The Adventist church is increasingly concerned about its youths’ lack of involvement: their reduced Sabbath School and church attendance, their reduced participation in youth activities, and perhaps most of all, their growing apathy and antagonism toward church doctrine. The church recently demonstrated its concern in its Valuegenesis project, a study of church youths’ attitudes toward church institutions, personnel and teachings. The study found, among other things, that standards are best taught by the family rather than the institution and that Adventist youth are not doing well at making value-based judgments. Many of us in the teaching profession are pleased to see our own assessments backed by this research.

The Valuegenesis study, however, measured only the tip of a huge iceburg. The issue of youth involvement is extremely complex and foundational. Facing it may require us to adjust some concepts at the core of the church’s identity. Strangely enough, many of these uninvolved “youth” are found at all age levels within the church. I found that many of the teachers I interviewed quickly diverted the discussion from youth to their own relationship to the church and their personal search—often very painful—for a way to remain Adventist while retaining their integrity of belief and finding the spiritual food for which they hunger.

In speaking to the young people themselves, I found a variety of reasons for their own lack of involvement with the church.

Relevance

A need for relevance is high on the list. Society is changing so rapidly that often the issues the church focuses on are not the issues that young people are dealing with in their own minds. A recent Adventist seminar on current issues in education concerned itself only with government funding for private schools and whether or not that is biblical. The challenges that we teachers deal with in the classroom, however, include child abuse, AIDS, teen pregnancy, a great sense of personal guilt, low self-esteem, violence in the neighborhood and cultural integration. We find, sadly, that Adventism does not keep our youth from sharing in the ills of society as a whole. The youth feel that because the church places such a high value on “wholeness,” anyone who is not whole is not acceptable. We give that impression by refusing to recognize and minister to very real needs and problems within ourselves, whatever they may be.

The flip side of the coin is that many young people do not perceive adults as benefiting from their own professed religion. They see the quarrels between liberals and conservatives, the struggles for power, misuse of money and lack of justice and equality, and they question Adventism’s relevance. Adventist adults and youth alike must acknowledge the needs within ourselves and must confess that our consecration still leaves us vulnerably human, with warped human natures, even as we strive to be better than we are.

Reality

Reality is vital! Pastors and teachers must speak about real life—not rote theory or tradition. Very few of us speak from conviction—from our own struggles and humanity, our doubts and fears, our own experienced reality, our own encounter with divinity.

Few students experience what we teach, either. Their experience of church and school is social, though that is not all bad. Human relations probably have far more to do with our concept of divinity than we begin to realize. But if we teach that God is near, gives power and answers prayer, this should be the experience of our students, and they should be free to discuss it. I don’t hear much of that kind of talk, and I can only assume that current Adventist religion does not provide our students with access to spiritual power or a sense of the transcendent.

Hunger

Dissatisfaction with religion or with an institution does not mean a lack of spirituality. In fact, I often find the very opposite. It is because deep spiritual hunger often goes unsatisfied that many youth seek elsewhere. They speak of emptiness, blankness, walls and meaninglessness when they speak of religion. They talk about the soul-need they have, and confess that they wonder if somewhere down deep there is not a meaning that they have missed in their efforts to abide by the church mores first learned in childhood. Other students from liberal families have escaped obligatory mores, but they have had neither spiritual experiences nor meaningful rituals.

This is not totally the fault of the church, of course. Individual experience of spiritual life depends mostly upon the individual’s search process and involvement, however, in prescribing only one accepted way of being spiritual, in passing on a package deal of truth and spirituality, we kill the spirit of individual search which is the only way in which persons can come to experience God for themselves.

Study

We have somewhere lost the idea of serious religious study and inquiry. Bible classes are mostly a means of passing on digested information, not a place where tools and materials are provided and skills are developed for the personal search. Because of this, few young people are equipped to carry out their own spiritual research. Recently a student who had finished reading one of Chaim Potok’s books sighed and asked me why we didn’t have the kind of experience available to his characters, the experience of struggling through text with the aid of commentaries, translations, arguments and dictionaries. That, the student said, would make her feel competent in scripture and would give her a sense of what she had to build on before interpreting her own life experiences.

I don’t think there is any program, institution or plan that the church can develop to resolve these issues. We must, however, quit prescribing the means and end for every Adventist youth. We must, rather, concentrate on providing for them the skills and tools through which they can carry out their own search. We must model the process of seeking God—a process filled with pain and error, joy and humor, moments of deep peace and awe, a process always marred by the human limitations to which we must continually confess. Then we will have truly begun to nurture the spiritual journeys of the next generation.