Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X

Christian Century, Dec 9, 1998 by Charles R. Foster

Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X.

By Tom Beaudoin. Jossey Bass, 210 pp., $22.00.

Three provocative books challenge our concept of youth ministry and question our capacity to transmit the faith across generations. In Youth Leadership Josephine Long and Carl I. Fertman take up a topic that many churches, schools and other youth-serving organizations have ignored since the late 1960s. Long, director of the Leadership Development Network at the University of Pittsburgh, and Fertman, executive director of the Maximizing Adolescent Potentials Program at the University of Pittsburgh, explore patterns of leadership in teenagers and examine how leadership is nurtured.

The authors frame the discussion with two theoretical perspectives. The first is that of developmental psychology, an approach that dominates the literature on youth ministry. Drawing on the insights of Erik Erikson, Carol Gilligan and others, Long and Fertman note that while young people begin to engage in leadership at a very young age, their involvement intensifies rapidly as they move into the teenage years. They are busy acquiring information about leadership and forming attitudes toward leadership in these years. They learn to communicate, make decisions and manage leadership roles. The authors identify three distinctive stages in this effort: awareness, in which youth sell-consciously begin to identify, ways to function as leaders in various social contexts; interaction, in which they explore and test their growing knowledge and skills of leadership; and mastery, when they begin to develop a vision of themselves as leaders and take responsibility for preparing to be leaders.

Long and Fertman's second theoretical perspective is drawn from the research of E. E Hollander, J. M. Bums and J. v. Downton, which emphasizes leadership as "transactions or exchanges" that take place between the leader and the one who is led, as well as the transformation of "self-interests for the good of the group, organization or society." The transactions are the skills and tasks associated with leadership, while the transformation of self-interests describes the act of leadership itself. From these two perspectives, the authors locate the impetus to leadership in the developing capacities of teenagers, who respond to the situations in which they find themselves and practice leadership.

The task of developing youth leaders is a matter of creating environments that will nurture capacities for leadership. This changes the role of adult leaders. Instead of teaching people to be leaders, they are to nurture their potential for leadership. Parents become partners to youth leadership efforts, while teachers and other adults "support," "empower" and "facilitate" their developing capacities.

The authors suggest ways to create these conditions and give examples of leadership-nurturing environments. They challenge the value of youth ministries that don't meet these conditions, including those that isolate teenagers from children and adults in the congregation, those that emphasize entertainment, and those that prefer charismatic adults who direct youth over adults who nurture youth capacities.

The youth in Youth Leadership are familiar to most church people. They are active, in school and community, live at home with at least one parent and accept the basic values and perspectives of society's dominant social institutions.

We are not familiar, however, with the young people we encounter in Cold New World. William Finnegan introduces us to disenfranchised young people whose families seem overwhelmed. Schools do not hold these young people's attention. Their skills do not translate into success in the job market. With the exception of some rural African-American youth, these youths find the institutional church irrelevant. Yet many of the deepest issues of their lives are inherently religious, especially when they are trying to make some sense out of the violence and hostility they experience.

Finnegan presents the lives of African-American young people in a New Haven neighborhood through the eyes of a teenage drug dealer. He presents Mexican-American youth in Washington State who struggle with the experience of immigration, and white supremacist Anglo-American youth in the Los Angeles suburbs. All of these youth are experiencing the downward economic movement of their families; all of them have had repeated encounters with direct, overt and systemic violence.

Finnegan researched this book by living with these young people. He ate with them, attended their gatherings, interviewed family members and community, business and school leaders who touched their lives. He returned to visit the youths over the course of his research, and on several occasions intervened in their lives.

Despite the grimness and violence of their stories, the youth reveal their resilience and their capacity for tenderness and compassion. I found myself hoping that these young people would find a way to improve their situation, give some socially acceptable response or find enough institutional or personal support to escape the downward spiral of their lives. It does not happen. Their environments do not contain the resources to alter this tragic course. And most of our congregations are unaware of or inattentive to their quests for meaning and place.