Student Life Youth Minister Magazine: Deep Discipleship

I wrote an article on "Deep Discipleship" for Student Life's latest Youth Minister e-mag. Unfortunately, a couple of lines are missing on the first page, so here's the full text of the first few paragraphs:

Mark is a high school student in our church that I meet with every other week for Bible study. One day, our conversation turned to world religions and how Christianity—with its insistence that we can't earn our salvation—is different from other religions. Suddenly, he became a lot more interested in the conversation. He asked, "How we can know that what we believe as Christians is really true?" Mark has a growing relationship with Jesus, but he is hungry to go deeper and know some of the reasons behind why we believe what we believe.

Mark is not alone. The students we lead are hungry to go deeper.

Unfortunately, we look out at our group of middle school or high school students—distracted by texting, their iPods, and the opposite sex—and conclude that they're just not ready for real meat yet.

But they are ready. They are hungry to learn about Jesus. They are hungry to know theology. They are hungry to know how to logically defend their Christian faith as truth. They want to believe in something they can count on, and they are prepared to examine the claims of Jesus, understand what they believe, and know that it's true.