Coming to faith is like falling in love. It happens in different ways and we each have our own story to tell. For some, deciding to follow Jesus is like love at first sight, and there’s no turning back. For others, coming to faith is a long, slow process. For still others, pivotal experiences along the way catapult them toward a personal relationship with Christ.

The church’s methods of calling people to faith are also varied. I grew up at the tail end of a revivalist period in my church. I made my first public commitment by going forward at an evangelistic rally when I was only eight. By the time I was in my middle teens, I questioned whether that experience had been genuine. Besides, the late Frank Epp said that making revivalistic appeals to children is like watering tender flowers with a fire hose. Still, as Regina Shands Stoltzfus says in this issue, many black churches use altar calls regularly and effectively in their worship (p. 17). What can we learn from that tradition?

Another approach churches use is to have their youth take a catechism class at a certain age which, presumably, culminates in baptism. Michelle Hershberger says this approach can function much like a rite of passage, motivated by parental or peer pressure, rather than being a genuine response to the gospel and a commitment to Christ and church (p. 7).

Mennonite congregations also have used mentoring programs, asking adults to walk alongside youth on their journey toward a faith commitment. This reflects something of the early church’s appointment of “sponsors” for baptismal candidates (see Alan Kreider’s article, page 2). Commendably, each young person is given individual attention; an adult is there to help process life and faith issues at a time when the youth might feel alienated from parents.

Too often, however, mentors are poorly chosen or they are not trained well for their task. Many are not comfortable with youth, or they don’t know how to talk about their own faith in winsome ways. Besides, mentoring in many churches only kicks in during the teen years; it might be more effective if the relationship had started much earlier. What if we chose mentors to walk alongside children from birth on, training them to take special care for faith development?

Our methods will vary, and they will change with the times. We need to be intentional, however, in our strategies for calling our youth to faith. Congregations should plan the spiritual nurture of each child, taking into account his or her particular needs and circumstances. In the early years the input of the parents must be weighed seriously, but as the children move into their teens, their own input into the process must be cultivated, and mentoring from the congregation must take a greater role.

Three areas need attention in such planning: belonging, behaving, and believing. Children need to be assured that they belong to the family of God. They need to learn that God’s people live in certain ways, and to understand the reasons behind these distinctive behaviors. And they need to learn the foundational beliefs of God’s people—their way of thinking, and their way of perceiving the world and God’s relationship with it.

The believers church tradition addresses the age-old problem of the relationship between individual freedom, group belonging, and responsibility. The genius of believers baptism is that it calls for an individual decision, yet the decision entails commitment to a group: the people of God. Inviting our youth—or anyone, inside or outside the church—to make this step can’t be left to happenstance. It must be an intentional, yet natural, part of what we do as a community of faith.

Richard A. Kauffman