From Here to Maturity

Overcoming the Juvenilization of American Christianity

Thomas E. Bergler

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781467442022
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Cristianesimo

Expert guidance on how to grow up in Christ This book is a follow-up to Thomas Bergler's acclaimed work The Juvenilization of American Christianity, which documents how church youth ministries over the past several decades have contributed to a process of adolescent spiritual traits becoming accepted and even celebrated by Christians of all ages. This "juvenilization" in the church is a real problem that must be addressed, says Bergler, and in his new book he addresses it head-on. Bergler's From Here to Maturity is an accessible guide for helping both individuals and whole faith communities to grow spiritually. Bergler claims that spiritual maturity -- defined as "basic competence in the Christian life" -- is both desirable and attainable, and he effectively presents a biblical theology of spiritual maturity, identifying its traits from pertinent New Testament passages. Adapting Dallas Willard's model of spiritual formation and applying it to congregational life, Bergler offers a wealth of practical, research-based guidance as to how Christian leaders can effectively foster spiritual maturity in their congregations. He also identifies six key faith-sustaining factors and provides a system for evaluating a church's state of spiritual maturity and steps for improving it. Ecumenically friendly, From Here to Maturity will be useful to individuals and leaders from many different churches and theological traditions.

Chapter 1

We’re All Adolescents Now

Americans of all ages are not sure they want to grow up. If you listen carefully, you can sometimes hear thirty-­ or forty-­year-­olds say things like “I guess I have to start thinking of myself as an adult now.” Greeting cards bear messages like “Growing old is inevitable. Growing up is optional.” A recent national study of the sexual lives of eighteen- to twenty-­three-­year-­olds found that most want to get married and have children — eventually. But they think of settling down as the end of the good part of their lives. One young woman spoke for many in the study when she said that having children will be “what makes your life, like, full, after like, you are done with your life, I guess.”1

Try this experiment. Ask a group of college students to raise their hands if they think they are adults. They won’t know what to do. You can be sure they won’t all raise their hands.

The problem goes deeper than just a fear of growing old. Early in my teaching career, I asked a group of undergraduate students, “What does a mature Christian look like? Let’s list some traits of spiritual maturity.” The question made my students uncomfortable, so they pushed back with responses like these: “I don’t think we ever arrive in our spiritual growth”; “We’re not supposed to judge one another”; “No one is perfect”; and “We can’t be holy in this life.” Sadly, these students who had been raised in church and were attending a Christian college did not think of spiritual maturity as attainable or perhaps even desirable. They wrongly equated it with an unattainable perfection.

Where did this problem of low expectations originate? Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, three factors combined to create the juvenilization of American Christianity. First, new and more powerful youth cultures created distance between adults and adolescents. Second, in an attempt to convert, mobilize, or just hang on to their teenage children, Christian adults adapted the faith to adolescent tastes. As a result of these first two factors, the stereotypical youth group that combines fun and games with a brief, entertaining religious message was born. In the years since, this model of youth ministry has become a taken-­for-­granted part of church life. Finally, the journey to adulthood became longer and more confusing, with maturity now just one among many options. The result was juvenilization: the process by which the religious beliefs, practices, and developmental characteristics of adolescents become accepted — or even celebrated — as appropriate for Christians of all ages.

This dynamic of juvenilization leaped out at me when I realized that there was nothing happening in the seeker-­friendly ministry of Willow Creek Community Church in the 1990s that had not already been done in the Youth for Christ rallies of the 1950s. The only difference was that the pioneers of Youth for Christ believed that what they were doing was not suitable for Sunday morning worship, but should only be done in an evangelistic rally outside the four walls of the church.2

Other branches of American Christianity — I examined Mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, and African Americans — either were latecomers to juvenilization or picked the wrong elements of youth culture to imitate. As a result, the white Evangelical model of youth ministry came to dominate not just the church basement, but increasingly, the adult worship service as well.3 To be sure, not all churches look like white Evangelical ones in their worship practices or other activities. But all churches compete for customer loyalty in a religious marketplace in which many people of all ages share similar adolescent preferences for an emotionally comforting, self-­focused, and intellectually shallow faith.

It is important to realize that many benefits have come from injecting more youthfulness into American Christianity. Church growth, mission trips, and racial reconciliation all received a big boost from the youth ministries of the past seventy-­five years. Churches that made compromises with youth culture sometimes managed to inspire long-­term loyalty in their young people and even make church more attractive to adults. In contrast, churches that ignored the preferences of young people tended to decline in numbers and in effectiveness. For example, conservative Protestant churches have grown relative to liberal Protestant ones over the past forty years because conservative church members have had more children and conservative churches have done better at retaining those children through juvenilized youth ministries.4 Big churches are not necessarily more faithful to Christ than small churches, but churches without members have a hard time fulfilling their missions.

Youth ministries are laboratories of innovation that at their best keep churches vibrant and help them adapt to the unique challenges of each generation. One of the few studies we have that asked the same questions about religion in the same town over a long period of time showed that between the 1920s and the 1970s the top reason people reported for going to church changed from “habit” to “enjoyment.” Because youth culture put teenagers especially at risk for abandoning their faith, youth ministers were the first to learn how to make church more enjoyable. And what they learned along the way has kept people of all ages coming to church.5

But this attempt to make Christianity as pleasurable as youth culture had some dangers. In the 1950s, one teenage girl who was a member of Youth for Christ had this to say about Elvis Presley: “The fact of the matter is, I’ve found something else that has given me more of a thrill than a hundred Presley’s ever could! It’s a new friendship with the most wonderful Person I’ve ever met, a Man who has given me happiness and thrills and something worth living for.”6 In other words, Jesus is just like a teen idol, only better. Juvenilization kept Christianity popular, but did little to promote spiritual maturity.

It is important to realize that because of juvenilization, the problem of immaturity is no longer just a youth problem to be solved by adolescents, parents, or youth ministers. One pastor told me that the concept of juvenilization helped him understand some of the struggles he is having with congregants in their sixties. These Baby Boomers raised in the founding era of juvenilization want church to revolve around their preferences. But the problem is not just the old oppressing the young. The young leaders of a church that targets twenty-­somethings asked a middle-­aged woman to leave the music team because she did not “project the right image.” That is, she looked too old. Not only is it easy to find people of all ages who are immature, it is now the whole life course — the normal pattern of moving from childhood to adulthood — that has been compromised as a path to spiritual maturity.

Growing Up Isn’t What It Used to Be

There have always been immature people, and there always will be. When I was young, if someone pulled a selfish prank, a classmate or sibling might yell “Grow up!” or “That’s really mature!” To be sure, growing up was typically something that other irritating kids should do, rather than something to which we all aspired. Yet this admittedly immature form of exhortation implied a shared notion that growing up included something called “maturity.” Today, there is less shared understanding of what “growing up” should include. In recent decades important changes in the patterns of human development have made immaturity easier and maturity harder. Both the journey to adulthood and the destination have changed.

A Troubled Journey: Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood

Adolescence starts early and lasts a long time. The total time between the onset of puberty and a clearly embraced adult identity can now be as much as twenty years. If we still think of youth or adolescence as a relatively short period of transition in a person’s life, our perception is out of step with reality. Over the past 100 years, the average age of at first menstrual period has dropped for girls from about 14 to 12.5. Secondary sexual characteristics are coming even earlier for some, with 47 percent of African American girls and 7 percent of Caucasian girls beginning to develop breasts by age 7. Some studies suggest that more and more boys are developing earlier as well. Studies show a correlation between precocious puberty, especially early menarche, and numerous health and psychological problems, including mood disorders, substance abuse, adolescent pregnancy and reproductive cancers. There is an ongoing debate in the medical community about the nature and extent of the problem of early puberty. But the overall pattern is clear: a significant number of children are entering puberty at very young ages. These children must cope with inherently difficult sexual changes with even less emotional readiness than they would have later. At least some experts believe that we as a society are not doing very well at developing medical and social supports for these children.7

But biology is not the only factor that encourages precocious adolescence. Common cultural beliefs and powerful economic interests are driving adolescence downward into childhood. Clothing, cosmetic, and entertainment companies market products with teenage appeal to younger children. This marketing strategy works because many eight- to twelve-­year-­olds aspire to look and behave like teenagers. Fourth-­grade girls who don’t wear thong underwear have been teased by those who do.8 Thankfully, many adults and children are resisting the disappearance of childhood, but they are increasingly on their own. Pressures to start adolescence early are many; social supports for protecting children are few.9 And as childhood contracts, adolescence expands downward.

In theory, entering puberty earlier could lead to growing up sooner. But that does not happen, because the institutions that structure adolescence are better at keeping people immature than pushing them to grow up. Two key institutions that drive youth culture are schools and businesses that target teenage customers. Ever since the mid-­twentieth century, almost all adolescents have spent significant time in high schools. But lumped together in large numbers, young people create their own beliefs and behaviors, some of which diverge from what adults would prefer. Thus the irony is that institutions adults created to move young people toward maturity also teach them to revel in immaturity.

But simply eliminating age-­segregated environments would not eliminate youth culture or juvenilization; there’s simply too much money to be made from young people. Starting in the 1940s and getting better at it ever since, the “merchants of cool” have studied teenagers and tried to discern their tastes. They have also worked hard to influence those tastes, especially through various forms of electronic media and advertising. Teenagers can be a fickle audience and often respond better to products that feel authentic because they have bubbled up from their peers. So media companies and other businesses turn to “cool hunting”: searching for new music, clothing, slang, and other styles that are emerging among trendsetting teenagers. Enterprising business leaders then repackage, mass produce, and sell those products to as many teenagers as they can. But when millions of teenagers buy the latest style, it drives the teenage trendsetters even further into deviance or even immorality in order to find something uniquely “theirs” that shocks adults. Meanwhile, fierce competition among the merchants of cool over a long period of time has a way of lowering moral standards. The merchants of cool usually excuse themselves by saying that they are just giving teenagers what they want. They also claim that media content does not influence the behavior of teenagers.10 But that’s not what they tell the companies paying them millions of dollars for advertisements.

At the other end of the process, the transition to adulthood has receded into the distant future not just for twelve-­year-­olds, but even for twenty-­year-­olds. Developmental psychologists have identified a new life stage they call emerging adulthood. After extensive, nationally representative research into the lives of eighteen- to twenty-­three-­year-­old Americans, Christian Smith and his team concluded that emerging adulthood means

. . . not making commitments, not putting down roots, not setting a definite course for the long term. It is about experimenting, exploring, experiencing, preparing, anticipating, having fun, and hopefully not screwing things up too badly in the meantime. Emerging adulthood entails few significant obligations, relatively little accountability to others, and (for those with the means) plenty of interesting detours and escape hatches. It is a time of limbo, of transition, of being neither a teen nor a real adult.11

Emerging adults are consumed with navigating many difficult transitions: from living at home to living on their own, from being single to being heavily involved in romantic relationships and sexual activity, from tagging along with their parents to church to deciding if faith is something they will continue to pursue on their own, from being in school to finding a job or career — the list goes on and on. They navigate these many transitions detached from significant relationships with older adults.12

The result is a life stage that is beset with problems, losses, and even tragic outcomes, but populated by people who put a bold face on matters and insist they have “no regrets.” In particular, Smith and his research team found that American society is not preparing young people to become healthy, productive adults in five important areas of life: moral reasoning, higher life purpose, substance use, sexuality, and civic engagement. First, they are unable to think clearly about moral matters. They can’t say what makes some things right and others wrong. About all they can say is that they “just know” or “just feel” when something is wrong. They’re pretty sure that each person needs to make up his or her own mind about morality. Second, they unquestioningly accept consumerism and the American Dream and do not have any higher aspirations in life. Third, many abuse alcohol, and a significant minority abuse drugs....

Table of contents

• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. We’re All Adolescents Now
• 2. Growing up into Christ
• 3. Helping Adults Mature
• 4. Reaching the Tipping Point: Youth Ministries That Help the Whole Church Mature
• 5. From Here to Maturity
• Appendix A: Thirty-Three Characteristics of Maturing Christian Youth That Combine to Form the Seven Characteristics of “Vital, Maturing Faith”
• Appendix B: Resources for Cultivating Congregational Cultures of Spiritual Maturity
• Appendix C: Questions for Observing a Congregational Culture
• Appendix D: Questions for Interpreting an Element of Congregational Culture
• Appendix E: Questions for Evaluating an Element of Congregational Culture in Light of Biblical Spiritual Maturity
• Notes
• Index