i am sparticus: Grace, Faith, Legalism and Youthwork

Grace, Faith, Legalism and Youthwork

One of the perks of my job not really being a real job but rather training is that I can mess up repeatedly and get away with it. However, as that's a story for another day, here's something fascinating that goes with another of those perks; being able to listen to R.E.M. and read books in work hours.

I was reading Youth Ministry That Transforms and came across a fascinating statistic⁽¹⁾ about the change in priorities in parents and youth workers concerning their young people. Apparently back in the first half of the last century the items with a highest priority would form a cluster that centres on a personal religious life. So priorities would be things like "seeing prayer and reflection as worthwhile", "seeing God's role in the world as demanding a personal surrender to his will", "live each day with a sense of divine forgiveness", "has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ", "values the bible". This is opposed to items that cluster around "Moral Maturity", things like "Has a healthy self-concept about his or her valueness and worth as a person", "Takes a responsible view towards moral questions around issues like drug taking and sex", "Distinguishes between popular culture and the values of the gospel". In 1980 a survey was carried out where most of the respondents ranked the priorities concerned with moral maturity higher than those concerned with a personal religious life. You can kind of see the American bias in this, with 'leading a good life by not doing bad naughty things, like sex or drugs' being the signs of moral maturity but I can't see these results as being confined to America. In Britian we'd have the same overall results, but signs of moral maturity would be things like 'respects other viewpoints and religions', 'helps with a variety of things that take up their evenings', 'attends meetings regularly', 'helps on a sunday'.

What worries me about this, is that as far as I can see things haven't changed. We still focus on getting young people to being morally mature and not on having a personal relationship with Christ. We go down the route of legalism, teaching them to act in a certain way and to obey certain rules. If you look at the two different categories, the first one places stress on how you look in God's eyes, the second places stress on how you look in everyone else's eyes. It's worrying how much of my youth work is centred around getting people to act nice and look good in my eyes, when really they'll act nice when they start being concerned about how they look in God's eyes.
Pharisee, Tax Collector, prayer. Which one went home right in the yees of God?

Footnote

1: Well, fascinating if you are a youth worker anyway

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