"The risks facing contemporary teenagers bear solemn testimony to the church's ineffectiveness at addressing adolescence. Youth look to the church to show them something -- Someone -- capable of turning their lives inside out and the world upside down. Most of the time we have offered them pizza." - Kenda Creasy Dean, in The Godbearing Life: The Art of Soul Tending for Youth Ministry
I have not read Dean's book, so I cannot speak to the totality of its teaching. However, this quote hits the nail on the head. We as "the church" have spent too much time making folks comfortable with their faith instead of shaking their lives apart and showing how Jesus can rearrange the broken pieces and make a life of significance out of it. Have we created a hunger and thirst for righteousness? Or have we only created a place of comfort, entertainment and complacency?
