PURSUING A HEART OF WISDOM:
Counseling Teenagers Biblically
By John C. Kwasny
Christian Focus. 330 pages. £11.99
ISBN 978 1 527 103 863
Anger, anxiety, depression, drugs and alcohol, eating disorders, guilt and shame, sexual, physical and emotional abuse, same-sex attraction and gender identity, pornography, premarital sex, rebellion, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, bullying and peer pressure, social media, video games (some very violent), demotivation. With our teens subject to a 360⁰ barrage we need all the help we can get, especially in a world that shares few of our values and ethics… which is why this book is welcome for parents and church leaders.
Pursuing a Heart of Wisdom begins with three chapters setting out general principles: Planting Firmly in Biblical Presuppositions; Practicing (sic) a Biblical Counseling (sic) Process; Partnering Together in Community.
Everyone in the church, and certainly every parent of teenagers, has a responsibility to help bring up all the children in the church. We should take Jesus’ warning not to offend any of these little ones very seriously. Part 2 is a section of 15 chapters covering the issues listed above; Biblical Counseling Principles for Typical Teenage Problems.
Compassionate approach
It’s a rough world out there. Life is diffi-cult. Satan uses this truth to lie to us that it is impossible. Teenagers make mistakes, of varying consequence, and parents’ knee-jerk reaction is to crack down on poor behaviour, especially when it is embarrassing to them. What is needed is compassionate enquiry into what is going on in head and heart, not an interrogation driven by anxiety and fear. As the title flags up, the goal of all disciple-ship and biblical counselling is a wise heart rather than conformist behaviour. So how is this best nurtured?
The vital principle of sanctification doesn’t appear until page 168. The ultimate solution is always moving the eyes from self to others and Jesus. Yet we are not given pathways to the ultimate solution, very different from a quick fix. Although one-to-one Bible stud-ies, such as my pastor did with me (to my great gain), are now ruled out because of child protection, small single-sex Bible study groups in public places are the best treatment and prophylactic. The teenagers need to be respected, listened to and their questions not dismissed. After school in Starbucks looking at, say, Colossians, focusing on Jesus’ beauti-ful character and staggering work are part of the ‘ultimate solution’. Teenagers often have the acute form of the human condition in being focused on the self of flesh and need to be refocused on the self of grace.
Assumptions
Pursuing a Heart of Wisdom speaks into a monoculture. The assumption is that each family is parented by believers, who are the teen’s biological parents and that the teen is a professing Christian. They all belong to a large church with a strong youth group and paid youth worker. Although we don’t have to deal with the ready availability of guns, Brits engaged in urban youth ministry have to contend with knives and gangs, the fear of the streets and the desire to belong. In a multicultural church, parents hold diverse assumptions, including what is appropriate authority, rules and freedom.
There are nuggets of wisdom throughout the book: parents need to practise com-passionate confrontation, a very precarious balance; always look to build hope; not to tell teens to love their body, but that their body is a temple of the Holy Spirit; the love of Christ should compel parents to move towards their teens, not away from them. There are good insights into guilt (true and false), shame and control, power and slavery. Each chapter helpfully closes with a distilled set of wisdom pointers.
I have some reservations. All of us are in a spiritual war, with our teens often at the frontline. There is little here on how to pray for our teens. Prayer may be assumed but, in my experience, what is assumed is usually ignored, prayer being the no.1 casualty. The Bible treats us not only as perpetrators but also as victims of sin. Sin is a power which, away from Christ, we will find irresistible.
I couldn’t see the point of the long evalu-ation sections at the start of each chapter. They make the teen seem like a problem to be fixed. A doctor may use such a checklist with a possible coronavirus patient, but no teenager will sit down and answer these questions, some of which only s/he will have the answers to. Teenagers are often ‘walled off’, to use Kwasny’s expression, and yet the art of ‘compassionate confrontation’ is rarely modelled in the book. I wanted more conversations such as those with Riley, a rep-resentative 16-year-old, who after suffering with anxiety and depression is now start-ing to withdraw. Fortunately, though not accidentally, we have such a conversation modelled for us by Jesus with the Samaritan woman in John 4. We are all looking for the same results in our counselling and praying. For many of us our teens force us onto God with a new intensity in prayer we would never otherwise have known.
(As a note to the publisher, I was more interested in the author’s experience as a parent and youth leader than his academic credentials and ministry positions, though a little research ticked these boxes.)
