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With Ruth Jackson
80 Plays4 years ago
What are the issues and challenges around young people and faith? Whether we're thinking about peer-to-peer evangelism, parents passing faith to their children, or the impact of growing up in a digital environment, both the opportunities and the pitfalls are immense. Here to offer her insight is Ruth Jackson, speaking with Andy Bannister and stand-in co-host Gavin Matthews.
Ruth Jackson is a producer and youth specialist for Premier Christian Radio’s Unbelievable? programme and podcast, which brings Christians and non-Christians together for dialogue. She was previously editor of Premier Youth and Children’s Work magazine. Ruth studied theology at Oxford University before working at the BBC’s flagship children’s television show Blue Peter. She moved to Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, where she helped set up the youth apologetics strand Reboot. Ruth is a volunteer youth worker, preacher and worship leader at her local church in Feltham, where she lives with her musician husband Will and puppy Taylor.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Support
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, thanks for downloading PepTalk. If you enjoy today's episode, why not get a free copy of Andy's book or my book by becoming a regular supporter? Visit us at solas-cpc.org and donate just £3 per month. Thanks so much. On with the show.
00:00:30
Speaker
Well, hello and welcome to PEP Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I'm Andy Bannister from the Solar Center for Public Christianity. And my usual partner in crime, my co-host, Christy Mercant, for family reasons, be with us today. But stepping into her incredibly large shoes is my Solar's colleague, Gavin Matthews. Gavin, how are you doing today? I'm doing very well, Andy, how are you? Oh, I'm staring out the window at the Scottish rain thinking, where is the summer gone? But you know,
00:01:00
Speaker
There we are. Maybe this is summer in Dundee. Well, we have a very special guest on the show today joining us from the other end of the country. We
Ruth Jackson's Role and Focus
00:01:08
Speaker
have Ruth Jackson. Ruth, welcome to pep talk. Thanks very much for having me. I've just realized I live right next to a garage and it suddenly just started drilling. So if it's really noisy, just tell me and I'll shout out the window or something.
00:01:21
Speaker
Oh, that's fantastic. We always like a sort of soundtrack. That's amazing. No, we can't hear anything, so it's not too bad. So, Ruth, you've worn a number of hats in your time, but the one you're wearing now is you, I understand, work as a premier radio, particularly working on the Unbelievable podcast with Justin Briley, a show that lots of people have heard of, and you do sort of producing and behind the scenes stuff there, right?
00:01:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So I've come on board with Justin fairly recently. Up until then, I was editing a magazine for youth and children's workers. But one of the remits that I'm hoping to be able to develop and Justin is on board with as well is kind of developing apologetics for a younger audience. So looking specifically at kind of young people and children and equipping parents and youth workers in that as well.
00:02:07
Speaker
So does that mean those of us who love Unbelievable can look forward to the Justin Brierley sort of plush toy kind of thing for children to cuddle at night or maybe not? I'm desperate to get his five-year-old on because he's just brilliant and he asks the best questions so that's kind of what I'm gunning for is you've got Justin show and then you've got his son spin-off.
00:02:26
Speaker
Oh, I think there's something there.
Integrating Apologetics in Youth Work
00:02:28
Speaker
Now, Ruth, one of the things that interests me as well as the stuff at Unbelievable, you're also a volunteer youth worker at Christ Church in Felton. And that's a great place to begin because before I went into evangelism, apologetics and all this stuff, I was a youth worker for sort of three or four years for a number of churches in Southwark down in London. And I often find myself thinking, gosh, I wish I knew then
00:02:51
Speaker
what I knew now in terms of engaging with young people and their questions. So I wasn't attuned to a lot of this stuff. And so I suppose a couple of questions really, how have you found, have you brought some of the apologetics and dealing with questions into your youth work that you do? And I suppose what are some of the big questions that young people have? You know, what is it that young people are asking and struggling with around around faith right now, would you say?
00:03:14
Speaker
So, before I start looking at the specifics of the questions, one of, I think, kind of the most terrifying verses in the Bible for me is Judges 2 verse 10, which says,
00:03:30
Speaker
And I guess that's kind of the rallying cry for youth workers and children's workers and parents, I suppose, as well, to say kind of not on our watch. We don't want that to be the case on our watch. And so I suppose it's kind of twofold. I think the questions are similar, but not always identical between Christian young people and
00:03:48
Speaker
non-Christian young people. So a lot of the questions that I get from kind of Christian young people will be perhaps around the Bible or a story they've heard or maybe something that someone's told them either about kind of a doctrine or something biblical. Whereas I think for the people outside of the church they tend to be
00:04:05
Speaker
slightly bigger picture stuff around kind of suffering and science and things like that. And what I found over the years, so I've been a volunteer youth worker, probably the best part of 20 years. And of course, the questions have changed, but I think actually the heart of the questions never have. So suffering is always one of the sort of top questions. But I think now more than ever, those questions are very, very personal. It's not
00:04:29
Speaker
I mean, you know, there would be questions around things like, why does God send coronavirus? But it would more be like, why did my friend get stabbed? There's a very much, you know, how does it affect my personal life and the life of those around me, rather than the kind of macro questions. But I also think as well,
00:04:46
Speaker
We've seen a lot more questions around mental health, so Bernardo's just recently did a survey with YouGov which suggested that as many as one in three young people might have struggles with their mental health. So that's become a huge thing, whereas those questions might just be a bit more general about suffering. I think they tend to be a bit more specific around, you know, why am I struggling with depression? Why does my friend self-harm? Why did one of my family members die by suicide? It's those kind of really pertinent questions and I think
00:05:16
Speaker
The coronavirus has sort of thrown it all into the air, but some of the statistics around children and young people now at the moment are just horrific. So there was another recent study that the Children Society did, which came out sort of in the middle of lockdown, which said that out of 24 European countries,
00:05:34
Speaker
15 year olds in the UK have got the lowest overall life satisfaction and there are various ways that they measure that but that is just heartbreaking and I think as youth workers and children's workers and parents and pastors and quite frankly anyone who cares about young people we have got to stand up and do something about that.
00:05:53
Speaker
I know this chap who is, he's middle aged now and 40 years ago he was in a Sunday school or a youth group. He put his hand up and asked a question and he was told by the church leader, just be quiet, stop causing trouble, just believe. And he said at that moment, I knew it was rubbish and walked away. It was just a terrible story, but a true story. And does that still go on today? Is that kind of pressure still on your people or have we learned now to give children, young people a space to ask and engage with those kind of questions?
00:06:21
Speaker
I
Challenges in Youth Faith Retention
00:06:22
Speaker
mean that's just horrifying and unfortunately not at all uncommon. I think we're getting better at it. The stats are still terrifying about the amount of young people that fall out of the church so there's a book called Sticky Faith that was published a few years ago which was predominantly in the states but it did look a little bit at UK stats as well and it seems to suggest that around 70% of young people fall out of the church when they hit their teenage years and a lot of that is because they weren't given the opportunity to ask questions.
00:06:48
Speaker
I think we've got slightly better at it in youth groups but we're not good at it in children's groups. I think sometimes we think those children aren't old enough to be able to cope with questions and things like that but I don't know whether you've come across a guy with an amazing name called John Westerhoff III. I mean the
00:07:03
Speaker
that there are two other people before him with the same name is quite amazing. He talks about the stages of faith development. And the first one is experienced faith. So when a child is small, they experience the faith through their parents or through their peers, other people kind of within a church community. The second one is affiliative faith. So they begin to do some of the things that you would do in a religious community. They begin to kind of do some of those things for themselves. And then the third one is searching faith.
00:07:32
Speaker
which is where young people are given the opportunity to ask questions and kind of to grapple with some of that stuff and make sense of it for themselves. And then and only then once you've done the third stage do you get to the fourth stage which is owned faith, which is where it really becomes a personal faith. And I think for so often what we've done in the church is missed out that third stage, that searching faith.
00:07:54
Speaker
and we've not given our young people and our children the opportunity to grapple with the big questions because we're scared of where they'll end up. And so what we've ended up with is no owned faith. We don't have young people who have got their own personal faith, which means that when they hit their teenage years and they hit questions from their friends at school, or they go to university or the workplace and they're faced with difficult situations, they suddenly lose their faith completely because it was never theirs to
00:08:19
Speaker
to begin with. So there's a Christian parenting blogger in the States called Natasha Crane, who says that a borrowed faith leaving home can be just as dangerous as a broken faith, because the results are often the same, they're just delayed. And I think she's hit the nail on the head there that actually, if our children have only got a borrowed faith, that's just as dangerous as them not having a faith at all, because we've not equipped them to be able to answer those things for themselves.
00:08:46
Speaker
Ruth, there's one of the issues here too, I mean, as you described that, I mean, I think I'm both sort of quite challenged, but also encouraged that the church, I think, is beginning to do better in places. Is one of the issues, though, that's perhaps as Christian parents, those of us with children and teenagers have at times had a tendency to sort of, you know, delegate all the work of faith building to the church. And so it's
Parental Involvement in Faith Development
00:09:09
Speaker
like, I'll send the kids off to the youth leader, I'll let them deal with it.
00:09:12
Speaker
and the Christian parents are not actually kind of building things into how we raise our kids at home. Is there a challenge here for parents and discipleship at home as well as for the church? A hundred percent. It is hilarious, isn't it, that parents are with their children for
00:09:27
Speaker
Most of the day, certainly in the morning and evening after school, and yet we think that an hour on a Sunday, if that is all that is needed by a professional in inverted commas to sort of look after the faith of our children. And it's so not biblical for a start. And also I just think
00:09:46
Speaker
it's not the way it's meant to be, it's that age old proverb that it takes a whole church to raise a child and I think parenting is such a key thing but I also think key figures within the church, I know in my own life, you know, I sort of grew up in the faith, I'm a pastor's kid so I could have gone one of two ways but for me, older people within the church community who weren't my parents, that was such a key thing but I also think, yeah, parents have got such a
00:10:12
Speaker
such a key role and we need to, as Christians, be supporting parents, be coming alongside them, praying for the children, but practically saying, is there anything we can do to help? Is there a particular area that they're interested in? Or can we sort of take them one day a week? So a girl I used to work with, she became a Christian through an old lady inviting her to lunch every
00:10:34
Speaker
every sunday and they were just not you know she didn't shove the gospel down her throat she would just sit and eat jam rolly polly and just talk about life and basically through kind of just being loved every week this this girl my friend became a christian and i think actually so much of it is just walking alongside our young people on their journey meeting them where they're at not expecting them to come to us and needing that to be within a whole community not just not just down to one individual or one family.
00:11:01
Speaker
So if somebody listening to this is maybe involved in children and youth work and they're listening and hearing what you're saying and say, I really need to engage with this phase of searching faith, but they've got this curriculum they're expecting to roll out. How do they open the floor to questions? At what age should they start opening the floor to questions? What resources should they use? They might be terrified of doing it. How should they practically go about engaging young people with where they are?
00:11:25
Speaker
You've totally hit the nail on the head there. I think fear is one of the big reasons that we don't ask these questions because I think we think if we give them an opportunity for questions, they're going to ask questions that we don't know the answer to. And I also think that's okay. It's okay to say, I don't know. In fact, that's such a humbling thing and you meet
00:11:41
Speaker
great giants in apologetics like Professor John Lennox who very humbly will say I don't know sometimes to a question and I think that's really important but I think we can't leave it there so we'll say I don't know but then what I think is such a key thing particularly as a youth worker but also as a children's worker is to say I don't know but why don't we journey in this together let's try and find out some of those answers together and you'll build relationship in doing that and you'll learn something along the way and so in terms of the age thing I think
00:12:10
Speaker
It's probably really dependent on the child, but I also think you can't start too young. The opinion that they have of God when they're really little will effectively be the opinion that kind of stays with them until they get old. So if you teach a child that God is a kind of victory soldier that will always sweep in and save the day and every single one of your prayers will be answered in exactly the way you want it. And all the kind of sweet stories that we tell them while hiding some of them more
00:12:40
Speaker
You know, slightly harder to tell stories than I think. We're actually doing them a real disservice and obviously you've got to talk to them in a child appropriate way. But I also think we've got to be honest with them about the fact that we do live in a broken world and therefore things will not always go the way that we want it to go. But we have a God who is always alongside us.
00:13:00
Speaker
And you see that in the incarnation that he refused to stay distant and came in to meet us in our mess. But I also think starting younger is really important in light of the fact that actually what was affecting our young people sort of 10, 20 years ago is actually now affecting our children. So this is a horrifying example, and I'm not saying we should talk to children about pornography, but the average age of children looking at porn now is nine years old.
00:13:25
Speaker
And that used to be 15, 16. So these issues are rampant in our schools. And we are talking about sex and relationships in primary schools, whereas before that would have just been secondary schools. So I think there's something to be said for starting at younger. And in terms of how we do that, again, I think it's totally dependent on
00:13:43
Speaker
what works in your context whether in a family situation or a church situation but I think just kind of open forums where perhaps at the end of each session you sort of set the precedent that you can always ask a question or there'll be a box at the back where you can write your questions and so I do a lot of kind of youth camps and we quite often will have a box throughout the week where
00:14:03
Speaker
you know, often depending on what the questions are, particularly if it's around things like sex and relationships or stuff that you were a bit embarrassed about or maybe you've been a Christian your whole life but you've got a question about the Bible that you don't want to ask in front of all your friends, you know, writing it anonymously or tweeting it in or texting it in to a number that sort of doesn't come up with your number, I think those can be really good ways. But then there are also some great kind of youth festivals and things like that that can often be, I think there's something about taking them to an external place
00:14:32
Speaker
and sometimes those processing but like processing can be a little bit easier when you're not in your own environment.
00:14:38
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting you you say that when I was in Canada, I was there based there for six years was a big report came out called hemorrhaging faith that look that came out that same stat of 70%. But they also flipped it around and asked, you know what it was that helped young people who stayed to remain. And two of the things I remember them coming up with were one was apologetics and answering the questions. The other was the one you just landed on there, which is taking young people out of their context, either on
00:15:02
Speaker
you know, short-term trips or even short-term mission trips, making a massive difference. But look, a question I wanted to put to you that also came out of something you just said there. You mentioned issues
Impact of Digital Media on Youth
00:15:12
Speaker
around pornography and sexuality and stuff. And I think one of the things that's accelerated those questions among young people has been the internet and digital culture. And that's an area where sometimes those of us are all struggle. You know, it's often been said that young people are kind of digital natives. They grew up in this. The rest of us are digital migrants were coming into this.
00:15:30
Speaker
What are some of the issues in terms of engaging with young people when those young people may be living their lives 24-7, plugged into the web, digital devices at a younger age, the influence of things like social media and so forth, which has changed the whole dynamic of conversations. How do we factor that into how we engage with young people today? Perhaps both in terms of those who haven't got a Christian faith, but also in terms of discipleship. Where does social media and digital technology come into this?
00:16:01
Speaker
So I think in some ways you could go to two extremes. So I think it's really important that we acknowledge the dangers of social media and the internet. And, you know, our young people living a life effectively always behind a filter, never being honest with anyone, always having sort of airbrushed and showing people the best bits of us. And I think actually as Christians, we have a real duty to live lives without a filter, to be honest in our struggles, to talk about the difficult things, but to show that God is with us in the midst of those struggles.
00:16:29
Speaker
is kind of the first thing. But what's interesting as well, a lot of the kind of execs at various tech companies in Silicon Valley are taking their children off social media and not giving them smartphones and things like that because they've seen the dangers of addiction and things like that. So, you know,
00:16:45
Speaker
I'm sure you guys know all of this, but the kind of addictive properties of social media and smartphones and the dopamine hit that young people will get from their phones. So they did a study recently about young people sleeping near their phones, even if they were switched off, young people slept worse because they were effectively wanting that dopamine hit. So they were anticipating someone messaging them and therefore not sleeping
00:17:08
Speaker
not sleeping as deeply even though the phone was off. So there's all sorts of unhelpful things. And I interviewed John Markoma recently who wrote that book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. Ironically, I speed read his book the day before in order to interview him. But he has got some really interesting stuff around Sabbath generally, but digital Sabbath and being really strict with not letting our technology
00:17:34
Speaker
you know, take over us, but being Lord of technology. And he's quite extreme in some of his things around like not letting his children use. They don't have phones and not letting them use technology and on a Saturday, which is their Sabbath because he's a church pastor, you know, they kind of they Sabbath technology completely. So they don't watch TV, they don't, they're not on any device or anything like that. So that's that's one extreme, although he does use social media himself. And then I suppose the other extreme
00:18:01
Speaker
is that we see social media as a tool and as an amazing opportunity to share the gospel. So in some senses, I think if young people are online, why are we not meeting them there? It's the opposite of if we build it, they will come and expecting them to come to church.
00:18:16
Speaker
And I think what we've seen, particularly in coronavirus, where we can't necessarily meet in churches, what an amazing opportunity to share the gospel. So I was chatting to a guy just earlier who, you know, normally they have maybe 500 people at a service. It's a big church anyway, but they've been reaching 40,000 people online because so many more people are engaging and who knows whether those are Christians already.
00:18:37
Speaker
I think the two options, either we take ourselves completely away from technology because it's dangerous and it's not helpful, or we so engage with our technology because that is the way to reach young people. I personally think that we probably need to get a balance of the two. We need to be aware of the difficulties and the dangers of technology and be talking to children about those dangers.
00:18:59
Speaker
I'm but i also think we can't take ourselves completely away from it because that's where are young people are and if we want to be speaking the language of the masses and we need to be where the masses are so and the diverse i think it's in one chronicles twelve yet one hundred twelve i think it is it speaks to the men of it's occur.
00:19:14
Speaker
who understood the signs of the times and knew the best course for Israel to take. And I think we need to understand the signs of the times when it comes to our young people and a lot of that is kind of the digital media that they're engaging with. And then we need to speak kind of a better story into it. So it's about kind of taking culture and bringing the gospel into it, I think.
00:19:37
Speaker
There seems to be attention, not just in social media, but similar patterns. I see attention between parents and pastors who are more kind of pastorally wired, wanting to protect young people and corral them and keep them away from the world because the world's big and scary, and others who are more missional, wanting to equip young people and send them into the world to influence it. How do I get that balance right? Not just in social media, but across the piece?
00:19:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's really difficult and I think, like you say, there are those two extremes that you can do with social media as well, as well as sort of in the physical world. I would tend towards the kind of mission, and I don't know whether that's just because I'm an evangelist, but I do think as well kids are the most amazing evangelists and all the stats would bear out that young people come to faith before the age, most people who become a Christian become a Christian before they're 19 and a lot of that will be
Preparing Young Evangelists
00:20:25
Speaker
peer-to-peer evangelism rather than kind of top-down evangelism which makes sense because you know as a teenager as a young person your relationships with your friends are so important and so I would say that actually we have got a real duty to equip our young people to be brilliant evangelists.
00:20:41
Speaker
but not to be someone they're not, to speak out of who they are and who God's made them to be. And I do think we've obviously got to protect our young people for some of this stuff, but I don't think that is by taking them out of the world. Because I think if we take them out of the world, all we're doing is wrapping them in cotton wool, and then eventually they'll have to be released into the world. And then they're completely unprepared as to how to process it and how to deal with this. I think what is a much more powerful way of doing it
00:21:09
Speaker
is having an open conversation with them right from the offset talking about these difficult things from a really young age so that they're prepared for those conversations and effectively making a space within our homes where no question is ever off the table. Nothing is too embarrassing, nothing is too difficult, nothing will upset mum and dad or mum or dad and just kind of talking openly and honest
00:21:32
Speaker
about these things and I think as well being provocative with the questions that we ask them and where they might be too scared to talk about things so perhaps using kind of new stories and things like that to talk about difficult things.
00:21:44
Speaker
Ruth, we're coming to the end, but one last question I wanted to throw you away. We've talked a lot about reaching young people in the church and parents and so forth, all being equipped to do that. But to turn it round, in terms of Christian young people who have a faith in Christ, sometimes I sense they can be a little bit nervous sometimes about talking about their faith at school, to their peers. What are some of the ways
00:22:08
Speaker
that churches and parents can perhaps be equipping their kids so they can not just answer the questions of their friends, but really actually get out there and be missional. How can we really get some sort of fuel into the tank of evangelism for young people so they can reach their peers? Because I completely agree. When we can do that, they're amazing evangelists. Are there ways we can be empowering Christian young people to do that more effectively?
00:22:31
Speaker
I mean I think the key thing is to help our young people to sort of cultivate their own faith and to kind of get a fire in their belly for themselves and then in some senses they can't help but share the good news because it's so contagious within themselves so you know that kind of famous prayer of John Wesley that he said he would ask God to set him on fire and then he'd go out and people would watch him burn and I think
00:22:54
Speaker
Our
Encouraging Personal Faith and Evangelism
00:22:55
Speaker
prayer for our young people within the church has got to be that they will be on fire and just helping them to cultivate their own faith in a way that is just contagious. So, you know, I love that the kind of classic apologetics, 1 Peter 3 15 always be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks you for the hope that you
00:23:10
Speaker
have. And that kind of implies that people will be asking us questions because our lives look different, because our lives look attractive. And that sort of, you know, the famous quote from Blaise Pascal about making the gospel attractive, make people wish it were true, and then show them that it is, I think actually, if our young people are living attractive lives, where in the midst, like I said, in the midst of these kind of, you know, Instagram filters, where everything's fake, if our young people are living kind of no filters,
00:23:37
Speaker
Honest lives then actually people can be drawn to them and they can be drawn to that hope and i think you know covered is kind of brought up all sorts of things but what are well desperately definitely need is hope and what are young people who know the gospel they know they have a hope and there's that kind of deeper understanding that even in the midst of darkness and mental health issues and all the struggles that are going on.
00:23:57
Speaker
they've got an anchor that will not move and they've got a hope that should be contagious and I think actually that's what we need to be cultivating in our young people is how to have that hope for themselves and we don't even need to, I don't think we necessarily even need to tell them how to share their faith. If their faith is so on fire it's going to be impossible to shut them up.
00:24:16
Speaker
What a fantastic place to end. Ruth, it's been a real privilege having you on the podcast. Thank you so much for taking the time and how kind of busy you are, but there's so much kind of helpful kind of advice and wisdom you've shared over the last 20 minutes. So thanks very much for all you're doing and thanks for being on pep talk today. Thanks for having me. Well, thanks for listening. All of you at home or in the car or wherever you are, as you listen to this, we'll be back in two weeks time with another episode of the show. I hope you've enjoyed this one and see you soon.
00:24:46
Speaker
you