Getting Inside a Teen's Brain for Effective Youth Ministry
Youth workers often assume that early adolescent years are a great time to cram teens with a lot of information. But in reality, that's doing kids a giant spiritual disservice, says one noted youth leader.
When a group of youth pastors ran out of topics to discuss at their annual summits, they decided to bring in some experts to introduce them to a different perspective on adolescents. Last year, they invited a theologian. This year, it was a doctor who specializes in adolescent brain development.
Understanding adolescent brain development and adolescent development in general is the second most important thing that any youth worker can do to improve their effectiveness in ministry, said Mark Oestreicher, president of Youth Specialties, in an interview with Kara Powell, executive director Center for Youth and Family Ministry.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
The first is to increase one's own intimacy with God.
Two years leading up to puberty, teens are at a stage when the brain goes into a "wild overproduction mode" of creating new neurons. Two years after puberty, neurons not being used disappear.
To Oestreicher, understanding the brain development of the adolescent has huge implications for his ministry work with junior high school students.
"What this is saying is that the way the brain is utilized in the two years following the onset of puberty is how the brain will be fine tuned for the rest of life," he said.
So rather than cramming in a lot of information, Oestreicher calls youth workers to set teens on a course that would most likely become their future practices. The course includes helping kids develop the ability to think about their faith, to process what it means to have a relationship with God, to help them understand what it means to doubt and to embrace their doubts and to move through them and beyond them.
"If we can help them to start to attune their brains to those things, those will become practices, you might say, brain function that will sustain their faith development for the rest of their life," the Youth Specialties head stated.
Plus, a teen's brain is not done developing until 20 to 25 years old. The prefrontal cortex, which is the decision-making portion of the brain, is one of the last areas of the brain to fully develop. That explains why teens act the way they do, making experimental or a lot of times dumb choices without thinking through the consequences.
When the prefrontal cortex matures, that's when teens can reason better and make better judgments.
Does that mean youth workers and parents should show teens more grace?
Yes and no, said Oestreicher.
"Give grace in that we have affectionate understanding of what's going on that creates some of these bad choices," he said. At the end of the day, consequences are the only way we have that effectively impacts the brain.
After working in middle school ministry for 25 years, Oestreicher just recently learned the significance of getting inside a teen's brain. "If we understand early adolescent development, it has implications into every single thing we do in early adolescent ministry," he highlighted.
