According to the author of a new book, it leads, too often, to what he calls ‘the juvenalization’ of Christianity.
In the book, Bergler traces the way in which, over seventy-five years, youth ministries have breathed new vitality into four major American church traditions — African American, Evangelical, Mainline Protestant, and Roman Catholic — even as their methods have also engendered widespread spiritual immaturity, consumerism, and self-centeredness, and have popularized a feel-good faith marked by neither intergenerational community nor theological literacy. The preponderance of pop worship music, jeans, and T-shirts in church services? These, he says, can all be traced to juvenilization. So can the ubiquitous language of “falling in love with Jesus.”
Brilliant! If anything marks modern youth movements it’s precisely spiritual immaturity and consumerism and self centeredness.
