How can we nurture faith in teenagers?

If you want to see teens grow in faith, help them have adventures with God, writes Olly Goldenberg

“In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams,” says Peter in Acts 2:17, quoting the prophet Joel.

There are two things to note here: first, there are the two generations strengthening each other – the youth with the energy and zeal to drive things forward, and the older people with the wisdom to temper them.

Second is the confident vision of young people’s faith. Nowhere here or anywhere else in the Bible is there any suggestion that, “When thou art a teenager thou shalt backslide”. The question for us, then, is how do we help nurture this type of faith?

Part of the answer is to help young people have spiritual adventures with God.

For teens to have deep, powerful faith they need to see that God is real and that their faith has legs. They need to see God working through them as they pray for the sick, share prophetic words or serve in church.

There are several examples that demonstrate this in the Bible – the most famous being David. Although we don’t know David’s exact age we know he was a youth, perhaps around 14 or 15.

His big moment of adventure came when he abandoned the armour of an adult soldier, picked up the smooth stones of a shepherd boy and set out to face Goliath.

He had confidence in God because of what he’d seen him do before. He put himself in a situation where God would either show up or David would die. He boldly tells Goliath, “You come against me with sword and spear but I come against you in the name of the Lord whose armies you’ve defied.” Up flies the stone and down falls the giant.

Ok, it’s an extreme example, but David has a spiritual adventure – something he could look back on in the years to come and think, “Remember when I stepped out and God did this!”

I’m not suggesting we put our teenagers in unsafe situations, but we do need to do things that will stretch them.

In our youth work we’ve taken young people out ‘treasure hunting’, for example.

The first time we did this we planned to visit a market town. Two weeks before going we asked the teens to pray about the people they might meet and what the Lord might want to say to them. We then asked them to write letters to give to these people with any words or pictures God had given them.

I thought, “This is either going to be the most amazing thing – something we’ll talk about for the rest of our lives – or it’ll be an absolute disaster and we’ll have pastoral issues to mop up for the next ten years!”

When we got to the town, one of the girls believed she was going to meet somebody called Margaret – an old lady walking with a stick and with a lot of health issues. She believed God wanted this lady to know he was with her in all this.

Literally everybody in the town seemed to be an old lady with a walking stick so this girl, about 13 years old, was running around asking people “Is your name Margaret?” for two hours.

Just as we were preparing to leave she found Margaret. She gave her the letter she’d written and Margaret asked her, “How did you know? Tomorrow I’m going to hospital and I’ve been really worried about it.”

Another girl heard from God that she was going to meet a lady called Fiona. She pictured the clothes Fiona would be wearing and heard that she was taking drugs and had been in a car accident. She felt God saying he wanted Fiona to know he loved her.

As we stepped onto the street the girl spotted the lady she had pictured. As she plucked up the courage to speak to her she found out her middle name was Fiona, she had been in a serious car accident a year ago and was taking medication for the pain.

One thing was bugging her – the lady in her dream had red hair but this lady’s was brown – until the lady told her that her natural hair colour was red!

God knew the natural hair colour of that lady, her middle name, what had happened to her a year ago and what she’d be wearing on the day this girl met her.

What a thing to look back on! Look what happens when you step out in faith. It’s spiritual adventures like these that help build the sort of faith we read about in the book of Acts in our teens.

Want to know more? Check out Olly’s book The Josiah Generation and these two websites: childrencan.co.uk and handinhandconference.com

This article first appeared in Direction Magazine. For further details, please click here.

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