The four main Christian churches considered the common problem of young people falling away from the Church at an ecumenical gathering in Drogheda earlier this week. TCD Church of Ireland chaplain, Rev Darren McCallig, said there are three stages in faith development - the institutional, intellectual and mystical. In the institutional stage, children accept a faith because they are told of it by people in authority, like their parents.
During the teenage years, young people move into the ‘intellectual’ phase, where they question everything. Instead, the mystical stage, is where a person moves to a new understanding - an internalised faith.
He told the Greenhills Ecumenical Conference on Monday, that the vast majority of young people get stuck moving from the institutional to the intellectual stage and never make it to the mystical stage.
To illustrate this, he spoke of a seventeen year old boy, who approached him at the end of a class he was giving on Genesis. The young man told him he had given up his faith at age 14 because he could not believe in Adam and Eve.
“You have taught me that I did not need to give up my faith at all,” he told Rev McCallig.
“We are failing as Churches to pass on the basics of biblical understanding,” he said.
Presbyterian minister, Rev Lorraine Kennedy-Richie, who does a lot of work with young children warned against either “pandering to” or “patronising” children, and she said Christian adults had a duty to pass on a Gospel mentality to children who can understand Christian truth at a very early age.
“One day I was asked by a five year old ‘Why did Jesus let them kill him?’"
She went on: “In the world today, suffering is seen as sin. If I don’t teach children that Jesus physically gave up his body, then they will buy into all the other consumeristic stuff. They will believe that everything can be covered up by plastic surgery .”
Fr Ciarán McDermott, said there was a shift in youth culture, from “the experience of authority” to the “authority of experience.”
“If their faith is not lived, if there is not an authentic meeting, an experience, then it doesn’t ring true for them,” said the former Catholic chaplain to UCD.
He praised movements like St Egidio, the Focolare and Taizé, for providing “pockets of hope” in the world of young people.
Former President of the Methodist church, Rev Norman Taggart, said that instead of being the high point, the Eucharist can be a “very low point” and churches needed to address this.
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(Source: CIN)