The BIG Problem with Youth Groups

there's a problem, right guys? So, the latest, don't say anything, I don't like answers to questions.

The latest study from Lifeway, which was back in January of 2019, shows that 66 % of young people stop going to church right around college age.

This mirrors a previous study in 2007 that showed 70 % walking away from the faith during college age, college years, with only 35 % returning later in adulthood.

That's bad. These numbers vary study to study, but they've held strong around that 70 % mark.

I remember one study in particular being as high as 90%. That's an outlier.

Children walking away from their faith, even those active in youth groups by the time they reach college age.

And some of the top reasons listed for why they leave are intellectual doubt and skepticism, perceived hypocrisy amongst the body, or they never really owned their faith.

Well, all of these issues are apologetics related. Now, imagine you're driving down the road and you got your kids in the car with you and your

GPS tells you that there's a major pothole up ahead and you're going to hit it. What do you do?

Do you just crank up the music and play a bunch of games and hope for the best? Or do you prepare so that when you hit that pothole, you do not incur damage?

Logan, you've been talking about this for years at this ministry, so I'll start with you. A lot of youth groups today are simply not preparing their students for the time that they will hit that spiritual pothole, which is when they experience doubts, which can creep in even as early as junior high.

In your opinion, how are a lot of youth groups improperly preparing its young people?

So let me start with maybe what the worst case scenario is that I've seen. So in some youth groups, there tends to be a focus of we just need to make sure that they stay in the pew, right?

So, and this is sometimes the case with things like, so for example, someone

I know who was involved with his local church's church camp had talked about the point of the camp is to get them in the pew because they have to come to church with us on Wednesday night.

That's the point of the camp. And a lot of the problems with that approach is that once you start thinking in terms of we just have to keep them here, you start thinking, okay, we got to keep them here.

What do kids like to do? Well, kids like to have fun. And so you start planning more fun things, pizza parties, amusement park trips, movie nights.

And when that becomes your sole focus and you're kind of training kids to think about, well, I mean, church youth group is where I went to have fun.

And what happens is if we try and set them up as, well, church is a place you have fun.

Guess what? In the short term, the world does fun a lot better. And so we have a lack of actually training kids.

Now, when we do train them, a lot of times it's not with a lot of strategic thought.

So for example, in some Barna research that was published in 2016, the biggest parts of youth group ministry that they cite are youth mission trips, overnight retreats, week -long camps, and family mission trips.

And then for a smaller percentage, large youth events such as conferences. But a lot of those are not really focused on training.

And they're not focused on repeated efforts. So youth mission trips, that's probably a once a year thing.

How much contact time are you really getting with overnight retreats? And I don't know about you guys, but my experience as a kid with week -long camps is they aren't actually focused towards the challenges you're going to encounter when you get to college.

You've either got Bible studies, which are good, right? It's a good thing to know the word, but they're not focused on actual challenges that you'll face once you get to college or once you're out in the workplace.

It's more get to know your Bible, accept on our word that it's true, and then here's some other cool stuff and relationship building stuff while you're at it.

So from my perspective, we're making kind of two mistakes with a lot of our youth ministries.

One is that we're focusing on fun rather than training. And when you look at the data, kids really do have these serious doubts early on.

A lot of times it starts in middle school is the most common place for it to start. And they have serious intellectual doubts and we're responding to that with fun and pizza and games.

And that's not actually what they're looking for. And then the second problem is when we do have the right mindset as far as, okay, we need to train them, we're often not training them in the serious stuff that they're going to encounter out in the world.

And what we need to do is to be training them to encounter these things and exposing them to other and difficult ideas while we still have enough access to them to train them on how to respond to it appropriately.

Yeah. Great, great points. I'm trying to think back to my experience with youth group. The problem is

I've always been 40. So that's number one. I think the problem with keeping young people,

I'll say a few words, Jean, and then toss it to you. But I think the problem with keeping young people entertained is with all the things that you mentioned,

Logan, is that it trades on heightened personal experience. I mean, we keep talking about this on the podcast lately, because this is one of the active dangers in the church right now, elevating feelings and personal experiences and making it primary to the

Christian life. So we take a youth group night, which lasts about an hour or two, and we fill half of that time, 50 % with games and icebreakers and activities.

And then when that's done, we take that last 50 % chunk and we fill about half of that with worship. And then that little chunk left over is given to teaching.

And even then, those teachings aren't necessarily great. They're devotionals designed to be primarily relevant, but don't provide solid theology, kind of like what you were saying,

Logan, apologetic training. So when we do church like that with our youth, and by the way, and also in our pulpits on Sunday morning with the adults, everything gets filtered through feelings and personal experience.

Our theology shrinks down because it's filtered through that. And so do our Bible studies, our worship, church doctrine, theological truth.

All of it becomes diminished because it's filtered through feeling. It's like we're giving people church a cola.

It's a really strong soda that they drink, and then they get a high from the sugar. And then we try to keep giving them that high for the rest of their lives.

The problem is that's not going to last. Eventually they're going to come down or they're going to find another source that outdoes the church entertainment or that outdoes the church sugar rush.

And what happens next? Bible, relationship with Christ, doctrine, theology, all of that can't hold up when the feelings get lost.

Gene, what do you think about all of this from your vantage point? Well, I would kind of agree with everything you guys are saying.

I think that when your church youth group is more synonymous with fun than with worship or with doctrine, then you've lost your church youth group.

What you have is a youth entertainment service, and you are there for their entertainment, and they know you are, so they continue coming back.

But then just like Logan said, when they go off to college, hey, look at that. There's something more fun, more entertaining, all these other things

I can do, and I don't have to spend time being told what the

Bible says about this or this or this thing I'm doing. So that's the first thing.

I think the emphasis needs to be on teaching and not on the fun. I'm not saying that the fun can't be there.

I think there is benefit to getting the kids together outside of church services and doing events together, creating those relationships.

Especially my church is an example. We pull from four, five, six different communities and school corporations in Boone County, in Indiana, Hamilton County, nearby, everywhere.

These kids don't know each other outside of church. So if we don't provide the time for them to get to know each other, then the bonds aren't going to start.

So there has to be something there to build relationships, and that can be the time outside of church services.

But there needs to be time too where you emphasize more heavily the teaching aspect of it or the worship aspect of it.

I think there are things we can do in those times where we have them outside of church where we can make it interesting, provoke their minds to think about things.

You know, if one of the highest things or the highest thing is intellectual doubt, we'll have a get together, have a youth group study where you encourage them to bring their doubts and maybe write them down on a piece of paper and you just read them and address those things at the youth group.

And you're going to find people who have the same doubts. You're going to be able to address them, and you're going to let them know that not only are you willing to answer them, but you are someone that they can go to for answers or for at least entertaining the question.

Because that's another thing that I would say is that so many times the complaints I hear about people who fall away from the church or stop attending was that they were always just told to trust what the

Bible says without any explanation of why it deserves our trust. Why is it that we believe it's the word of God?

If we can't tell our young people that, then they're not going to think that we have a good reason to believe it in the first place.

And that's one thing that, you know, I don't know necessarily that in generations past, it was taken for granted as much as that is, you know, just believe and you'll be fine.

But I think young people today are more inquisitive than ever. They are more empowered than ever by the internet and social media to be able to search out the answers to their questions.

So we have to, number one, let them know that we are a place and a person that they can go to with their questions and their doubts and not get shot down and not just say, oh, well, that's silly or, oh, you should just trust or just believe, but have actual real concrete answers and let them know that it's okay to have those questions.

So we have to be willing to have that open door and really just let them know that we're there for them to answer any of those questions.

And I think that you can still have the relationship building aspect that we, a lot of times we think that some of these more fun things are doing.

I think the thing is, what is the basis of the relationship and the relationship building?

Because if that's fun over here, but then we also need to do the serious stuff back over here, that division is not going to go well.

So one example that I'm thinking of, so I, one summer when I was in college, I was a preacher intern at a church and part of what the shepherds there wanted me to do was to work with the young people.

I wasn't officially the youth pastor intern or anything like that, but I did some stuff with the young people.

We did a lot of, we went out to Dairy Queen after church or to Applebee's and that sort of thing.

But something else that we also did is we got together for a singing and prayer night and I had everyone write down a personal prayer request that had to do with your personal walk with Christ.

So it was something that was like a specific sin they were struggling with, a specific doubt, something like that.

And they were all anonymous. So we all wrote these on little slips of paper, put them in a top hat, and then we all went around praying for somebody else's prayer request, but we didn't know who in the group it was.

And this only, this doesn't work if you have a group of five people, because then people start guessing, who was it?

But this is a group of about 20 kids. And it really struck me, and I hope that it was impactful for them too, this was kind of the point, there were a lot of duplicates in there.

So there were a lot of duplicates of kids who were struggling with pornography, kids who may be struggling with addictions, and there were a lot of duplicates in there.

And that is an example of the sort of thing where you can see, hey, here's, we're discussing things that are needs of ours.

And it's not just, we're sitting around having pizza, talking about the latest movie. Yeah. Our man

ET saying, he's made deeper connections with the teens in his youth group during conversations and small groups, then playing dodgeball.

I agree. You take an event like Rethink, which is coming up again in Southern California, I think, what month is this?

Next month. They'll have entertainment, they'll have games, but in, say, an hour and a half, the entertainment lasts maybe five, maybe 10 minutes.

The rest of the time is dedicated to solid training resources, the giving of information that will benefit kids.

And I don't know, it's counterintuitive, because I think the original calculus that you were mentioning at the beginning,

Logan, with a lot of youth leaders is, well, they begin with the question, how can

I connect with kids? And then they land on fun. Actually, you can connect with kids by simply just talking to them and identifying with the questions that they have about themselves and about the world, especially when they get to teenage years.

Teenagers have all the questions, and they're asking really good questions, by the way. Questions like, who do

I want to be? Who should I love? What career should

I take? Basically, how should I fashion my life? And some are even thinking about death.

Some have lost their friends and they're thinking about those are all really great questions. And I think if we connect with them on that level, it builds credibility.

I mean, this is one of the things that we keep talking about here. Credibility is key. It's the first obstacle to overcome in the order of persuasion.

And you all know this because we've all done this. When somebody just comes up to you, especially a stranger, and they start talking to you, the first thing that comes into your mind is, who are you?

That's the question that must be answered before I even listen any further. And credibility must be maintained over time.

The moment you lose credibility is the moment that a questioning teen comes to a leader and they have a question, and the leader goes, don't ask those kinds of questions.

It's really about faith. They elevate faith. They think they're being really good followers of Jesus Christ, and they're being pious.

They're ruining their credibility because that immediately sends off a message to the teen, this person doesn't know what they're talking about.

So one story that I want to share real quick, when I think about what established credibility when

I was a teenager with someone I didn't know, when I was around 15 or so, maybe 16, and I was at a youth lectureship that was at another church that was near -ish, like it was within an hour and a half or something.

And this preacher I didn't know, I'd heard of him, but I didn't really know him. But something that he said really stuck out to me,

I'll never forget it. He said, he was talking about this type of thing to a bunch of teenagers.

And he said, I think it's insulting to you guys that some people think that you'll only care if you have pizza and fun.

He might've not said pizza. I don't know why I keep coming back to pizza. But that instantly made a connection with me because I mean, at 15, 16 years old, how many people are taking 15 year olds seriously?

And so the fact that he was like, no, I think that this is important stuff. And I think that you guys are,

I think that is enough for me to expect you guys to engage with it. That immediately struck a chord with me.

And I think if we had more people saying that, then we'd have more kids asking questions and connecting with the church.

So we already kind of slipped into the solutions to these kinds of problems.

I think we identified it. We're emphasizing entertainment. We're elevating feelings and experiences.

The solution, I think, is developing real relationship around where the kids are at.

But also there is a place for apologetics. Gene, firefighters, police officers, other first responders, they continually run through drills, drills, drills, role plays so that their people will be best prepared when a real situation comes down the pike.

Is that the missing ingredient with our young people? What do you think?

I don't know if it's the missing ingredient, but it is a heavy portion of the ingredients that are missing.

I think that practice sessions or challenging students with tough questions back at them is something that's missing.

We want to try and be very careful not to offend, not to scare them away.

But in doing so, handling them with kid gloves, they are getting soft and going towards the easier things, going gravitated towards the fun and the entertainment stuff.

Part of that is their kids, they're going to gravitate towards the fun things. But if we can challenge them in a meaningful way, they're going to remember that.

And if we can back that up with a relationship and let them know, yeah, hey, I'm challenging you, but it's not because I want to embarrass you.

It's because I want to prepare you. Then that relationship will deepen and they will look at us as someone who is a mentor, someone they can go to for in difficult times.

It's interesting you brought up the firefighter example. I was just thinking, just crossed my mind, we treat sports more seriously than we treat youth groups sometimes.

If we truly have a balance 50 -50 of teaching or worship or doctrine or whatever, and then all the fun or fun first and then doctrine, we don't do that for sports and practices.

Practices, 90 % of the time is running through drills, going through scenarios, in -game examples, asking them, where are you supposed to be?

What's your assignment if this happens? Going through the drills, it's not until the end, if they've done well, where we actually let them maybe have fun and do some competitive drills or something.

It's just interesting. We take something like sports a little more seriously and are more direct and to the point when it comes to that.

I think we need to let a little bit of that rub off to our youth camps and our youth study groups and get into more of the real world application for a lot of these things and prepare them for the game of life, just as you would prepare your baseball player, your soccer player, whatever, for the game next week.

Prepare them and do it with purpose. ISKRA Well, and here's a metaphor that's biblical. This is war. So, is this what we're doing with our soldiers?

Training them up by starting off with pizza parties and movies and shooting t -shirts at them with a potato gun,

Logan? LOGAN Yeah, it's not. I really like what you said,

Gene, about that we need to be taking things more seriously. I think also something that comes to my mind, all the the remedies that we're talking about are things that we need to do better.

It makes me think about, are we doing that at home with our kids before they ever get old enough for youth group two?

I mean, so we talk sometimes, we not meaning like the three of us, but like we as Western culture sometimes talk about that the best teacher in the world can't be a parent in the classroom, that can't take, fill the shoes of a parent.

I think there might be some of that here as well. You can have a really great and focused youth pastor, but if the kids at home are not getting fed the word, if they have

Christian parents who are not passionate, who just church is another thing that they do once or twice a week.

ISKRA This is where the hypocrisy stuff comes in. Right. And so there's only, I mean, a youth, a good youth minister is going to be really, really valuable, but it also just makes me think, man, we need to be encouraging parents to be taking these same approaches with their kids too.

That's true. I mean, parenting is discipleship at the end of the day. So, you know, it starts at home and when they come into the building on Wednesday or whatever youth group is, it has to keep to the same theme.

I think it's, for those probably who might be listening right now or watching, especially who are in youth leadership, there might,

I'm anticipating some pushback where, you know, people might be thinking, well, you don't know cause you're not, you know, you're not a, you haven't dealt with youth leader, you haven't dealt with youth groups and you haven't been a youth leader or a youth pastor.

That's not true, first of all. And second of all, well, on both counts, that's not true.

So the thing is, we all collectively have experience with youth groups.

I am a former public high school teacher and deal directly with teenagers, have dealt with them in the classroom. I even travel around and speak at youth groups.

We know what we're talking about. If you go ask the typical person in a youth group and you get them to open up, they're going to tell you that this is what we're talking about right now.

This is what they desire. They do not desire pizza party after pizza party, all this vapid stuff that we think is really working with them.

They know it's not working. They have their thoughts, their questions and their desires, and they want to figure this stuff out, especially right around junior high, high school age.

They desire this. So just give them what they want. There might be a question too.

So I'll throw it to you guys. What do you like, let's say you're a youth pastor who has started off kind of on the wrong foot, you know, pizza parties, all this stuff, icebreakers, activities, like 10 minutes of Devo.

And then, you know, you call it a night, but now you're, you're rethinking this whole thing. And now you want to give proper training.

How do you flip that? Is that an easy transition guys or, or, you know, you cold Turkey or is it you ease the kids into it?

What do you guys think? Well, this would be an area where I have no experience making a switch like that.

I think cold Turkey, you're going to lose kids. Maybe even a, a, a slow progression.

You're going to lose kids too. Maybe part of the way to do it is start to work in questions of the kids that may highlight their lack of knowledge of, of certain items, ask them who

Jesus is. And if they stumble over the answer that is, that should be convicting for you to have not taught them the answer to such a simple question.

But it will be convicting for them too. And then questions like that can pivot onto you kind of introducing to them,

Hey, we like getting together and eating pizza and hanging out together. And that's fine. And we're still going to do some of that, but we're going to work in more teaching.

We're going to work in more direct questions to you guys. We're going to work in more opportunities for you to ask me direct things that are bothering you.

And once they see that, yeah, they're lacking in some areas, they may be encouraged to, to continue on that new direction with you.

But, but you're going to lose some kids. I mean Nate, you said they, they don't want the pizza and they don't want, well, they do want it.

But they, but that's not what they need. And, you know, kids don't necessarily like being told what they need, especially high school, middle school kids.

So we have to be able to present it in a way where they're going to understand by their own conviction that what they've been doing so far isn't working.

And if they want to get this right, if they care about it, they're going to have to make a change and you can kind of lead them that way.

That would be my, my two cents. So here's what

I think I would do. So this is assuming a certain structure, what I'm about to, to say, but so Nate, you talked about how a lot of times you've got like, say a half hour fun, maybe 15 minutes of worship, maybe like a five, 10 minute

Devo. Right. So I would not necessarily say you need to leap bounding out of that structure right away, but so something that I might consider doing is during that Devo period, do a

Devo about people in the Bible with depression. By the way, folks, Devo is

Christianese for devotional period. Go ahead. So I would do a

Devo on people in the Bible with depression, focusing probably, especially on Elijah following Mount Carmel, but also and use a few other examples as well.

And then kind of conclude that by saying God's people in the Bible have asked very serious questions and have been very seriously troubled by things.

And then just ask people to put what their number one serious concern or serious doubt about Christianity is.

And to just do, submit those anonymously. And then I, as the youth leader could look and see, okay, here's what

I'm dealing with and use that to, as for the topics that you address, to make sure that when you do have just built in those devotionals or these different ideas, you can say, okay, here's something that's a problem.

I'm going to address it. And I think from there, you with the activities that you have, find ways to work those in.

So maybe you still have pizza, but over dinner, you have a spiritual discussion, right?

And like those things are going to be awkward and not a super easy transition there.

But I think that that is one way to start saying, okay, given my current structure, when we do have these spiritual things, how can

I make this more serious and more applicable? I like Logan's strategy there.

And I think I see a commonality with what Gene said a moment ago. Although you guys are being way too nice.

You can press a hard reset. If the kids trust you, you can press a hard reset and say, we're moving in a different direction.

But it has to be handled in a certain fashion. And one of the things that I think really helps that transition process along, or for me, what

I'm saying is a hard reset, is if you really rely on them for feedback, just open it up to the floor, do a town hall, get them talking.

They love talking about themselves anyway. And you do what Logan just suggested a second ago, get them to open up.

I mentioned cognitive dissonance in the effective nature of cognitive dissonance, because it forces folks to reflect and reevaluate their beliefs and their desires.

Well, in the same way that cognitive dissonance is key to talking to nonbelievers in our communication,

I think the same thing is key to communicating with our young people in church. I've spoken to youth groups in the past.

Whenever I can, I begin with a survey, because I want to know who

I'm dealing with. And the survey is a series of questions that's designed to figure out where these kids are.

So I'll ask questions like, what's your favorite movie? Who's your favorite celebrity? What do you like to do in your spare time?

Stuff like that. Notice what I'm doing is I'm doing what Augustine suggested.

So Augustine once said a long time ago that if you're trying to figure out whether someone is good or bad, ask them what they love, not what they believe.

Ask them what they love. And so that's what my surveys are for. So I know who I'm dealing with.

I'm asking what these kids love. I've done this for years. And it's always the case that what the survey reveals is that the culture has greatly influenced our youth.

They love what the culture tells them to love. It's not like the questions that these young people are asking is bad.

Like I said a moment ago, I think young people are asking good questions. The problem is the culture has given them the wrong answers.

They've given them insufficient answers, spiritually dangerous answers. And so the goal is to get the kids to articulate these things that they feel deep down.

And in doing so, get them engaged with our message. What I'm describing now is a connecting point that acts as a bridge so that you can press a hard reset.

If you are someone that has established a certain format or a template of youth group in the past, it's easier than I think you think it is.

I think another issue is that a lot of kids, a lot of youth group think that their lives are disconnected from church, from the

Bible and from God. So church and youth group, that's on this one day a week. And then

I go back and do my own stuff. I'm trying to pursue my own desires, the things I'm working on. These are not separate things though.

All of the pursuits and desires that young people have, they find their fulfillment in Christ. I think

I was talking about this previously, but we don't have to... See, the thing is, once we get to the apologetics, there's not very many different ways to teach the minimal facts of the resurrection.

There's not a lot of different and unique ways to talk about the evidences for the reliability of the scriptures or the existence of God or whatever.

But it's that getting them to buy in part, that's key. And you can take the long way around.

You can ask them directly, what is God showing you in your life right now? And that may or may not work.

Well, you can take the long way around and try to connect with kids where their desires are at.

What do you think is the meaning of life? Why are you even here? What do you want to do? What kind of person do you want to become? Because all those questions and more like them all end up finding their fulfillment in Christ.

So now I forget my original point. Is it in track of this, guys?

Yes. Yes, sir. Another thing that we can do is what friends of ours have suggested.

They call it inoculation. Bring somebody in, whether they're real or not, that are skeptics, atheists, whatever, and let them actually sit down in a safe environment where their youth pastor is around, where they can feel free to ask questions that they have been thinking about as a youth group to somebody who can answer those questions.

It's another thing that immediately gets kids engaged because these kids have questions, right, guys?

That's right. Yeah. Absolutely. They're in the questioning stage of life. I mean, the first stage of questioning things in life is why, why, why, when they're four and five and six years old.

But now they're getting to the fun questions that you can actually have conversations with them about. So take advantage of it.

Yeah. And not until four, dude. I mean, what kind of kids do you have? Gentlemen, we have a few minutes left.

Any books? So I just wanted to end with a little suggestion. Any books that our viewers or listeners would benefit from reading that would kind of help along these lines that you think?

So I really like Ashamed of the Gospel by John MacArthur, and it's not youth group specific, but it kind of talks about how, kind of a similar idea, how churches have let a desire for things to be nice and showy, to kind of crowd out the core gospel.

So I think that's one that I would recommend. It's kind of more about church structures a whole bit, but it's really good.

And then I think also one that jumps out at me is The Story of Reality by Greg Cockel.

And that one specifically because I think it's a good example of how you can return, because I think part of what we want to do in our more teaching and theology specific sessions with kids is we want them to get not just piecemeal, you know, they know, know in the art, they know creation, they know the gospels, but like the core themes of what the

Bible story is. And I think getting a good handle on that can help you return to the same themes with repetition,

I think is really helpful within a good youth group structure. So what

I'm going to suggest is not a book, it's a video series. This is one that I use with my classes.

It's called True You, and it's just how it's spelled, true, and then the letter you.

You can go to the website trueyou .org. It is a focus on the family product. They have a series of videos on does

God exist? Is the Bible reliable? And who is Jesus? I think those three very overarching topics address three of the primary ways in which our culture is attacking

Christianity. They question if God exists, and the primary way they do that is through science, and they'll say science trumps religion.

The first video series on does God exist really tackles a lot of the scientific evidence for God, does all of the arguments for the existence of God.

You've got the, pardon me, the, oh man, I'm spacing right now.

The moral argument, the cosmological argument, all of the five or six traditional arguments for the existence of God are covered in that video series.

The second one is the Bible reliable. This is another way culture attacks Christianity. It says the

Bible is just made up. It was written hundreds of years after the fact. This series goes into both

Old and New Testament, looks at the historical evidence that we have, discussing the exact same events that the

Bible is covering, and then lines them up and says, okay, do these things match or do they not? And kind of gives us more faith, gives us more trust that the

Bible is the word of God. And then the third one, who is Jesus? I actually haven't gone through this one yet, but it talks about, just answers the question, who is

Jesus? And that's the other thing that cultures attack. And they say, Jesus is just a teacher.

He was just a wise man, maybe a prophet or something, but definitely not the Messiah. And he definitely didn't die and resurrect for your sins.

And so this would answer the question of who he is. So I would really highly suggest that video series.

It's a good series to go through. They're like 30 or 40 minutes long each, and you can pause them as you want and talk and discuss with your groups, but it's really good for kind of middle school, high school age kids.

Yeah. I've heard good things about True You. I haven't had a chance to take a look at it. A pastor friend of mine in Anaheim says a lot of great stuff about True You and that organization there.

Yeah. It's led by Stephen Meyer. He leads the first two at least. I don't know if he does the third one.

Yep. Well, I have a couple of book recommendations. I have four in no particular order.

A Practical Guide to Culture by John Stone Street and Brett Kunkel. By the way, these are not books that are meant to be read by the kids.

These are books that are meant to be read by the leaders who are influencing kids. Leaders slash parents.

I mean, Logan makes a great point. We're talking about youth group in church right now. This conversation could totally be put into the of parenting children at home and discipling them.

A Practical Guide to Culture is a really great book. So the Next Generation Will Know by J. Warner Wallace and Sean McDowell.

And if you're curious, if you've not read these books, they've got really... They pack a bunch of value onto every single page.

If you're still curious about the book and what's in it, we interviewed J. Warner Wallace a while back. Just look at it in the archives.

Those are really great books and they're going to give you tips as youth pastors and leaders about how to do the things that we've been discussing.

Cultural Apologetics by Paul Gould. I'm going to recommend that book regardless of the context all year because that is the most important book that has come out for these very reasons.

And Our Deepest Desires by Greg Gansel. I'll go ahead and say that too. Again, those last two books, Cultural Apologetics, Our Deepest Desires, they're going to give you an approach that is perhaps not typical that we see in apologetic circles, but they're really designed to get at the loves and the desires that I was talking about in the monologue.

And unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on who you are, emotions have more weight in decision -making than does the intellect.

And so it stands to reason that we hit the emotional aspect of people by meeting them where they're at there.

And Cultural Apologetics and Our Deepest Desires will do that. It'll provide you opportunities to open up conversations in a valuable way.

And so hopefully all these books will tremendously bless you. And I really hope that this episode blesses you.

And if you are someone who is a youth leader, or you're thinking about being a youth leader or youth pastor, and you have any further questions, feel free to reach out to us.

We'll end right here and we'll say bye for now, everybody.