restless reformer

Citing his famous 4% statistic (that’s how many current Christian teens will end up “Bible-believing adults”), Ron Luce says in a front-page New York Times (!) article about Christian teenagers:

“I’m looking at the data,” said Ron Luce, who organized the meetings and founded Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, “and we’ve become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. We’ve been working as hard as we know how to work — everyone in youth ministry is working hard — but we’re losing.”

What’s really ironic about Ron Luce’s pessimism is that Teen Mania and ATF are not some unique effort striving to keep teens going with real Christianity while everyone else is failing.  ATF-style events are standard fare in evangelical teen ministries, and they’re failing miserably.  In other words, Ron, it’s your version of youth “ministry” that teens are walking away from.

Why isn’t it working?  The article gives the following statement:

Mr. Luce’s strategy is to replace MTV’s wares with those of an alternative Christian culture, so teenagers will link their identity to Christ and not to the latest flesh-baring pop star.

Which is true.  Joel Hunter at the BHT adequately responds, and nails the problem:

Replacing one religion with another. The problem is that christianized commodities and sanctified amulets do not address the religiousness of the religion of hookups, swinging, or greed. Thus, these evangelicals have no good news of grace with which to counter those things they rightfully deplore.

“No good news of grace.”  All the marketing and Christian subculture crap is annoying, but it’s rooted in an incredible lack of the good news of grace in youth ministry.  In most youth ministries, “Grace” = “Power to Not Sin” (particularly sexually).  Once again, Joel sums up the problem well:

Until our culture’s religion of sexualization is addressed at the level of a religion, with all of its dead-end promises, then all of our alternative attempts to create a bionic superego in our children will be futile. Here’s a test: would you be willing to preach Rom 8:1 straight up, even if you knew half your teenagers and young adults under your care were succumbing to the cultural ethos of sexuality? If we lose “There is therefore now no condemnation,” then we’ve lost everything.

Grace.  Scary stuff, that is.  It’s scared all our youth ministers into moralism and Christian versions of MTV.

God help us.