present in the Church and is often not adequately dealt with pastorally.

But why isn’t it?

This is for several reasons, but the common factor between all these reasons is youth-centeredness.

Youth-Centered Christianity is Not Authentic in Light of Christian History

What does that mean?  Didn’t the early Christians care about the youth?  For sure they did.  But care does not equal keeping the Church’s attention solely on them.  Going back to the history of the Church can inform us on how to carry out the service in a way that initiates the young in a way that forms them to be ready for adulthood as Christians, and at the same time allow for continual spiritual development as adult Christians. 

The Order of Readers

From the earliest sources we have on the Order of Readers in the 3^rd century, we can make the determination that they were children, specifically pre-pubescent.

But this was not a nice gesture to include the kids in the service.  Rather, it was a serious expression of theology meant to teach both children and adults.  Firstly, in the days of the early Church, reading was not as easy as it is today (even though if you’ve read my previous articles on the matter, it is clear that reading is anything but easy today).  Back then, there were no spaces between words, and a reader could not just go up and read monotonously without any understanding.  It would have been nearly incomprehensible to read out loud without understanding due to this.  Readers had to reflect upon the text beforehand to sound it out correctly and in addition to sounding it out, they had to have read it fluently.  So, it was a way to inculcate the gravitas of the Scriptures in the young by giving them this serious responsibility.  Bear in mind that for most of the adults in the early Church, this was their only way to access the Scriptures apart from the sermon.  This assigning of responsibility caused the children to authentically participate into the spiritual life of the Church; it was not just a gesture.  And it was certainly not just a way to keep them busy.

In comparison, today when our kids read the Scriptures in the church service, it is only a gesture: they stumble, they mumble, and monotonously read the text with zero understanding and for that reason they also can’t communicate understanding to the congregation who is listening.  This is not distinguishable from “noise.”  And this is one reason (but not the only reason) that it becomes difficult to focus on the readings in Church.  Of course, the main reason is choosing to pay attention, a skill that is becoming rarer each passing year.  But I know even when my attention is not 100% there, a clear and compelling reading demands my attention.  Such a reading was the type practiced in the Church.

Further, in the 3^rd century, Readers retired at puberty.  Thus, in those days only the high-pitched voices of young children were ever heard reading the Scriptures.  This was to signal that we must become like children to inherit the kingdom of God (Christopher Page, Lecture # 2: “Towards a Ministry of Singing”).

But what about youth groups?  Boy’s meetings.  Girl’s meetings.  Sunday School?  Bible Studies?

These meetings didn’t exist; all these are innovations in the past couple of centuries.  This shows that youth groups, meetings, and Sunday School are not as effective as you might think them to be.  It has even been noticed by modern Protestants that youth groups have had a detrimental impact on the faith of the youth.

Rather, it was the communal gathering, service, attention to the Scriptures and sermons in specific, and the contemplation upon these things once they left the church service that nurtured, sustained, and grew the children and the adults in the early Church.

The Juvenilization of Faith

But when we make our faith about teaching how we should act on the playground or with our siblings at home, or about how we should persevere and study hard and pray to God before taking exams or taking graduate school seriously, this makes the faith kid-centered.

Other than how to act on the playground, the rest has no relevance whatsoever for how to live a life as an adult because the nature of adulthood is very different than the nature of life from elementary school to graduate school.

Kid-centered Christianity gives us an incomplete or skewed understanding of multiple areas of our faith:

1.The definition of and committing sin

a. It’s not as simple as bad actions that will make God upset

b. It’s not as simple as rules that God set for us to follow, which causes Him to be displeased if not followed.

2. Deadliness of sin

a. It’s not that we will go to Hell at the end of it all if we sin. There is an effect on us and others in this life.

3. How Christianity is not a behavioral system but an existential and ontological one

a. It is not about getting us to live well behaved lives.

b. Virtue is only secondary to any type of end.Philosophy never defined it as primary nor did the early Church.  The end was one: love for God and others.

4. The role of the mind in the Christian life

a. It is not optional, but essential.However, we use it to the best of our ability.

5. The true nature of prayer

a. It is a lot larger than asking God for protection, perseverance, and guidance.

6. The role of reading in the spiritual life

a. It is not simply to keep our minds occupied on holy things or God’s work in the past.

7. The role of fasting in the spiritual life

a. It is not to please God nor is it to be obedient to the Church which nourishes us.

If you are feeling uneasy about calling these conceptions incomplete or skewed, then it is likely you were brought up in a church that was kid centered.

If we send out into adulthood people who have been taught these incomplete and/or skewed conceptions of these areas of our faith, then it can only result in one out of three possibilities:

1. They will be unstable and live a life of sin in their spiritual life as adults

a. It will result in an extremely difficult struggle against sin and lead them to despair.

b. It will lead to troubled marital life.

c. It will lead to rudderless children.

d. It will create a pastoral nightmare for priests.

e. Or they’ll just sin and treat the Sacrament of Confession as an automatic forgiveness button that you can click.

2. They will leave the faith altogether

a. They will just walk out on the faith and possibly encourage others to do so too through discussion.

3. They will actually develop an adult faith (by accident though)

a. This will also come as a result of struggle but ultimately unrelated to the poor pastoral care they received, which is why it is accidental.

But with all that said, how do we fix the problem?  We must turn to the history of early Christianity to get an idea of how to do things the authentically Christian way.

The Laity of the Early Church

The example of the lay members of the early Church provides an admirable model of imitation for us today. Why?  Because they were hungry to partake of the life that Christ invited us into.  Today we confuse education with acquiring degrees instead of developing a mind(set).  St. Basil’s sermons, both the Moral Homilies and the Hexaemeron, were addressed for the most part to illiterate manual laborers.  These illiterate manual laborers show us what it means to be spiritually educated because they developed a mentality, not just a certification.

As far as I can tell, attention did not devolve among the audiences of the Church until the late 4^th and early 5^th century with the mass conversions to Christianity because it became a popular thing to be a Christian, which was a result of imitating the Christian emperors, only one or two who actually embodied what it meant to be Christian.

May we learn from the examples of the nameless lay members who lived before us and passed down the faith to us.  Even though they left us no writings, their way of life is written firmly into the life of every Christian because they formed the communities that passed down the faith to us and paved the way for evangelism.  May we share with them in the inheritance of our Lord Jesus Christ unto the ages of ages.

Re-Visioning

One of the most essential things (in my opinion, one of the two most essential things) lost when we center Christianity on the youth, is that Christianity is meant to cause us to see the world in a different way and thus to understand things in a different way, and this leads us to live in a different way.  This way of re-seeing, or re-visioning, to my knowledge was not treated as a topic of discussion in the early Church.  But we find this re-visioning dispersed and diffused throughout the writings of the Church Fathers.

An example is St. Ephrem the Syrian in his hymns (which were written for the singing of the laity of the Church of Nisibis, specifically the choirs of women).  These hymns had imagery associated with everyday commoner life such as that of artisans or women working at home (because contrary to popular belief, women worked in the ancient world, although their work was done in the “home,” but included weaving clothing and grinding grain, which in the end was used in the house and the surplus was sold in the marketplaces for money).

St. Ephrem’s hymns are genius not only for their sublime beauty, but also because they trigger attention to God and our lives in light of the Gospel, even when we are in our ordinary, everyday lives doing our work.  This re-orienting vision of what we are doing and how we can understand the Gospel through it causes us to grow spiritually; we become acutely aware of God and His work in the world.

Retrieving these ways of spiritual development from the early Church will lead us to become Christian adults.  That will be the focus of the next article which is titled “Mature Christianity.”

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