Podcast Episode 140

How can your youth ministry cultivate a faith that stays with a young person as they mature through adulthood? We speak with Brad Griffin of the Fuller Youth Institute about five compass points that can guide an impactful youth ministry. The approach emphasizes building trust and relationships while teaching in transformative and experiential ways that help young people make meaning of their faith and life experiences.

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Announcer: Leading Ideas Talks is brought to you by the Lewis Center for Leadership of Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. Subscribe free to our weekly e-newsletter, Leading Ideas, at churchleadership.com/leadingideas.

How can your church help youth claim a vital faith? No question is more critical to the future of the church. Learn effective tips your congregation can use to improve ministry with teens and their families in the free Lewis Center resource 50 Ways to Strengthen Ministry with Youth. Read now, download free, and share at churchleadership.com/50ways.

How can your youth ministry cultivate a faith that stays with a young person as they mature through adulthood? In this episode we speak with Brad Griffin of the Fuller Youth Institute about five compass points that can guide an impactful youth ministry. The approach emphasizes building trust and relationships while teaching in transformative and experiential ways that help young people make meaning of their faith and life experiences.

Ann Michel: Welcome to Leading Ideas Talks. My name is Ann Michel. I’m a senior consultant with the Lewis Center for Church Leadership of Wesley Theological Seminary. I’m one of the editors of Leading Ideas e-newsletter. And I’m so pleased to be the host of this episode of Leading Ideas Talks. My guest today is Brad Griffin, who’s the Senior Director of Content and Research for the Fuller Youth Institute. And he is coauthor with Kara Powell and Jen Bradbury of a new book, Faith Beyond Youth Group: 5 Ways to Form Character and Cultivate Lifelong Discipleship. So, welcome to Leading Ideas Talks, Brad.

Brad Griffin: Thanks, and it’s great to be here. Happy to be talking about this.

Ann Michel: To set the stage for the conversation. I wondered if you could just very briefly describe the work of the Fuller Youth Institute and then specifically the work that led to this new book.

Brad Griffin: Really the heart of Fuller Youth Institute (FYI) is turning research into resources. We want to equip leaders, parents, adults who care about young people, in particular teenagers and young adults, and who care about their faith. We believe that young people can change the world and we really want to support them along the way, be there for them, and really try to understand them. So, our research tries to go to the heart of that. And in terms of this particular project, often we find that one question leads to another. We’ve been at this just about 20 years now, and so some of the early questions that we wrestled with were around what we can do in our churches, in our homes, and in our ministries to help young people when they’re with us to carry their faith with them. We did a big project called “Sticky Faith” that really tracked young people in that transition out of high school and into college and beyond.

And in some ways, this project on “faith beyond youth group” is kind of a full circle moment for us where we asked a similar but different question of youth ministry. Youth ministry is great. We love youth ministry. We want to support what happens in those spaces and places. But what about all that time that teenagers spend outside our ministries? How can we help them cultivate faith that is for not just what happens in ministry but beyond it, the rest of their week and the rest of their lives. It was funded by a grant, too, that helped us really explore how character is part of that equation.

Ann Michel: That actually was going to be my very next question. Character is such a central construct in the book, which is about faith formation in youth and then how youth can develop faith that extends beyond their time as youth in church. So, could you define “character” as you use it in this book and then explain the central role that you see it playing in faith formation and discipleship growth?

Brad Griffin: There’s a lot of research out there about character and one of the gifts of this project was tapping into all the research that exists and then looking at how we apply it in the context of faith formation. As part of that application process, we distilled a definition of character that is “living out Jesus’ goodness every day by loving God and our neighbors.” It’s centered in the character of Jesus, living out Jesus’ goodness every day, because character is an everyday thing. Then, by loving God and our neighbors, we’re centering in that Great Commandment of Jesus. It’s kind of that distillation of what it means to follow God and live in the world.

We make a distinction between just trying to make teenagers “good kids.” Sometimes we hear, even folks in our church will say, “Oh we have such good kids!” And yes, we have good kids. But the goal of Christian formation and discipleship — whatever language we use around that — isn’t really just to make good kids. It’s to form us into the character of Christ. And so those may be related, but they’re not quite the same.

Ann Michel: I appreciated the distinction you made in the book between character and certain behaviors. This isn’t about purity or certain other ways that kids might manifest good behaviors. Living out Jesus’s goodness every day by loving God and our neighbors — that’s how I would define discipleship. Maybe that’s my particular denominational slant, but how do you distinguish this definition of character from how you understand discipleship broadly?

Brad Griffin: We are intentionally connecting them. What we are envisioning is “character-forming discipleship.” It’s a discipleship that doesn’t just separate our spirituality from the rest of our lives. And it doesn’t just focus on moral conformity or behavior, as you said. It’s not that list of “do’s and don’ts”, as we might say. It really is an integrative discipleship.

Now people define character in all sorts of ways. Even when we talk to teenagers, they say some really insightful things. “It’s who you are really” is one way they talked about it or “who you are most of the time.” And I think we hope for an integrative kind of discipleship that looks at Christlikeness as an outcome of that discipleship. I think Christlikeness and character are often terms that folks use kind of interchangeably.

Ann Michel: So, I think a lot of us instinctively think of character as an outgrowth of faith. But if I’m reading your book correctly, I think you’re actually saying that it’s the other way around. Developing good character habits is what carries faith forward. Is that right?

Brad Griffin: That’s a really interesting observation. I think mayb