Why are Youth Aimless and Hurting?

Chap Clark has known young people who use knives to slice their arms or other parts of their bodies to express the deep alienation and suffering that they feel.

Other young people may fall into drug abuse, sexual promiscuity or simply fail to make the difficult transition from being a young adult into adulthood, says Clark, a professor of youth, family and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary.

At the same time, a majority of young people do not attend church and show little signs of doing so.

So, why is this happening? Clark asked during the final presentation of this year’s Calvin College’s January Series.

Is it our technological, highly consumer-driven culture? Or that young people today are immature and don’t grow up until they are in their 30s.

Maybe, he said, they are a generation we don’t understand and that we need to find or develop a range of youth specialists to reach them.

No, it is none of this, he said, answering his own question.

“Children are our most precious asset. But parents and other adults today have failed in their responsibility to support children and integrate them into the ongoing life of the adult community,” he said.

By not doing our jobs, many young people are frightened, cut off, aimless and floundering even as they move into their 30s, he said.

“Kids today believe they are responsible to become adults themselves,” he said.

“They are left to develop spiritually on their own — and I can’t see how they can integrate faith into all of the nuttiness of their culture.”

A popular speaker and co-author of the book Stickyfaith: Everyday ideas to build lasting faith in your kids, Clark spoke about research that he and another child development specialist from Fuller — located in Pasadena, Calif. — have done on youth. He focused on what they have learned about why so many young people have fled the church and are not coming back.

Bottom line, he said, the majority of today’s young people — even those who grew up in the church — feel no lasting connection to faith, since it seems to offer nothing to them, other than an agenda, a set of rules and rituals that are not helpful.

Their research has shown that 50 percent of young people who graduate from high school with a strong faith end up leaving the church soon after they reach college.

This means that about 80 percent of all college-age young people either leave a church and never go back or weren’t attending a church to start with.

In the last 30 or so years, for many social, economic, political, technological and faith-related reasons, adults have essentially been abandoning young people, shaking their heads and believing that these young people are a disconnected group onto themselves who will somehow find their own way.

“Young people feel as if they don’t belong,” Clark said.

Adults of every age need to step back into the lives of young people. Parents whose children have left the home must not simply let their children go.

Grandparents, neighbors, church members, teachers, coaches and others need to do what others who went before them decades ago did — remain involved in the lives of young people.

Young people need not just one close adult, but several, showing interest and support in their lives.

“We need to realize that we are called to pass on our story to those who come behind us,” said Clark. “Each one of us is called to love young people into the Kingdom.”

After Clark’s talk, which was sponsored by the Christian Reformed Church in North America, he attended a reception for him at the Grand Rapids office of the CRC. He also spoke on Jan. 24 at Brookside CRC in Grand Rapids.