Today I want to continue to interact with Chris Folmsbee over at A New Kind of Youth Ministry on the topic of Five Dangerous Things. Here is how Chris introduced it,

So, here are five dangerous things I suggest we should let our students do (feel free to comment and add to the list!) Like Gever, I really have 6 but I think that 4 and 4.5 go hand in hand…

1. Dance with doubt
2. Discover truth for themselves
3. Disengage from reality every now and then
4. Dispatch their story, not someone elses
4.5 Determine their own future
5. Deconstruct what they are told, see and come to “know”

Today Chris and I are going to look at the second dangerous thing… helping students discover truth for themselves. Often when I talk with youth workers about their goals for students - they will talk about grand schemes of what they would like kids to accomplish and know before leaving (graduating from) the youth ministry program. They will speak of things like knowledge of the flow of the Bible, about wanting students to know how to “feed themselves” from the Bible, about how to share and defend their faith, and the list goes on - it sounds great! When I push further in this discussion and ask how they are accomplishing this, often the response is some curriculum used on Sunday mornings or Sunday nights where the main delivery of the information is a lecture (okay sermon or message).

I love to speak. I love to prepare and deliver a message. That being said, I know that it is a poor way to help another person come to own and obtain personal knowledge. A spoken message may be a great way to introduce new information. It may be good to survey lots of things - history, theory, interpretations of significant events; but if we want a person to go beyond “book knowledge” to a personal encounter where they know something from first hand experience - a lecture isn’t going to get us there.

Few people learn how to carve wood or play an instrument or paint or quilt or build a fire from reading a book or hearing a lecture (and few people learn to pray or learn to trust by hearing a sermon). These things are passed down from person to person (one to one) in a you watch me, now you do it kind of fashion. We discover by watching and doing it in an apprentice/master kind of experience. I discovered how to muck a horse stall - not by reading a book; but by watching my wife do it and then following her expert example. I had learned in a book and from common folklore - “to never walk behind a horse.” I also discovered in owning a horse that it is nearly impossible to get much work done in a barn full of horses if you never walk behind them! I learned from personal experience how to work with prey animals and come up behind them or walk around them without catching them off guard.

Those things learned in a book or heard in a lecture - I may know. I may understand or be able to sound intelligent talking about them. Those things I have a “personal knowledge” of - these are things I do, I wrestle with, I see shades and nuances about this, I continue to discover variations and subtleties, I experience and live out these subjects and topics. In youth ministry (and throughout the Church) I believe what we are aiming at is that individuals would wrestle with their Faith at the level of personal knowledge. To get to such a place demands that what we know or understand about Christ, God, the World, the Bible and our calling and identity will be truths that we have acquired through “personal knowledge” - not merely a second hand hear-say. That means, no, demands that we must help adolescents discover truth for themselves.

So how do we get teenagers out of circles of chairs or off the rows of couch’s and on the way to discovering truth for themselves? I believe one simple way is helping teens go out and find a mentor who will accompany them through life. The mentor’s job is to help their charge notice various truths and God’s presence when they are together. In the midst of this natural relationship as life happens it will highlight how the Christian faith operates and counters the struggles, inconveniences, celebrations, and mundane occurrences of everyday life. It is one way to help our young people move from a second hand faith to a personal knowledge by discovering truth for themselves in an apprenticeship (if you will).

Not a radical idea. Nothing we all probably don’t know. Yet for some reason there are still a lot of lectures and messages being given as the primary way for “learning” in our churches. I believe God uses sermons. I know that is true. It is interesting to me though that Jesus called the disciples to be with Him (Mark 3:13-14). I think we could help the teenagers in our church have a more independent and personal faith (personal knowledge), if we followed Jesus’ approach.