What do teenagers respond to in their youth pastors or other church leaders?
I was talking to a 19-year-old here on campus yesterday (I’ll call him Nick) who said, “It doesn’t matter the style of worship, it doesn’t matter the size of the church. What matters is whether the pastor seems authentic.” He said he goes to a church where the pastor hangs around after worship to talk to people, and he is the same person in the pulpit as he is in conversation. That mattered to Nick. He sees this pastor as a real leader, as somebody he respects. I don’t think Nick is going through his life right now saying, “I want to be like that guy.” But Nick has decided that he wants to be authentic. What Nick’s pastor may not know is that by not not creating distance between himself and young people, he is modeling a way of being in the world that young people like Nick are taking to heart. When Nick starts thinking about what he values in Christians and who he wants to be as a Christian, he is going to remember that pastor. Not every teenager has parents who can model this, so the
