Adult Mentoring Matters in the Lives of Teens

These excerpts come from Family-Based Youth Ministry, Revised and Expanded by Mark DeVries.

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The book Faithful Parents, Faithful Kids documents a study of Christian adults that sought to identify which home-based faith-nurturing practices were most likely to have the greatest long-term impact on children. The study found that there was no single, across-the-board practice that worked in even a slim majority of families. Some effective parents required their teenage children to attend church, but the majority didn't--more than 50 percent of teenagers quite going to Sunday school in high school. Only 25 percent of families reported having devotions together. And surprisingly few of these adults (15 percent) reported praying fairly often with their parents during their teenage years. For the researchers looking for a barn-burning discovery, the results had to be frustrating.

What the study did discover, almost accidentally, was a single faith-nurturing factor that was present in more than 90 percent of the families surveyed. The authors write, "While we didn't come up with a sure-fire formula, one thing was obvious: Those who stuck with their faith...had a half-dozen 'mentors' present during their growing up years."

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Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco sought to determine why some young people are destroyed by the deficits of their home environment while others seem to thrive under the very same set of circumstances. In reviewing these studies, Earl Palmer uncovered one constant factor among resilient teens:

They all experienced the non-exploitive interest, care, and support of at least one adult during their childhood years--a parent or grandparent, uncle or aunt, older brother or sister, coach or teacher, pastor or youth leader--an adult with no hidden agenda or exploitive design on the youngster.

The Search Institute has discovered that young people who thrive experience certain key assets that help them overcome adverse situations. And church or synagogue tops the list of assets that promote resilience. In Children of Fast-Track Parents, Brooks reports, "Studies of resiliency in children have shown time and again that the consistent emotional support of at least one loving adult can help [children] overcome all sorts of chaos and deprivation."

Steven Bayme, director of Jewish Communal Affairs Department, documents the impact of the community of faith on the stability of Jewish families:

More interestingly, among Jews affiliated with synagogal movements--Orthodoxy, Conservatism, and Reformed--the chances of marriage ending in divorce are approximately one in eight. Among Jews unaffiliated with the Jewish community, the chances of divorce rise to one in three.

Grandparents also provide this kind of stabilizing influence for children. In his study of children of divorced parents, John Guidibaldi discovered that young people who lived close enough to their grandparents to seek help from them performed significantly higher academically. He found tha the same positive academic results were typical of children who had regular contact with the relatives of their custodial parent.

I remember Sunday lunches at my aunt's house with a table full of relatives, laughing, and arguing around the table until it was time for supper. I remember a backpacking trip in Colorado with one high school friend and four of our Young Life leaders. I still recall the Sunday nights around the prayer altar at First United Methodist Church in Waco, Texas, with teenagers and little children and balding old men praying side by side. Those experiences have filled my arena with a cloud of witnesses. In each of those settings, I was told in some way that my life mattered, that my faith was significant. Although I had a number of wonderful experiences with Christian friends who were my own age, none of them seem to have carried the long-term weight or given me the security that these connections with Christian adults did.

Of course it's only logical to believe that the best way to reach teenagers is by creating a youth ministry. But in the long run, the teenagers in our churches will be affected by significant mountaintop youth-group experiences that we spend so much energy creating. Everything we do in our youth ministries should be, first and foremost, about helping to give kids excuses to build connections with Christian adults.