She knew all the right answers.
That’s the part that trips her parents. She could fill in every blank on the youth group worksheet. Recite the verses. Explain the gospel in four spiritual laws and diagram the Roman Road without breaking a sweat. By any measurable standard, she was discipled.
And when life got hard, none of it held.
You might know her. She might be in your youth group right now, acing the Bible trivia while something slowly disconnects behind her eyes. Or she already left, and you’re replaying every conversation wondering what you missed. She might be your daughter. Your student. The kid you’ve been pouring into for years who told you last week she’s “not sure she believes anymore.”
The content wasn’t wrong. And most of the people teaching it were doing their absolute best with what they knew. But the container (the way faith was being formed) might be where we need to look harder.
Because somewhere along the way, she absorbed a whole lot of information about God without ever learning how to wrestle with Him. And there’s a massive difference between knowing the answers and knowing what to do when the answers stop working.
If you’re a parent, a youth leader, a small group facilitator, or anyone who’s ever tried to pass faith to the next generation, I need you to know this: the problem might not be what you’re teaching. It might be how faith is being formed.
When the Worksheet Fails
Something I’ve been turning over lately:
The fill-in-the-blank model of discipleship works great for transferring information. It’s measurable. It’s scalable. You can track progress, check boxes, move through the curriculum at a reasonable pace. Everyone finishes the study at the same time.
But formation isn’t information transfer.
And the young people in your life aren’t learning machines who need the right data uploaded. They’re souls in the process of becoming. Souls who are going to face crises you can’t predict, questions the curriculum doesn’t cover, pain that won’t fit neatly into a discussion guide.
I’m not speaking hypothetically here. I’m sharing this because I know what it feels like to have a foundation you never built on.
My mother gave me something precious: an early Christian upbringing, knowledge of God and Jesus and the Bible. The whole infrastructure was there. Sunday school. Youth group. Stories before bed. I knew the content. Could play the part when I needed to. But I wasn’t connected to any of it. The faith I inherited stayed in my head and never dropped into my heart.
And when life put weight on it (the kind of weight that comes from rejection, confusion, crisis, watching everyone else seem to succeed while you’re stuck praying the same prayer for years), I got angry. I drifted. I started building my own spiritual system because the one I’d been handed felt hollow.
Not because the groundwork was bad. But because I’d never built on it. I’d learned about it without living in it.
The Thing No One Showed Me
This is what I wish someone had demonstrated when I was sitting in those church pews, absorbing information and producing correct answers:
Passive learning cannot carry you through active pain.
Let that land for a second.
When crisis hits (and it will), your child or student or mentee isn’t going to reach for a workbook. They’re going to reach for whatever they’ve practiced. Whatever patterns they’ve internalized. Whatever relationship with God they’ve cultivated, or haven’t.
If all they’ve practiced is consuming content and producing correct answers, that’s what they’ll reach for. And when the content doesn’t have an answer for this specific pain, when their crisis isn’t covered in Chapter 7, they’ll assume the faith itself has failed them. Not realizing that what failed was a formation model that prioritized information over transformation.
I’ve talked with enough young adults who’ve drifted from faith to notice the pattern. The most common complaint isn’t that the Bible itself was the problem. It’s that the way they were taught to engage it left them unprepared for real life. They describe church as offering a “shallow and boring” spiritual experience. They say things like “the church is unfriendly to those who doubt.” A startling number report feeling unable to ask their hardest life questions without being labeled difficult or dangerous.
That’s not a content problem. That’s a culture problem. And the culture flows from our assumptions about what discipleship is.
What Jesus Did That We Keep Missing
When Thomas doubted the resurrection, Jesus didn’t hand him a study guide.
Think about that for a second. A disciple who’s supposed to be further along, who’s been walking with Jesus for years, who should know better by now. And in his moment of crisis (the death of everything he thought he understood about his teacher, his mission, his future), Thomas says he won’t believe unless he can touch the wounds himself.
Jesus doesn’t lecture him. Doesn’t shame him. Doesn’t say “blessed are those who believe without needing evidence, Thomas, and you’ve disappointed me.”
Instead, He shows up. In the flesh. And He invites Thomas into an encounter. “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe” (John 20:27, NLT).
That’s formation through presence, not curriculum.
That’s invitation before expectation.
That’s making space for wrestling instead of demanding correct answers.
Thomas’ doubt didn’t disqualify him from encounter. Jesus met him in it. Jesus entered the room specifically because Thomas was struggling. Not to correct him from a distance, but to be with him in the mess.
How different things might have been for me if someone had done that. Not given me more content to consume, but walked with me through the confusion. Not told me what to think, but helped me figure out how to think. How to bring my real questions to God instead of hiding them behind right answers.
Permission to Slow Down
If you’re discipling young people right now, you might be feeling the pressure. The clock is ticking. They’re only in your youth group for a few years. They’re leaving for college soon. You need to get them through the material, cover the essential doctrines, make sure they know enough before they face the world.
I understand that weight.
But what if the anxiety to cover content is undermining formation?
Friedrich Nietzsche said something a century ago that I love.. He noted that transformation is “a long obedience in the same direction.” The spiritual life isn’t a sprint through a curriculum. It’s a slow, often messy, deeply relational process of becoming.
And the uncomfortable truth is this: you can’t rush formation by adding more content. Sometimes you form people better by slowing down. By making space for questions. By holding silence instead of filling it with answers. By modeling what it looks like to not know something and still trust God anyway.
The young people in your life don’t need more information about God. They need to see what it looks like to walk with Him. To wrestle with Him. To bring doubt and pain and confusion to Him and find out He can hold it.
That’s slower. Less measurable. Harder to put on a quarterly report.
It’s also what forms resilient faith.
What This Might Look Like
I’m not saying throw out the curriculum. Content matters. Doctrine matters. Getting the story right matters.
But I am asking: what’s the container?
Is your discipleship environment a place where young people feel safe to say “I don’t understand this” or “I’m not sure I believe that anymore”? Or do they sense (even if you’ve never said it explicitly) that doubts are dangerous and questions are threatening?
Because if the church doesn’t become a safe place for wrestling, other spaces already are. The algorithm is always available. The Reddit threads are always open. The deconstructing voices on TikTok never make anyone feel stupid for asking.
And those spaces will meet your young people in their confusion with presence and validation while the church waits for them to get their questions sorted out before rejoining.
What might this look like practically? It could be the difference between asking “What did you learn from tonight’s lesson?” and asking “What felt true to you tonight, and what didn’t?” It could be creating space in your small group where “I’m not sure I believe that anymore” doesn’t end the conversation but starts a deeper one. It could be as simple as telling a struggling student, “I don’t have this figured out either. But I’m not going anywhere.”
The Question I Can’t Stop Asking
Jesus warned about seeds that sprout fast but wither when trouble comes because they have no root (Matthew 13:20-21, NLT). I find myself wondering if our fill-in-the-blank discipleship model is accidentally optimized for that exact outcome. Fast growth that looks impressive on the surface but can’t survive heat.
What would it look like to prioritize depth over speed? Relationship over content completion? Presence over performance metrics?
I don’t have a clean answer. I’m still working this out myself.
But I know what didn’t work for me. And I know what I wish someone had done differently.
It might start with giving yourself permission to slow down. To see discipleship as relationship first, content second. To create environments where doubt doesn’t disqualify someone from belonging, where questions are welcomed as signs of engagement rather than threats to unity.
It might mean being willing to say “I don’t know” when you don’t know, and showing what it looks like to trust God anyway.
It might mean following Jesus’ lead with Thomas: showing up, being present, inviting encounter instead of delivering lectures.
Where This Goes From Here
There’s something in Hebrews about spurring one another on toward love and good deeds, about not giving up meeting together (Hebrews 10:24-25, NLT). I’ve been holding that passage lately, asking what it looks like when we practice it. Not showing up to the same building at the same time, but doing the work of formation together. Walking alongside each other through the messy middle.
What would shift if we approached discipleship less like content delivery and more like what it is: one person inviting another into the slow, uncertain, beautiful work of learning to trust a God who isn’t afraid of our questions?
The workbook has its place.
But presence is what forms people.
And formation through presence? That’s what holds when the pain gets active.
If you’re wrestling with how to disciple young people through doubt and crisis, you’re not alone. And the fact that you’re asking these questions probably means you’re doing better than you think. The hunger for depth over performance? That’s a good instinct. Trust it.
And if you’re reading this thinking about someone who’s already gone, who’s already drifted, who’s already left, that’s a different conversation. One I want to have with you soon. Because presence isn’t just for prevention. It’s for reunion, too.
There’s this passage in Luke 15 about a father who runs toward a returning child. I find myself drawn to what that running says about God’s posture toward the ones who wandered. I constantly reference it, it’s that good. But that’s where I’ll go next.
For now, pick one conversation this week where you resist the urge to teach and listen instead. Ask a student what they’re wrestling with, not what they learned from the lesson. And when they tell you something messy, don’t fix it.
Stay in the room.
That’s a beginning.
