6: Shallow
Disconnection: “It just feels like in America everyone keeps faith separate from work and life.”
—Tracy
Reconnection: “I am focusing on going deep with a lot fewer young people.”
—Jon
Tracy was coming home from Tanzania. I sat next to the twenty-three-year-old young woman on a flight from Washington, DC, to Denver, Colorado, the last leg of her twenty-nine-hour journey back from Africa. Despite her taxing trip, she was enthusiastic about what she had seen and done, filling the last hour of our flight with interesting details about her experiences.
The journey had been part of Tracy’s master’s degree in international affairs from a university in the Denver area. “It’s the same program that Condoleezza Rice went through,” she told me with pride. Tracy was raised Catholic and attended a Catholic undergraduate college, and she fits the nomad profile described in chapter 3. She considers herself a Christian, though she attends Mass only occasionally with her boyfriend. “My boyfriend is much more into church than I am. I’d say he is more into spiritual stuff than I am, even though I am spiritual. Like, whenever I say ‘Oh, God!’ he quickly chimes in ‘loves you.’ It’s cute and also annoying.”
What excites Tracy most are her experiences internationally. “Working with vulnerable people is so cool. My boyfriend is a math geek. He does loans and accounting—stuff I don’t understand. And he loves it. But I see my work as more than just a nine-to-five thing. I mean, I think this is so important. I don’t think I will ever see development as just a job.”
“It’s a calling,” I said. When her expression showed confusion, I added, “I mean, it seems like God has put it in your heart. You were made for it.”
“Oh, huh. I never thought of my interest in helping the poor around the world as a calling from God. It just feels like in America everyone keeps faith separate from work and life. That’s not how it is in Africa, certainly not in South America and Central America. I’ve spent a lot more time in those countries, and faith is definitely woven into the lives of the people there.”
She paused for a long, thoughtful moment and then said, “I guess maybe it is a calling for me.”
My conversation with Tracy illustrates one of the significant forms of disconnection that plagues this generation of students: the separation of faith from their “real lives.” The faith too many of them have inherited is a lifeless shadow of historic Christianity, which insists that following Jesus is a way of life, not a laundry list of vague beliefs that have little meaning for how we spend our lives. I think the next generation’s disconnection stems ultimately from the failure of the church to impart Christianity as a comprehensive way of understanding reality and living fully in today’s culture. To many young people who grew up in Christian churches, Christianity seems boring, irrelevant, sidelined from the real issues people face.
It seems shallow.
The shallowness equation has two sides. On the one, we find young adults who have only a superficial understanding of the faith and of the Bible. The Christianity they believe is an inch deep. On the other, we find faith communities that convey a lot of information about God rather than discipling young believers to live wholly and deeply in the reality of God. Thus the Christianity some churches pass on is a mile wide. Put the two together and you get a generation of young believers whose faith is an inch deep and a mile wide—too shallow to survive and too broad to make a difference.
Let’s start with the inch-deep side of the equation.
ROOTLESS AND SUPERFICIAL
Our research shows that most young people lack a deep understanding of their faith. The trend of biblical illiteracy, which is problematic among most age-groups, has been on the increase since my mentor George Barna wrote his books on the younger generations, including Baby Busters: The Disillusioned Generation, Generation Next, and Real Teens. Other researchers have explored these challenges as well, including Kenda Creasy Dean, who shows in Almost Christian that most teenagers embrace beliefs that are Christian on the surface—but once you dig a little deeper, you find they are not quite orthodox. Perhaps the best description of this superficiality is found in Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton’s book Soul Searching. They famously label the religion of today’s young Americans as moralistic therapeutic deism, vividly described like this: “God is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process.”[41]
This inch-deep, not-quite-Christian understanding of God has been demonstrated in Barna Group studies as well. One project we conducted in 1999 examined the views of teenagers who shared their faith in Christ regularly with others—“teen evangelists.” We found that the faith they were trying to spread was, in fact, more akin to moralistic therapeutic deism than to historic Christianity. Few of these youth evangelists could identify a single portion of the Bible as the basis of their faith in Christ.[42]
This type of shallow faith that most Christian young people embrace does not require the nurture of a faith community to thrive. Certainly it is not a holistic way of life that demands we die to ourselves for the sake of Christ. And while it is indeed easier than following Jesus, I believe this uniquely American take on faith among young Christians is a core reason so many of them are disengaging from church to become nomads or prodigals.
Consider some of the perceptions young Christians maintain. Nearly one-third (31 percent) described the church as boring. One-quarter indicated that faith is not relevant to their career or interests (24 percent), that the church does not prepare them for real life (23 percent), that the church does not help them find their purpose (23 percent), and that the Bible is not taught clearly or often enough (23 percent). One out of five young people (20 percent) expressed that God seems missing from their experience of church. These may not seem like large percentages but they represent millions of young prodigals, nomads, and exiles.
Shallow | In Their Own Words
Percentage of 18- to 29-year-olds who have a Christian background
completely true of me
completely or mostly true of me
Church is boring.
16%
31%
Faith is not relevant to my career or my interests.
13%
24%
My church does not prepare me for real life.
9%
23%
My church does not help me find my purpose.
9%
23%
The Bible is not taught clearly or often enough.
7%
23%
God seems missing from my experience of church.
7%
20%
Barna Group | 2011 | N=1,296
Some young adults, like Tracy, are doing all they can to create meaningful lives yet cannot see how the feel-good god they believe in has anything to do with making a difference in the world. (Who can blame them?) Others have not even considered what a meaningful life might look like, much less how faith could be the unifying feature of a life filled with purpose. They have such a shallow understanding of Christianity and the Bible that their roots of faith cannot survive the weather systems of real life. It’s difficult to imagine them anchored as “oaks of righteousness” (Isa. 61:3) whose spiritual, relational, and vocational roots are planted deep in Christ.
Misplaced Confidence
As we look at the problem of shallow faith, we need to consider where to assign responsibility. This is not an exercise in finger-pointing; we need to understand the causes of shallow faith in order to find God-ordained solutions. The Christian community may share the blame for superficiality of faith among the next generation (more on that in a moment). However, young adults’ ability to grow in faith withers when they persist in narcissism, entitlement, and out-of-proportion self-confidence. The results of a study conducted by Barna Group captures this phenomenon. The vast majority of churchgoing teenagers said they understand the teachings of the Bible “very well.” But when we asked specific questions about the basic content of those teachings, most teens in the study performed quite poorly. In other words, their self-confidence was totally out of proportion with their actual knowledge.
One seventeen-year-old from Oregon typifies this sort of imbalance. When we asked him to describe his life goals, he said, “I don’t know. I am really good at a lot of things. I am also really interested in a lot of things. I’m thinking of starting a college. I feel I have a lot to teach others about many subjects.” It’s admirable that this young man has big dreams, but his outsized self-confidence comes across less as ambition and more as naïve arrogance.
Some overindulgent parents are partly to blame for their kids’ unrealistic self-assessments, but young people have been aided and abetted by a culture that glorifies youth as inherently beautiful, valuable, and wise. Have you ever noticed the degree to which youth and young adults are featured in advertisements? This is true even for products and services targeted to a general audience—that is, ads for soft drinks, cosmetics, alcohol, automobiles, clothing, pharmaceuticals, amusement parks, restaurants, and many other items frequently feature twentysomethings, even though many other age-groups are included in the target market.
Simply put, there is something amiss and superficial in the marketing media’s obsession with youth and young adults, an obsession that has at least two negative consequences. First, it reinforces the very modern notion that the next generation—the arbiters of cool—must be catered to before all else. Second, it fuels the damaging misperception that older people don’t have much of value to offer younger generations, thereby increasing generational fragmentation in our cultural imagination. In other words, there is little doubt that our culture contributes to the shallowness of the generation.
Missing Ingredient
All this leads to a faith that lacks one essential ingredient: humility. If you already know all there is to know, if you’ve been told your entire life that you’re “just right” exactly the way you are, if the main job of the god you believe in is to make you feel good about yourself (because you’re entitled to great self-esteem, along with everything else), then there are not a lot of compelling reasons to sit in the dirt at the feet of Jesus and live the humble life of a disciple.
To follow Jesus, young adults in the next generation—just like the generations before them—will have to learn humility. From whom will they learn it? When they look at us, do they see humble servants and eager students of the Master?
BROAD AND TRIVIAL
Even though there is some blame to assign to young people (unrealistic self-regard) and to our culture (media-driven superficiality), congregations and faith communities must also share some responsibility for the shallow faith of many young adults. It is a tragedy that so many of them come to such a tepid conclusion about their faith communities—places that should breathe meaning and hope into their lives as they connect with God and with others.
As we look at the experiences facilitated by faith communities in the lives of young Christians (found in the table on p. 119), we discover a mix of good news and bad in four areas: relations, mission, education, and vocation.[43]
What Happens in Church Stays in Church?
Survey question: Thinking about your experience at church during high school, which, if any, of the following did you experience through your church or faith community?
Percentage of 18- to 29-year-olds who have a Christian background
Catholics
Protestants
Relational Outcomes
Had a close personal friend who was an adult at church or parish
28%
39%
Had an adult mentor at church, other than the pastor or church staff
12%
17%
Missional Outcomes
Served the poor through my church
24%
20%
Went on a trip that helped me expand my thinking
16%
19%
Found a cause or issue at church that motivates me
11%
15%
Educational Outcomes
Received helpful input from a pastor or church worker about my education
11%
11%
Received a scholarship for college through church
4%
3%
Learned about schools or colleges I might want to attend through my church
4%
3%
Vocational Outcomes
Learned about how Christians can positively contribute to society
28%
28%
Learned to view my gifts and passions as part of God’s calling
25%
26%
Better understood my purpose in life through church
23%
25%
Learned how the Bible applies to my field or interest area
10%
16%
Experienced none of these
44%
46%
Barna Group | 2011 | N=1,296
Let’s look first at relational experiences. Most young Protestants and Catholics do not recall having a meaningful friendship with an adult through their church, and more than four out of five never had an adult mentor. This is true of enough young Christians that we must ask ourselves whether our churches and parishes are providing the rich environments that a relationally oriented generation needs to develop deep faith. I believe we need a new mind to measure the vibrancy and health of the intergenerational relationships in our faith communities.
Our research focused as well on missional, educational, and vocational experiences. Did young people discover a sense of mission through their church? Did their faith community help them make significant educational choices? Did their church or parish family help them navigate their calling and career trajectory? You can see for yourself that these kinds of experiences are relatively rare among young Christians. There are significant opportunities for the Christian community to improve in these important areas of discipleship.
As we look at four of the factors that contribute to the problem of shallow faith, you will begin to sense some of the ways that the church needs a new mind to engage this generation. Later in this chapter, we will explore how we can “turn” the experience of spiritual shallowness into something deeper and more akin to historic Christian discipleship. The “turn” is what motivates me as a researcher and writer. There are many churches, organizations, and families doing great work developing disciples, and my aim is to inform and equip many more for the kingdom work of passing on the faith.
To move forward, however, we need to look at the unfortunate role we in the Christian community sometimes play in passing on shallow faith to the next generation.
Mass Production of Disciples
After more than a decade and a half of research into American faith, I believe that the Christian church in the United States has a shallow faith problem because we have a discipleship problem. Moreover, diagnosing and treating shallow faith among young adults is urgent because we have a shallow faith problem among all adults.
I suggested earlier in this book that we have a mass-production approach to faith development. Taking our cues from public education, among other sectors of society, we have created a conveyor belt of development that industrializes the soul formation of young people—who eventually become adults with inch-deep, mile-wide faith. The outcome is adult Christians who were not transformed by their faith as children, as teens, or as young adults. How can we expect more after they turn forty?
Some are tempted to believe that spiritual effectiveness is connected to the size of our institutions and the sophistication of our content, but nothing could be further from the truth. Can you imagine a human civilization with a more developed spiritual infrastructure than the United States today? We have Christian camps by the handfuls, Christian media companies by the hundreds, Christian schools by the thousands (from daycare to graduate schools), local churches by the hundreds of thousands. Today Christians in North America use the most advanced communication technology and media that have ever been known to humankind.
But does this infrastructure yield more and better discipleship automatically? Our research says no. Colleges, publishers, camps, and schools are not bad things—and I believe such institutions are absolutely vital for the future of Western faith. In fact one of the outcomes I hope emerges from this book is action for institutional decision makers. Your efforts to rethink and reimagine your church, business, nonprofit, or denomination—cultivating a “new mind” for what you do and how you measure success—will bear significant fruit for the future of the next generation.
Still, despite their size and reach, institutions can serve outcomes that are antithetical to genuine discipleship, especially to the approach found most often in the Scriptures. Yes, the Bible records instances of large events in which many made a commitment to follow Christ, and it is absolutely clear about the need for sound teaching, which can and should be delivered to groups large and small. But compare the mentality of today’s Western church to Jesus’s work with his disciples, which was characterized by life-on-life mentoring and apprenticeship. Can we really conclude that by embracing an industrialized, more-is-better approach, we have improved on the Lord’s results?
Missing Rituals
A second way our communities of faith contribute to shallow faith is by failing to provide meaningful rituals—or, when rituals exist, failing to provide a clear sense of their meaning and importance. Not long ago, I attended the Bat Mitzvah ceremony of my daughter Emily’s friend, Kelsey. I was deeply impressed by the way the rabbi involved the entire family in the service. Kelsey read from the Torah, demonstrating to her faith community the hours of work she had invested in learning Hebrew. Then she gave a short talk about the importance of faith in her life and about the meaning of the verses she had read. Kelsey’s grandparents stood at the front and passed the Torah scrolls to her parents, Dan and Debbie, who passed them to Kelsey, symbolizing in a tangible way the passing of the Scriptures from one generation to the next.
When Jewish kids become Bar or Bat Mitzvahs, they are no longer children in the eyes of their religious community. They accept full responsibility as adults under Jewish tradition, including being accountable for their moral choices and serving their local synagogue in public Scripture reading and prayer.
Most mainline and Catholic parishes have a similar ceremony for young teens called confirmation, the “sacrament of maturity”—yet many do not follow the ceremony with a meaningful expectation that the confirmed will contribute to the spiritual growth of the community. The majority of evangelical churches lack such a rite of passage completely, though they may have an occasional “youth service” when teens are invited to lead the congregation in worship. Most of the time, however, teens and young adults are consumers of the church’s services, not servants of the church.
My point is not that every church should have confirmation but that Christian communities of all kinds must find ways to include teens and young adults in the spiritual life of the church, rather than relegating them to the game room. We need a new mind for facilitating meaning-filled rites of passage. How might young people be involved in Scripture reading, praying, leading worship, giving testimony, or providing a short teaching to the congregation? What would happen if teens and twentysomethings knew they had a responsibility to visit the sick or shut-ins of their church, or to become a “big sister” or “big brother” to younger kids, mentoring and discipling their spiritual growth?
A related challenge is the lack of opportunity for young people to participate, commensurate with their abilities, in decision making for or leadership of the congregation. Many schools and civic groups have youth councils that participate in policy decisions. Of course, elder boards should not be replaced with youth boards, but isn’t it unrealistic of us to expect young people to claim a stake in the church’s mission without having a seat at the table? What can congregations do to appropriate the energy and passion of young adults to benefit the whole body?
Expecting Too Little
A third problem found in many churches and families is expecting too little of the next generation. This is a point driven home in Kenda Creasy Dean’s book Almost Christian. In a review of the book, Eve Tushnet draws the following contrast between the expectations placed on Protestant teens and those placed on Mormon teens.
[Protestant] parents who show, by their words or their actions, that the tenets and practices of their faith are vague, unimportant, or only tenuously related to daily life, produce teenagers whose faith is vague, marginal, and unlikely to shape their actions and plans in any significant way. Parents who ask little of their children in terms of faith formation, but a great deal in terms of, say, getting into a good college, make a statement about priorities which their children trust and follow. Churches, youth ministries, and similar groups that trade “send[ing] young people out” for “rop[ing] young people in” wind up with teens who think church is fine, a good place to be—“nice.” And who then leave church to act just like all of their friends.
Mormons, by contrast, challenge their teenagers and require a lot of time, study, and leadership from them. Mormon parents rise at dawn to go over their church’s history and doctrine with their children. More than half of the Mormon youth in the study had given a presentation in church in the past six months. Frequently they shared public testimony and felt that they were given some degree of decision-making power within their community. They shape their plans for the immediate future around strong cultural pressures toward mission trips and marriage.[44]
In our research, we find clear evidence that many parents and churches have expectations of young people that are much too low or much too driven by cultural ideas of success. Often we misread youth involvement in church as growth in faith. However, teen attraction to the newest flash-bang-wow at church may be a misleading indicator of success. Teenagers’ excitement about church, their willingness to attend, and the friends and social connections they make at church are not the same thing as spiritual growth. We must not equate youth attendance at programs with discipleship.
Not only do we tend to expect too little of our young people, we expect too little of ourselves, and those low expectations spill over onto our students. If faith in Christ is not shaping every facet of our lives, transforming us into people who love God with heart, soul, mind, and body (see Luke 10:27), why would we expect more from the next generation?
Quantity over Quality
A fourth practice that contributes to shallow faith is the fact that many of our youth ministries fixate on numbers of attendees rather than measuring spiritual growth and transformation. We emphasize quantity over quality. I was describing some of this research to my friend Jon Tyson, who is now a pastor in New York City. For many years, this Australian worked as a youth pastor in Nashville. Recently as I explained our research findings, I suggested that some large youth groups actually do damage to young souls by taking the “factory” approach to faith development. “It’s not wrong to have big youth groups, of course,” I said. “Good ministry can result. But it’s really about the issues of apprenticeship. Are young people learning to live like Christ or just coming to see friends and hear an entertaining speaker?”
Jon stared intently at me. I thought for sure I had ticked him off, but then he said, “I’ve had to repent of focusing on myself and my own success. I have come to realize that I was subconsciously more concerned with how many teens were in the room rather than how many were becoming like Jesus. I have had people come to me since then and tell me that the largeness of our youth group ended up pushing them away from God. I couldn’t believe it at first. But God has shown me that my own ambition for success actually hurt my ministry.”
Then he added: “Now I am focusing on going deep with a lot fewer young people.”
If you have a hard time believing that size matters, think about the field of education. There is considerable evidence that class size is a major factor in the effectiveness of learning environments. That is, smaller classes increase the quality of education. Why would we assume the same rules do not apply to the church’s training of junior high and high school students? I realize there is some debate about this. Still, most small colleges promote small class sizes and teacher-student ratios as a benefit of these collegiate settings.
Or imagine that you are starting a new career. Would you prefer to attend a lecture series with hundreds of other new employees or to be mentored by a twenty-year veteran of your chosen industry? Yet somewhere along the line, many of us decided bigger is better. We chose big attendance numbers over young lives shaped in the “classroom” of deep-level discipleship.
The truth is that it is much easier to put on events for large groups of kids than it is to mentor each and every one of them into a mature and holistic walk with God. If our churches are too big to provide that level of life-on-life focus, can we grow the next generation of Jesus’s disciples?
SHALLOW TURNS TO APPRENTICESHIP
The Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13 is helpful when considering what it takes to develop sustainable faith. I’ve often thought a better title would be the Parable of the Soil, because Jesus’s focus in the story is the various kinds of ground on which the seed of his message falls. There is packed-down dirt where birds gather to steal the truth. There is rocky ground where the seed can’t put down deep roots and so it withers under the sun’s scorching rays. There is soil with weeds and brambles that choke out the message. Finally, there is rich, loamy earth in which the seed can take root.
People of deep faith are the metaphorical equal of deeply rooted trees, an image used throughout Scripture (see Ps. 1:3 and Isa. 61:3, for instance). It is appropriate, then, to ask what it takes to cultivate young Christians who are deeply rooted in the faith. The simplest answer is that to grow big, solid, thriving “trees,” we need to prepare rich, fertile, soft-hearted soil. The task of growing spiritual redwoods is God’s work. Yet we can partner in that effort by tilling and tending the soil of the young lives God entrusts to us.
We must rethink what it means to “make disciples” (Matt. 28:19) in a context of massive, compounded cultural change (access, alienation, and skepticism of authority). I believe we need to change from an industrialized, mass-production, public-education approach and embrace the messy adventure of relationship. We need a new set of ideas and practices based on apprenticeship.
We see in the Gospels that, while Jesus had many followers at various times in his earthly ministry, he invested himself fully in just twelve disciples, who went on to change the world. We find in the book of Acts that the early church grew through both the public proclamation of the Good News and a network of relationships. In the apostle Paul’s letter to the fledgling church in Corinth, we discover a shining example of deep-level faith mentoring: “Even though you have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel” (1 Cor. 4:15). Today in North America we have thousands of “guardians in Christ” in our church culture but we do not have many spiritual fathers and mothers. Yet it is people with that level of commitment who make disciples.
As a starting point, let’s consider three areas where the potential for deepening faith is most obvious.
Meeting God
Millions of young Christians, represented by those in our survey, admit that they have been frustrated with their faith because “God seems missing from my experience of church.” In a related critique, many students point out the gaps between the miracles and faith-fueled exploits described in the Bible and the flat, lifeless experience of church in today’s world. If people who want to meet God are not meeting him in church, we need to consider why this is and how we can make a different experience possible.
God can, of course, meet with anyone anywhere. Some family friends, Mike and Maureen, recently told my parents that their twenty-three-year-old daughter served at a Christian camp last summer, where she found greater depth in her faith than ever before. Many times God shows up without any help from us. Yet he has also called us to be about the business of making disciples, which means showing (not just telling) them how to trust Jesus, live for God, and participate in the Spirit’s work. People want to meet God, so let’s make sure we’re helping not hindering.
Restoring Knowledge of Truth
This generation wants and needs truth, not spiritual soft-serve. According to our findings, churches too often provide lightweight teaching instead of rich knowledge that leads to wisdom. This is a generation hungry for substantive answers to life’s biggest questions, particularly in a time when there are untold ways to access information about what to do. What’s missing—and where the Christian community must come in—is addressing how and why.
Dallas Willard, in his excellent book Knowing Christ Today, suggests that there are two important challenges for what and how we teach.[45] First, we must connect spiritual wisdom with real-world knowledge. Churches, Dr. Willard argues, have ceded the realm of knowledge to academics and institutions of higher education. Essentially, we make little effort to help disciples connect the dots between their vocation—whether in medicine, journalism, city planning, music, sales, computer programming, or any other—and their faith. We in the church focus on matters of belief and commitment, which may be divorced from any impact these make on the whole of life. Willard illustrates the disconnect by pointing out that no one wants a brain surgeon who has merely a belief in or commitment to medicine. We want a surgeon with knowledge of and experience in surgery! Likewise, Christians must connect our commitment to God with real-world knowledge and experience—and we need to teach young people to do the same.
Second, Willard contends that we must teach through experience, reason, and authority—all are important to our apprenticeship efforts. Churches tend to emphasize one element over the others, and this leads to insufficient discipleship. For example, some churches rely too much on experience (events and activities) and not enough on authority (the Bible) or reason (reflection and application). Others emphasize Bible teaching but do not connect the Word with experience or reason. We need to be holistic in our approach to discipleship so that young people can think about and respond to truth in various ways.
God Calling
Another way we can cultivate apprenticelike training for the next generation goes to the very heart of apprenticeship—finding what young people are gifted for and called to do, and doing all we can to nurture that calling. Most youth ministers and volunteers have some sense that this is important and do the best they can. But I believe young people need a much clearer, definitive, objective, and directional approach to finding their calling in Christ’s body. This is not likely to happen through a simple weekly message. It’s a whole mindset that needs to pervade our faith communities.
Callings may include science, math, medicine, business, congregational ministry, art, music, or any number of other vocations. Our guidance in the area of vocation should take both learning style and spiritual giftedness into consideration. Additionally, all of these factors must be wedded to a strong sense of mission. What has God called you to do, in partnership with the community of Christ-followers? How can you be on mission for Christ in the world, based on what you’re gifted to do?
We also should reconsider our metrics of success. A woodworking artisan does not employ hundreds of protégés. He could hire any number of laborers to mass-produce furniture, but his goal is not thousands of cookie-cutter headboards or tables. His aim is to pass on the fine art of carpentry, so he selects one or two apprentices who want to learn the craft. He goes on making beautiful, one-of-a-kind pieces of furniture. And he spends time making future craftsmen.
What if, instead of measuring our success by the numbers, we changed our metrics? What if we said that the hallmark of mature Christianity is a willingness to invest in a young person for a period of two to four years, teaching him or her the fine art of following Christ?
I think an apprenticeship would have made a difference in Tracy’s life, back when she was first discovering her passion for helping developing communities in Africa and South America. Instead of feeling disconnected from her Catholic upbringing, today the blossoming international humanitarian might understand her vocation as a vital outgrowth of a thriving faith.
Jesus has commanded us to make disciples. We can obey that call by helping young people answer their callings.