"A major challenge for religious educators of youth, therefore, seems to us to be fostering articulation, helping teens to practice talking about their faith, providing practice at using vocabularies, grammars, stories, and key messages of faith" (emphasis in original).

Invest Time in Teens. None of these suggestions, of course, are easy to implement, nor could they be implemented without sacrifice on the part of adults.

"Adults should be aware, however, that better adult teaching of youth will require stronger adult relationships with youth. More important in the effective religious teaching of teens than, say, new pedagogical techniques will be the building of sustained, meaningful, personal adult relationships with the teens they teach," Smith and Denton said. "This will require investments of time, attention, and readiness to be open and vulnerable with teens."

However, if Christian adults insist on remaining detached from their teens, or little interested in their spiritual development beyond a halfhearted effort to expose teens to religion, the church will risk losing the greater part of an entire generation of young people.

Refusing to change -- in the face of growing evidence of the need for it -- might then be the greatest scandal of all.

Ed Vitagliano, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is news editor of AFA Journal, a monthly publication of the American Family Association.  This article, reprinted with permission, appeared in the February 2006 issue.

(c) 2006, Agape Press