In a new report on Generation Alpha – youth born 2010 or later – Fuller Youth Institute cited research from Future of Faith on the connection between a young person’s feeling heard and their belief.
Specifically, two-thirds of teenagers reported experiencing spiritual growth when they had the opportunity to share their beliefs and were met with listening rather than judgment. Only one-third reported experiencing spiritual growth after listening to a sermon.
“In other words, listening itself is an act of faith formation,” FYI’s report said.
As someone who has spent years of study and work delivering such sermons, I find that … humbling. On the other hand, this finding, which comes directly from young people, can unlock a relational, holistic ministry that can greatly expand the imagination and vision of who can accompany youth and how. This research speaks not only to the power of relationship – something many folks who accompany youth instinctively understand – but also to the specific qualities that give these relationships power.
When young people experience belonging in a group, school, organization or church, their sense of belonging is ultimately due to the people and the relationships.
Together Lab builds community power to transform systems that exploit people and planet. As director of youth initiatives there, I oversee the youth solidarity movement, which seeks to cultivate community for teens and the adults who care for them. The goal is for youth to experience a sense of belonging. We accompany and activate locally rooted youth collectives of play and purpose, grounded in care for neighbors and neighborhoods.
Our approach to cultivating belonging draws on the “noticed, named and known” framework. This framework comes from Springtide Research Institute’s national research on youth mental health. The institute’s work emphasizes the impact of trusted adults and notes that young people who have relationships with just one to five trusted adults report fewer instances of negative mental health outcomes. When young people experience belonging in a group, school, organization or church, their sense of belonging is ultimately due to the people and the relationships.
Springtide identifies three distinct experiences in how a young person moves from joining a group to experiencing true belonging within that group: feeling noticed, feeling named and feeling known. Feeling known encompasses “unreserved acceptance”: in other words, feeling like one can be heard without judgment. If spiritual formation happens when a young person feels heard, then cultivating space for belonging isn’t just a means to the end of some compartmentalized belief but is central to the ministry itself.
We also believe that belonging includes agency, specifically honoring and uplifting a young person’s agency. Building off frameworks from the Othering and Belonging Institute, we emphasize “structural belonging.” That is, belonging is about ensuring that members of a community, organization and society feel that their well-being has been considered, that they are able to contribute to its design and that they have “a meaningful voice.” So if being heard is itself part of formation, we also try to foster a sense of co-creation and input in the design of youth spaces. We cultivate opportunities for youth service and leadership, and we amplify youth voices on social justice and the betterment of the local community toward structural belonging for all.
With the youth solidarity movement, we have experimented with adding the word “valued” or “needed” after the framework of “noticed, named and known.” The idea is to recognize the value of a young person’s contribution to broader belonging structures, as well as their inherent value and agency — not to engage in mere tokenism.
Surrounding youth with a community of peers and trusted adults who notice, name, know and value them – who are building trusted relationships and nurturing sacred space where young people feel heard and experience belonging – should be at the center of our work, not pushed to the side. What if the goal of youth ministry was to nurture as many opportunities as possible for peers and trusted adults to listen to young people speak their beliefs without judgment? To open the door for moments of spiritual growth over and over?
What if the goal of enlisting adult volunteers is not just to fill quotas and hand out pizza – though that work is surely needed, too – but also to cultivate sacred space to build safe, trusting cross-generational relationships? Relationships where young people feel safe expressing their beliefs, asking deep questions without fear of getting it “wrong,” exploring their purpose and identities – and even making a difference in their neighborhood – alongside a trusted community?
Think less like a program manager or cruise director charged with spitting out the perfect product. Think more like a people connector, a story weaver, a community organizer.
In fact, what if the calling to be companions walking alongside youth isn’t seen as the job of one or two youth workers or Sunday school teachers, or just the work of ministering only to the youth we see in the pews? What if the calling awakens a movement of coaches and aunties and neighbors and teachers and family friends alongside the deep care offered by parents and caregivers, all surrounding our young people with a village, with community?
That vision is why we have been hosting workshops and strategy sessions on belonging, not just with a few staff and volunteers who work with the so-called youth group, but with entire congregations and communities. We are hosting these sessions with everyone who might ever come alongside to accompany youth. The vision is about moving away from dependence on the one charismatic, hip younger leader who can compete with TikTok feeds. We are moving to surround young people with trusted adult and peer relationships across a spectrum of ages, identities and experiences.
What if the goal of youth ministry was to nurture as many opportunities as possible for peers and trusted adults to listen to young people speak their beliefs without judgment? To open the door for moments of spiritual growth over and over?
You don’t have to be cool! In fact, that’s not what young people really need.
As many have emphasized, this work also underscores the importance of accompanying parents and caregivers raising youth. We believe that coming alongside parents and caregivers to help their youth feel heard in their real lives and contexts helps not only the faith formation of youth but their holistic well-being. This belief is why we are experimenting with bringing parents and caregivers together around raising teens toward a horizon of wholeness, including youth and mental health. We are all working together to accompany youth in this political moment, to cultivate positive examples of masculinity and to care for children of immigrants in these times.
This emphasis on hearing youth and listening as spiritual formation does not mean that adults don’t have wisdom to give, safety and rules to uphold, information to teach, faith traditions to pass down, boundaries to set and goals and values to instill in young people. We are not even saying that the sermon itself has no value.
But our continual question is this: Are we nurturing space for young people to respond to, wrestle with and process that sermon and then talk about it with others? And do we believe that young people may even have something to preach?
