How much are we actually listening to our kids?
Not talking at them. Not projecting our fears onto them. Not assuming that because they sit in a pew—or a youth Sabbath School—that we understand what’s going on inside them.
How much time do we spend studying our kids?
And by studying, I don’t mean monitoring their behavior or tracking attendance. I mean genuinely trying to understand what makes them tick spiritually. What resonates. What repels. What gives them a sense of meaning—or what quietly drains it away.
In our rush to involve young people in church, and in our deep hope that they’ll stay, we often skip the most uncomfortable step: actually asking what they need—and then listening closely enough to hear answers we might not like.
As Hans Gutiérrez of Villa Aurora, the Adventist university in Italy, has pointed out, if we truly study our children, we’ll likely discover something unsettling: we don’t know them as well as we think we do.
That realization isn’t a failure. It’s an invitation.
An invitation to trade assumptions for curiosity. Programs for presence. Control for conversation.
Because kids don’t drift away from faith just because the world is loud. Sometimes they drift because the church never learned how to listen.
And listening—real listening—might be the most radical ministry we have left.
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