The worship services I went to during my teenage years employed a rock band with a full drum kit, a massive gospel choir, and a preacher who literally would sprint from one side of the stage to the other waving a handheld microphone. He shouted. Worshipers shouted–and waved their arms and leapt up out of their seats at intervals. When prompted, dozens streamed down the aisles toward the front to be saved.
Compared to the staid, pipe organ-fueled affair I now bring teenagers to, the church of my youth would seem like heaven. Filled with energy and urgency, interactive, and deeply personal, that church should have hooked my adolescent soul, but it didn’t. All of its spontaneity felt contrived and predictable, and all the emotion felt offensively manipulative.
I wonder how my students experience the hymns and unison prayers of the church of their youth. When I ask them, some say it’s “fine,” others complain that it’s boring. I’m not bothered by the boring complaint, though, because the church is playing a longer spiritual game with them as disciples, one in which excitement is not the most important play and where the stamina to sit through a 15 minute sermon and to recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed is a critical component of a grownup faith.
Studying some of their faces during yesterday’s service, I found myself wondering not only how they are experiencing worship today, as teenagers, but also how this present experience of worship will affect them in their 20’s and in their 30’s. Because it should affect them after today. I want for them to receive something durable here in these readings and litanies, something deeper than the ephemeral emotional charge that did so little for me when I was their age.
I know it’s not an either/or, though.
YoRocko! 
Some things to think about. Thanks
Growing up in the 1950s, and attending a Southern Baptist Church of which my mother was a founding member, I only knew about Girl’s Auxiliary or Youth Association when I became a teenager for younger worshipers. I was expected to sit in the Sunday morning service and act like I was interested, which I did. There was no children’s church, no youth service.
I believe that routine served me well throughout my life. I attended an American Baptist Church for 39 years until the congregation decided that it wanted to be a rock n roll night club instead of a worshipping church. Now my husband and I are members of a small Presbyterian congregation with the choir and the organ and we love every minute of it. The liturgy is so beautiful and brings me to a place of reverent worship that the rock n roll band and the minister in skinny jeans and a mohawk could never do.