3. Jesus Offers Better Answers
3
Jesus Offers Better Answers
Usually when I describe God to my friends, I describe God as a best friend. Like someone who is always there for you. Sometimes I describe him as a father, but that is sometimes a sore topic. When you think of a father you think of your own, so it’s not always the best example. So when I talk about God, I usually describe him as a friend. It’s easier to understand, because almost everyone has at least one person they consider a friend.
Janelle
Samuel has been part of the same church his entire life, as has much of his extended Asian American family. “Church and family always went hand in hand for me,” he said the first time he met with me (Brad) to share his story. He continued, “I always had people I knew. Church was never a place I didn’t want to be.”
Today he’s a leader both in his youth group and in a Christian club at his public school. Now a senior, Samuel is looking at Christian colleges and working around twenty hours a week in fast food to save up for tuition. Friday night youth group is the highlight of Samuel’s week. He loves connecting with other students and leaders, the small groups after the message, and closing worship when students can receive prayer. “We all know what each other’s going through. And if you’re involved, you’re really involved, you’re really part of the community.”
Samuel talks about a turning point his sophomore year that made his faith real—when he decided to stop wearing so many “different hats” and chose to wear his “faith hat” consistently. He changed friend groups, distancing himself from damaging relationships. He spent weeks eating lunch alone in a classroom, using lunchtime to pray and sort things out. “It was a safe place for me. I was really broken, but it was really good because I used that brokenness to grow.” Now he speaks of that time as “growing relationally with God. And just finding myself.”
The more Samuel shared with me, the clearer it became that his faith is very real and integrated into most every area of his life. When he talks about the 3 big questions, his answers are grounded in Jesus and clearly shaped by his family and church.
How Does the Gospel Respond to the Big Questions Today’s Teenagers Are Asking?
In chapter 1, we wrote that teenagers often wonder, How is God relevant to me? We heard from a student who reflected that faith was “a big part of my life, but it’s not my whole life, I guess.” In our experience, many young people are a lot more like that student than Samuel. Faith is in the picture, but it’s not integrated. And all too often, it feels like a compartmentalized extra more than a life essential.
Empathizing with today’s teenagers is the first step to helping them answer their big questions of identity, belonging, and purpose. The next step is to ask, If these are the biggest questions, what does the good news of Jesus Christ say in response?
Young people need new plotlines, new mantras to say to themselves over and over about who they are, where they fit, and what difference they can make. These new Christ-centered stories can replace teenagers’ incomplete or toxic narratives, empowering them to live out more freeing answers to their most pressing questions.
We believe this is the heart of discipleship.
We find it helpful to view the 3 big questions, current answers, and Christ-centered answers together in a table. We will continue to build on this table throughout the book as we explore identity, belonging, and purpose in the lives of today’s teenagers.
Big Question
Focus
Description
Current Answers
Christ-Centered Answer
Who am I?
Identity
Our view of ourselves
Where do I fit?
Belonging
Our connection with others
What difference can I make?
Purpose
Our contribution to the world
The Gospel Isn’t Thin, but Sometimes Teenagers’ Jesus-Answers Are
In our interviews with students like Samuel, we asked a lot of questions about faith and church. One of those questions was “What does it mean, to you, to be a Christian?”
We noticed three themes in students’ answers: behavior, belief, and relationship. At first glance, these themes were unsurprising, but what did catch our attention was the disproportion among them. While we don’t want to make broad generalizations about all teenagers based on our small interview sample size of twenty-seven, these findings do raise interesting questions about how teenagers talk about faith today.
Behavior
The category of “behavior” included acting out faith and living Christian morals. Teenagers talked about “acting Christian,” “living differently,” “being an example,” “helping others,” “loving others” as well as practices such as going to church and reading the Bible. Here are a few excerpts to give you a sense for students’ own wording:
What it means to be a Christian is doing what God tells you. To be obedient to God, to follow in the way of Jesus Christ. We are called Christians for a reason—to really follow what Jesus Christ told us to do, and then to follow him. We can’t be Jesus, we will never be him, but we can have his morals. Just following the Word and all that, and also evangelizing and being kind to anyone.
Daniel
To live by God. Basically, to try your best to live the way that he lived, which is not easy—it’s extremely difficult—but as long as you are doing your best to serve his kingdom with whatever gifts he has given you, that will naturally bring others to God through you, so you want to evangelize and bring others to God too.
Hannah
Oh, that’s an easy one. What does it mean for me to be a Christian in my eyes? Being a loving person to everyone around you. That is how I see it. I would point out a Christian in public as the person who is the most loving to everybody.
Leo
Behavior-oriented responses were by far the largest theme across the answers. Two thirds of interviewees noted behavior.
Belief
Responses identified as “belief” included this word and synonyms like “accepting Christ” and “having faith.” A few examples include the following:
I guess it means to be a firm believer in God.
Simone
I believe that Jesus saved us all and that accepting him will get you a life in heaven with him, so that is the most important thing.
Nick
I feel like it means someone—well, obviously someone who believes it—like, Jesus rose from the dead and is coming back. I feel like that is kind of the main point.
Hailey
Belief was the second most common theme, mentioned by about half of participants.
Responses we identified as mostly about “relationship” included direct mentions of the word as well as experiences of love, relational qualities, or familial terms like “Father.” Here are a couple of examples:
I would say that being a Christian is having a relationship with the Lord . . . purely because he loves us.
Rebekah
Just being, like, a daughter of God.
Claudia
Only one-quarter of interviewees mentioned relationship themes in their responses, and only one young person primarily described being a Christian in relational terms.
Other relational elements such as encountering God or a sense of transcendence were mostly absent. The Holy Spirit never showed up in teenagers’ explanations of what it means to be a Christian. In fact, “spiritual” was mentioned only once.
What’s more, young people talked in behavior-oriented terms nearly one-third more often than belief and over three times as much as relationship. In other words, a teenager in our study was three times as likely to mention behavior over relationship when talking about what it means to be a Christian.
Integrating Faith
If you’re like us, you’re probably both encouraged and discouraged by these responses. Faith includes being in relationship with God, believing, and actively living it out. But do young people have these elements in balance?
We did see some integration: one-third of students mentioned two of the three themes in their responses. But only one young person integrated all three elements in his description of what it means to be a Christian.
That teenager was Samuel, whom we met earlier in this chapter. He shared:
Being a Christian is believing that Jesus died for you, and having a relationship with him, being able to create a bond with Jesus, to read God’s Word; to just talk with someone. Knowing God and believing that he sent his Son to die for us. That’s what being a Christian is. And living that out.
Now, no one wants their faith to be judged by their answer to a single question in the midst of a two-hour interview. So we don’t want to read too much into these responses.
At the same time, we can think about this data like an off-the-cuff snapshot. And for many of the teenagers we interviewed, this snapshot looks a lot like “try-hard faith.” While it’s wonderful that young people put faith into action and see being a Christian as something they do, it’s possible that belief and relationship sit on the sidelines.
Lack of faith integration was also a theme in our analysis of the responses of 2,092 young people to the 3 big questions of identity, belonging, and purpose. When looking at all the actual words teenagers shared in their responses, we found that religious terms (such as church and God) were hardly used at all—in only 6–7 percent of words for identity, 10–12 percent for belonging, and 2–3 percent for purpose.
We hope for a more holistic vision of what it means to follow Jesus. We bet you do too. You long for young people to know and live a robust picture of discipleship. You also wonder how to help them get there. The good news is that you can be part of the journey through stronger conversations and connections.
But first, we need to clarify what we mean by discipleship. If young people can’t articulate it, there’s a good chance the adults in their lives don’t have an easy and repeatable way to do so.
Discipleship Is Our Everyday “Yes” to Jesus
If you’re reading this book, you want to help teenagers move from their current answers to Christ-centered answers. How do we get there?
Discipleship is the bridge. Discipleship is our everyday “Yes” to Jesus.
When we say that discipleship—our everyday “Yes” to Jesus—is a bridge from teenagers’ current answers to Christ-centered answers, we envision it like this diagram. The young person stands in the intersection of the three interlocking domains of identity, belonging, and purpose. Their current answers, represented by the empty circles on the left, often represent less than the abundant life God offers. The Christ-centered answers, represented by the shaded circles on the right, embody the fruit of discipleship. In between the two, the discipleship bridge is marked by dotted arrows indicating that the discipleship journey is an ongoing, reciprocal process. Discipleship isn’t just one way, and it isn’t always a linear journey. Sometimes we take one or two (or three or forty-three) steps away from Christ’s best answers for us. That’s why faithful guides like you are so important!
In the Gospels, we see Jesus encounter all kinds of people and extend all kinds of invitations. But perhaps the most alarming and poignant is when he looks someone in the eye and offers, “Come, follow me.” The stakes are high. The ask is big.
Answering yes changes everything.
While we’re not arguing the finer points of how salvation “works” here, it seems to us that Jesus’ invitation to discipleship looks like an active and ongoing response to what God is doing in, around, and through us. So we propose that discipleship is an everyday “Yes.”
What do we mean by that?
It’s One Big Yes Followed by a Thousand Yeses
It’s been wisely said that when we follow Jesus, we say “one big yes” followed by a thousand little yeses each day. Discipleship is a journey, a long pilgrimage, grounded in the stuff of normal life. It’s holistic, embodied, and concrete. God’s first word to us is “Yes,” and in response, our yes is to look toward God and ask, “What today?” Today’s yeses could look like reaching out to a hurting friend, seeking God through reflective prayer, or connecting with other disciples.
Our daily discipleship is a combination of the power of God at work to transform us and our “working out” our stories through what we do, say, and believe. It’s about who we are and who we are becoming. Discipleship, then, is also about growing in character and virtue. We can think of character like a well-worn pathway between who we say we are and what we actually do.
So instead of a form of discipleship reduced to only behavior, belief, or relationship, as teenagers may see it, we can invite them into a more robust way of life based in trust. A yes—today, tomorrow, and every day after.
It’s Not Just about Me but about Us
We do not follow Jesus in isolation. Discipleship is at once personal and shared; it’s never only about “me” but always implies “us” at the family, church, community, society, and global levels—it’s our everyday “Yes.” Being a disciple means I belong with God’s people.
Discipleship acknowledges that loving God means loving others, even when it’s hard. It involves knowing I am “saved by grace” while also knowing that what I do—and what we do together—matters because it impacts other people, who are all beloved image bearers of God. By the power of the Spirit, we open ourselves to see what Jesus sees and become neighbors the world needs—neighbors who enact justice and love mercy.
We practice discipleship together because it’s one of the ways we are like God: utterly relational. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in mutual self-giving relationship. We are made in God’s image, invited to participate in God’s life, transformed by God’s love, and sent out in God’s power to love the world.
Jesus also offered stark terms for those who would walk with him: “Whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”
Discipleship is a yes that requires a no. Following in the way of Jesus means we renounce other paths, allegiances, lords, and idols. This is discipleship’s cost.
a See C. S. Song, The Believing Heart: An Invitation to Story Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999); and James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997). Song suggests “Jesus-oriented” as a preferred term.
Sometimes that no means turning away from false answers to the 3 big questions of identity, belonging, and purpose and toward Christ-centered ones that free us to truly live.
It’s Saying Yes and Then Inviting Others to Say Yes Too
Our response to Jesus is contagious. We become ambassadors who bring this story of good news to the poor, the rich, the hopeless, the forgotten, and the people with whom we share our everyday lives. We’re always looking to expand the circle, to make room at the table.
The Church Puts Flesh on Better Answers
At the start of this chapter, we met Samuel. Samuel is deeply embedded in his church family. He has had the same mentor for the past four years who meets with him regularly and really helped him through the faith and friendship crises of his sophomore year. Samuel describes his mentor as “on call whenever. He has really pushed me in the right direction; if I ever need help, he is always trying to show me the way. Not so much push me—being able to let me experience it on my own, but also guide me. So he has been a really great influence.”
This consistent adult has encouraged, challenged, and lived out faith for Samuel. But he’s not the only one. Samuel has also had his youth pastor, his parents, his pastor, his peers and volunteer leaders in youth group, his extended family, and those who are like extended family.
In other words, Samuel has been surrounded by the church.
The church plays a unique—and increasingly rare—role in our culture. It is a community bound by collective beliefs and commitments that puts flesh on the message of Jesus through its shared life.
Sometimes that embodied faith is shown in the quiet example of the elder who shows up to shovel snow in the church parking lot week after week through the long winter. Or in the college student who faithfully drops off weekly groceries to an older shut-in during a quarantine. Or in a thousand other examples of on-the-ground faith in action—discipleship made concrete.
Other times the church puts flesh on better answers by telling stories. It repeats stories from the Bible as well as testimonies of saints through the ages and saints down the row in our worship services.
My (Brad’s) youth ministry regularly invites adults in our church to share testimonies with our youth group. We ask them to think of a story about their own experience with God—either something recent or from when they were a teenager—and, if possible, to link it to one of the 3 big questions of identity, belonging, or purpose. Recently, we heard from a young adult about how he found joy in a new job among people experiencing homelessness, and from one of our pastors who shared openly about her long struggle with depression.
Students often tell us these testimonies are the highlights of our gatherings. The stories offer glimpses into what faith is like for real-life disciples beyond Sundays or what it was like for them as teenagers. The practice gives our students access to adults’ not-put-together selves and to how they have wrestled with questions of faith.
Hearing faith stories builds faith language. Reflecting on our interviews with teenagers, teammate Jennifer Guerra Aldana noted that sometimes the answers young people gave us felt like “borrowed language.” She reflected, “I surely resonated with that—as a young person I borrowed a lot of language about my faith from the adults around me. Later I realized I had to sift through that language and figure out what language fit me best now as a young adult. So when I think of discipleship for young people, I think, let’s inundate them with stories so they will have many to draw from.”
What Any Adult Can Do as a Starting Point
As we think about how the church can be present with teenagers and give them a big bank of “borrowed” stories and language to scaffold their faith, we might like the idea in theory but get stuck in practice. We spend time with teenagers, but we don’t know what to do to shape their journey toward Jesus-filled identity, belonging, and purpose.
As a Young Life leader in college, I (Kara) knew I was supposed to have some sort of “spiritual” conversation with teenagers when I met with them. So I set a goal to bring up God at least once every time I took a student out for frozen yogurt (frozen yogurt was all the rage when I was in college). I even had a strategy for when to bring up God. It needed to be far enough in the conversation that I had already bonded with the student but not one of the last questions I raised. So I’d usually shoot for talking about God—once—about two-thirds of the way into the conversation.
I was well-intentioned, but talking about God was an add-on—a forced three-minute interruption that didn’t even shape our conversation, let alone that young person’s faith.
It was sort of like walking students partway across the discipleship bridge, then shuffling back before anything got too serious.
What does it look like to be a faithful guide on that path? Picking up on the practice of sharing our testimonies and lives, here are three steps we can take with young people to create better conversations.
NOW
First, we listen for what is going on NOW in students’ identity, belonging, and purpose.
As we explored in chapter 2, listening opens the door for empathy. When we’re with a young person, we can start by considering what’s going on right now in their quest for answers.
Sometimes the “now” is right on the surface: a friend group falls apart, college applications are almost due, she gets cut from the team, he discovers a love for theater. When we’re present in these moments, we hear a teenager processing one or more of the big questions out loud.
Other times the answer is less obvious. We may get the put-together version of the story or the closed-door answers of “fine” or “good.” As we ask more questions and do more exploring, we can listen for the answers below the water—sometimes way below.
GOD
Next, we practice wondering and discernment. This puts us in a posture to look for how GOD is present with students and then explore better Christ-centered answers to their 3 big questions.
In this part of the conversation, we gain perspective in order to talk about the “now” concerns in light of God’s nature, promises, presence, and action. We do this by wondering how God’s Spirit is already in the midst of the current situation and inviting the student to see it. As adult mentors, leaders, or parents, we can help a young person discern the ways God is active. We may use specific prompts and questions such as these:
I wonder how God might be at work through this situation? or, I wonder what God is up to here?
I wonder if you’ve sensed God’s Spirit present with you in this?
How can I help you pray about this?
Together, we can explore the Christ-centered answers that free a young person to live out of a truer sense of identity, belonging, and purpose.
a The origin of this widely used acronym is difficult to nail down, but it has been popularized by The Empowerment Dynamic. David Emerald and Robert Lanphear, The Power of TED* (*The Empowerment Dynamic): 10th Anniversary Edition (Edinburgh, Scotland: Polaris Publishing, 2015); and David Emerald, Power of TED, 2020, https://powerofted.com/w-a-i-t-why-am-i-talking-2/.
HOW
Eventually, we can offer direction. The HOW part of the conversation helps a teenager take a next step toward living out better answers. But be careful not to jump into this mode too soon. We become a trusted guide only after we have listened well and empathized. At that point, we can practice truth telling, leading them into more faithful discipleship.
This NOW-GOD-HOW conversation framework gives us the skills we need to help teenagers move toward transformation. The rest of this book offers ideas and tools to help you put it into action.
One Adult Can Be the Bridge
When I (Brad) was a high school junior and new to following Jesus, Gaylene was one of our church’s youth leaders. Gaylene was a single mom who showed me better answers to the big questions because she not only taught the Bible to our small high school group but also lived out better answers herself.
I knew her testimony of leaving an emotionally abusive marriage for the sake of her teenaged daughters. I witnessed her courage to keep them connected in a church community, driving them to midweek youth group after a long day at work or taking a Friday off to help lead a retreat. The one Bible study I still remember her leading was on the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 because she was someone who so obviously embodied them.
You don’t have to be as courageous or devoted as Gaylene to make a difference. But whatever your situation, the young people in your life need you to be the bridge to better answers to their 3 big questions. As a caring adult who lives out their life and faith alongside a young person, you can make a deep impact in their adolescent years—and throughout their lifetime.
Up to this point in the book, we’ve met today’s generation, considered how to listen for and empathize with their 3 big questions, and explored discipleship as the pathway to Christ-centered answers. The following chapters offer more specific ideas to help you be a bridge to better answers and over three hundred questions you can ask any teenager.
First, we turn our attention to identity, the question Who am I?
REFLECT and APPLY