Doubt and Children's/Youth Ministry

The Easter story – the resurrection of Jesus – is pivotal to the Christian faith. And it could be argued that it is the most difficult concept to believe as well.

Somehow, a man who is an extraordinary teacher of God and even performs miracles and healings is easier to swallow than a man who died and three days later, after being in a sealed tomb, is walking around in a slightly different form. In many cases, those who saw Jesus resurrected didn’t even know it was him. That in itself is strange.

The disciple Thomas struggles with this and doesn’t believe the others who saw Jesus. Until he sees the holes in Jesus’ hands and the gash in His side it is just malarkey to him. So Jesus complies, turning up in a locked room and calling Thomas over to check out the evidence for himself. Thomas immediately worships Jesus after seeing the proof.

For us who may struggle from time to time with various aspects of our faith, we typically don’t have Jesus turning up at our house in the flesh to reassure us. While He may be trying to show us in many ways that He is real, we may miss it. And we can feel guilt or frustration that what we didn’t question before is challenging us now.

It can be easy to despair if we have doubts, and to even panic if our kids and youth do. This is when we need to take a step back and breathe and remember that the God of love is so much bigger than our questions and lapses in security in our faith. We need to maintain perspective that the disciples who spent three years living with Jesus were the very ones to turn and doubt. He still loved them and didn’t give up on them.

Doubt should not be something that scares us, but something that acknowledges that our life in Christ is not stagnant. We will keep moving and growing and changing until we die. Older children and youth are doing the hard work of separating out what they’ve inherited and been taught from their own unique identity and ideas. They will push buttons and ask challenging questions and try on different ways of being because that is the work of their stage of life – clarifying who they are and what they believe.

In considering doubt, try to keep these things in mind:

1. Whether or not your learners adhere to the Apostles’ Creed or other statements of faith is not 100% up to you. Even if it was, in a few years they will be in a different place spiritually anyway, having experienced more of life and learned and grown.

2. Faith and doubt are not opposites. Rather, they work in tandem. You can’t doubt something that you didn’t first believe. Doubt allows us space to wrestle and own our faith rather than blindly following without understanding.

3. Faith journeys include different seasons. For many, doubt is among those, sometimes often. This does not indicate weakness or lesser commitment, but paradoxically perhaps greater commitment because of the desire to know for sure.  

4. How we respond to someone admitting doubts is critical. It may make the difference between their giving up on the faith entirely or finding their way back to more solid ground of belief. We need to mirror the openness, patience and calm that Jesus showed the disciples in offering them peace and listening carefully.

5. What happens with those who never leave their doubts behind and instead leave the faith? We are called to love one another and share Christ’s love with the world. That includes those who don’t think or believe like us. If we love and respect others and their right to disagree and not believe, then we are being like Jesus.

None of us will reach our final place with our faith until we die, and not one person will have gotten everything 100% right in what they believe. The beauty of the faith is in the many, many ways God is made known to us in ways that resonate with us so that we catch on and follow.

“For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now, I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12