preparation

The following has always been one of my favorite passages of scripture. In combing through these words recently, I've been privileged to understand them in the context of relationships and our responsibility as a Church in promoting purity.

You must teach what is in accord with sound doctrine. Teach the older men to be temperate, worthy of respect, self-controlled, and sound in faith, in love, and in endurance.

Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. Then they can train the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God.

Similarly, encourage the young men to be self-controlled. In everything set them an example by doing what is good. In your teaching show integrity, seriousness, and soundness of speech that cannot be condemned, so that those who oppose you may be ashamed because they have nothing bad to say about us. (Titus 2:1-8, emphasis added)

Church, I regret having to say this, but we've done a poor job with this.

When I share my testimony, I jokingly describe myself as a "recovering youth minister." This is misleading in the sense that I have a great heart for young people, but true considering my philosophical overhaul. Whereas my ministry once centered around providing a safe, comfortable place for teenagers to be teenagers, I've since realized that I did them no favors by encouraging their immaturity. One of the American church's primary objectives is to provide an age-appropriate Christian education to its young people.

At its best, this objective provides scriptural lessons within an environment familiar to each demographic. By offering a close alternative to their daily social and academic setting, we attempt to make teens comfortable without the temptations found on the outside. Since pop-culture teaches that pleasure is good, responsibility is lame, and parents are clueless and selfish, the church utilizes its two to four open hours to convince young people otherwise -- presenting this message comically, painlessly, and absent from their parents -- preferably from some dude dressed ten years younger than his age. Hmm...

Our best hope is that these teens graduate with a large enough toolbox to resist the lies of the big, bad world, so that they will become responsible, selfless adults that know the difference between a pleasure God allows and one He does not.

And we wonder why we're losing them.

I revisited the Titus passage shortly after contemplating how poorly young people are prepared for marriage. Paul seems to identify every characteristic that is missing as a result of our disregard for discipleship. He instructs older men and women to train and set an example for how young people are to live. Purity was never designed to be an adherence to a list of don'ts. Purity begins when the mature believer invests his or her life in a young believer. We're not instructed to send teens to youth group or offer age-appropriate material. We are asked to disciple them into a life of holiness, which begins with our own pursuit.

Looking back at my own teenage years, I cannot count the number of abstinence and purity messages I heard from a pulpit. I was continually encouraged to "live out my faith" rather than own my salvation in complacency. You know what I never once received? Someone to show me how. I spent every Wednesday and Sunday with other youth, as we tried to encourage one another in how we could reach the world for Christ. We had passion, and we had motivation. We never had a model.

Sure, some of us can look back fondly at our pastors and youth pastors, eternally grateful for the conviction through which they shared God's word. Some of us had wonderful relationships with ministers that personally made the decision to invest in our lives. Not surprisingly, these are the teens that grow up to become youth leaders themselves. But is the retention rate supporting the structure? Are we raising up mature, firm-footed, self-controlled adults?

This isn't the job for a handful of young-hearted people in each church body. We all hold the responsibility to engage in discipleship, and we do so by first submitting to the process ourselves. For both men and women, elders are instructed to first live in purity, so that they are capable and willing to give their lives to young people. If we would teach and show boys and girls how to pursue intimacy with Christ, how to live a life of holiness, how to become respectable and submissive husbands and wives, how to attain maturity and self-control, how to...we could trust young people to lead the next generation and advance His Kingdom beyond our expectations! But none of us get a pass from the Great Commission, no matter how great our pastor or youth minister may be.

You think Jesus may have already instructed us how to fix our problem?