Teenagers rarely drift from faith because a program was too dull. More often the adults who carried them in have loosened their own grip, and the teen notices. What helps faith last is a slow, shared life: a few adults who invest in a small group of young people over years, teach them real things, connect those things to their actual days, and stay through the stretches where nothing seems to be working.
That is the case Dr. Natasha Sistrunk Robinson makes. She does leadership development in Christian spiritual formation and runs a nonprofit that mentors small groups of Black girls and young women from middle school through high school. Her answer is quieter than most people want. It asks for less spectacle and much more patience.
Why do teenagers drift in the first place?
The usual story treats teenagers as the problem. They get older, the phone gets louder, and church can’t compete. Robinson starts somewhere else, with a fact about how anyone ends up in a pew at fourteen:
youth don’t take themselves to church. Like somebody takes them to church or someone introduces them to the faith or someone encourages them in the faith. So if the youth are leaving, that means that the adults are also leaving.
That changes the question. If young people come to faith through adults, then a wave of young people leaving tells you something about the adults. Robinson says the trend was once seen mostly in predominantly white and evangelical churches, and that since COVID it has shown up in Black churches as well. That is her summary of research she has followed, not a finding this article can confirm on its own. But her logic does not depend on any one study. A teenager’s faith is borrowed before it is owned. If the lender wanders off, the loan gets called in.
She adds a second diagnosis. Citing the 10 by 10 initiative she partners with, she says the number one reason people give for turning away from Christ is what they perceive to be hypocrisy. Her conclusion is blunt: “you gotta have credible witnesses of the gospel, not just in your local church.” She means adults working in ordinary places, doing their jobs well, whose faith holds up in public.
Outside pressures are real, and Robinson does not pretend otherwise. She talks openly about social media training young people to chase quick rewards. Teenagers from steady, faithful homes sometimes walk away too, so adult behavior cannot explain every case of drift. What her argument does explain is the part adults can actually change. If the problem includes adults who have drifted or whose lives don’t match their words, then a bigger event leaves that problem exactly where it was.
What is wrong with the event-and-program approach?
Nothing is wrong with a good retreat. The trouble comes when the event becomes the whole strategy. Robinson names a habit she sees in how the Western church tends to reach people: “we always wanna create things for them to come to us.” The church builds a thing, advertises it, and waits.
Her own ministry runs the other way. Of her nonprofit she says, “We don’t have an events driven ministry.” She borrows Eugene Peterson’s phrase about a long obedience in the same direction to describe the alternative. Students start in sixth grade, and many come back every year. As she puts it, “if they come in sixth grade and they stay to 12th grade, that’s a seven year investment, which is not a small thing.”
She also pushes back on the way churches measure success. She recalls a seminary professor warning that not everything that grows is healthy. Size and speed, in her view, are poor tests of whether discipleship is happening. The better question is whether roots are going down. She reaches for the picture Jesus gives in John 15, of branches abiding in the vine and bearing fruit that lasts. An attendance count can tell you how many came. It cannot tell you whether anyone is abiding.
The event reflex also hides a quieter assumption: that someone else will do the real work. Robinson describes believers who are “waiting to send them to your podcast or to send them to their pastor or whatever.” An event lets ordinary adults stay spectators. A shared life does not.
What does Scripture actually show about how faith spreads?
Robinson points to the first disciples. In John 1, Andrew goes and finds his brother Simon, and Philip goes and finds Nathanael. In John 4, the Samaritan woman goes back into her town and says, “Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?” (John 4:29). Nobody in these scenes was recruited by an announcement. Each heard about Jesus from someone they already knew.
Her summary: “the entry point is normally just because of relationships we have with people. So we start there.”
Read honestly, these are narratives. They describe how people came to Jesus; they do not issue a command that every ministry must look a certain way. What they show is a pattern, and Robinson treats it as a model worth following rather than a rule. That is a fair use of the text, as long as we keep it at the level of wisdom.
The same goes for the shape of Jesus’s own ministry. Mark records that “he ordained twelve, that they should be with him, and that he might send them forth to preach” (Mark 3:14). Before the sending came the being with. Robinson’s nonprofit says it follows that model directly: “we invest in small groups of people over long periods of time.” Jesus taught crowds too, so this is not a case against large gatherings. It is a reminder that the people he trusted to carry the work were the ones who had shared his days.
None of this makes Robinson anti-church. She says she loves the local church, has always been a member of one, and cites the call in Hebrews not to forsake “the assembling of ourselves together” (Hebrews 10:25). Her argument is about where the weight sits. The gathering matters. The relationships carry it.
Does a slow, shared life mean going light on content?
No, and this is where her approach gets more demanding than it first sounds. Robinson wrote a six-week Bible study on the Nicene Creed for young people. Her reason is simple. Some questions Christians can disagree about. “We cannot be disagreeing about who Jesus is.”
Lisa Fields, founder of Jude 3 Project, argues that teenagers are often better placed to learn doctrine than adults, because they are already in school working through hard subjects. “Older people sometimes haven’t picked up a book since they graduated,” she says. Robinson agrees.
But the slow life shows up even in how the content is taught. Robinson’s group stretches that six-week study across a school year: “a six week study, we would go through that over a nine month period.” Students in a seven-year program go through it twice. “We’re thinking about mastery,” she says, and she ties repetition to remembering, a discipline she says the church learns in Exodus. A one-weekend event can introduce an idea. It cannot give a fourteen-year-old the second and third pass that turns an idea into a conviction.
Then she draws the line that keeps content from becoming a lecture: “if we don’t connect the dots for people, that’s the difference between a Bible study and discipleship.” Discipleship asks the so-what. What does the Trinity, or a passage about emotions, have to do with this student’s team, school, or friendships? Those dots get connected over time, in conversation, by people who know the student’s actual life. That is hard to do with strangers.
Slow does not mean grim. Robinson tells new students to learn the nonprofit’s creed by December and suggests they turn it into a jingle, since they already memorize song lyrics. Her reasoning is specific. Young people get a hit of dopamine on social media “for doing nonsense and wasting time,” so shared time at church should be something students actually want. She argues that “they need to get an immediate reward of some kind when they’re taking initiative to do something positive.” Her complaint is that adults spend too much energy on what kids get wrong and too little celebrating what they get right. That kind of encouragement only works inside a long relationship, where the same adults are there to notice next week.
Who is supposed to do this work?
Ordinary adults, and they have to go first. Robinson made short videos to go with her creed study because adults without seminary training get intimidated by unfamiliar words. “Nobody wants to feel incompetent or like they’re failing at something,” she says. Her prescription is that “the adults need to go through the study first for themselves” before using it with young people. An adult who has never wrestled with the material has little to hand on except the handout.
She says the same about mentoring in general. She cites research that people don’t mentor “because they don’t feel confident they can do it,” and her response is training rather than lowering the bar.
Over time, she says, the students become teachers too. Her group leans on peer-to-peer mentoring, where students share how a passage is showing up in their lives. “So it’s not just the expert in the room. Like they all become teachers.” She echoes Hebrews 5, which rebukes believers who should be teachers but still need milk. That is the payoff of a long, shared life. The faith stops living only in the adults.
Parents belong in this picture, not outside it. Lisa Fields points to a crisis in parenting that educators keep describing, and says that where involvement is missing, “mentorship kind of comes and fills in a little bit of the gap.” She is equally clear that “You can’t replace a parent.” Robinson, a parent herself, sets the same limit: “We’re not trying to replace parents,” and “we certainly don’t undermine parents.” She is also honest that unhealed hurt in adults gets taken out on kids or projected onto them. That ties back to the first diagnosis. A mentor can help a teenager, but cannot carry what the adults at home refuse to face.
Her wider picture is the village. She cites the African proverb that it takes a village to raise a child, and describes the posture behind it: “I want for other people’s children, what I want for my child”. She says that kind of communal care used to be common in Black families and wants to see it recovered. The shared life, at its widest, is many adults treating other people’s kids as their own.
What if you do all this and the teen still walks away?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a straight answer. No approach guarantees that a teenager’s faith will last. Robinson does not claim otherwise. Her own most hopeful story is about a former student, now in college, who had just rededicated her life to the Lord and wrote to thank the program for the years they spent together. That story cuts both ways. It suggests the drift happened even inside a seven-year, relationship-heavy program. And it suggests that what was planted did not disappear.
Robinson’s response is not a promise. It is a description of what she has seen: “the Lord keeps encouraging us that the children come back.” She also says many people labor far longer and never see any fruit, and that doesn’t mean God isn’t in it. “Sometimes the Lord’s just looking for you to be faithful in that thing, period.”
That is the deepest difference between her approach and the event reflex. Events produce numbers you can count on a Sunday night. A shared life produces nothing that tidy. The adults who choose it have to judge their work by whether they kept showing up for the same young people, year after year, and leave the outcome with the Holy Spirit, whom Robinson calls the able teacher. Some of what they plant may only come up after the teenager has left their care.