Alex Parker highly recommends Worth it as a resource for teeenagers wanting to make sense of their faith today
Worth it is a superbly readable book for anyone who has ever wondered whether their Christian faith is really relevant and trustworthy in our complex and broken world.
Chris Morphew is clearly someone who understands teenagers and the situations and struggles they often face. Any teenager who sometimes feels that what they hear in church on a Sunday or at Youth Group is difficult to connect with their secular Monday to Saturday lives will find it helpful. And, indeed, so will their parents! If you’re spending most of your waking hours at work, school or online with other young people who, at least on the face of it, project confident, polished selves, appearing content and complete, then the Christian message can feel out of place if not even unkind. Chris’s observation that we can appear to be saying “here’s a problem you didn’t think you had – but don’t worry, here’s a solution you didn’t know you needed”, articulated exactly how I have frequently felt in my own workplace. What I believe I have in my relationship with Jesus just doesn’t seem to be relevant or needed by my colleagues, who are either getting on perfectly fine without him, or struggling with such difficult situations that adding something else to think about doesn’t seem quite the right thing to do. And so, Chris’s aim is to convince his readers that Jesus definitely is worth it.
Throughout the book, Chris adopts a conversational tone, which I easily recognised as the way my own teenagers (aged 15 and 17) talk
Throughout the book, Chris adopts a conversational tone, which I easily recognised as the way my own teenagers (aged 15 and 17) talk – lots of parenthesis and italics! He is consistently light-heartedly profound, and takes care to avoid church-ey jargon, for example using “biography” and “bunch of somebody’s mail” instead of Gospel and Epistles respectively. This would make the book accessible by teenagers new to Christianity, although it felt to me that it would particularly resonate with those who have grown up in the church.
Chris starts by effusively and winsomely explaining how much God loves each of us individually. With all the troubling stats we read about low self-esteem and consequent issues with mental well-being amongst our teenagers this felt an immensely affirming way to begin. He then goes on to dismantle the misunderstandings in our culture around the differences between judgement and justice, which are good, and being judgemental and prejudiced, which are not, but are often what our society thinks we mean when Christians talk about judgement. But he makes it clear that our fundamental identity is made in the image of God, rather than a sinner. We are each God’s priceless masterpieces, and Jesus is looking for us to become his apprentices.
This is the first book aimed at teenagers I’ve ever read – if they’re all as engaging, accessible, thought-provoking and relevant as this one I think I’ll read more of them
But, if they’re convinced that the good news about Jesus really is good, how do our teenagers go about living in the Western world where Christianity is no longer the dominant, mainstream world view? The latter two-thirds of the book seeks to help them with this question. For example, why it’s important to read the Bible and where to start. And how to keep going. And what to do if you find it confusing or disagree with what it says. Or if you find yourself distracted (eg: by social media!).
Importantly, the book covers what to do when difficulties or suffering come our way, because they inevitably will; that it is rational and sensible to keep trusting God in those difficulties, because He offers a meaningful and reliable hope. The examples used make Jesus very relevant to a teenager’s experience: what teenager in the Western world hasn’t “been betrayed by his friends, whispered about behind his back, misunderstood by accident and misunderstood on purpose”? But so has Jesus.
It also explains why church (ie: meeting with other Christians, not the building!) is important. Again, practical as always, Chris covers what being part of a nurturing, supportive church family might look like in real life. For example, it could mean texting or calling people; meeting up with them; finding someone to ask questions about the Christian life or something you read in your Bible study that you didn’t understand. And also, what to do if you go to church and feel that “no one else there is into the same stuff you are”.
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Chris doesn’t flinch from offering challenge either. He explains why we can’t just take Jesus on as part of our own personal self-improvement journey, but that we should share the hope of Jesus with our post-Christian culture by loving it, as opposed to retreating from it, trying to control it, or compromising with it. He applies the theory to real life teenage struggles like how to live with your siblings (“tear up the scorecard and thrown it away” – Matthew 18:21-22 – because that’s what Jesus did on the cross for you); how to honour your parents; love your friends; deal with conflict; and how to tell people you know about Jesus. To aid the latter, Chris suggests that you “merge your universes” ie: “figure out something that your church friends and your school friends (or whatever) would enjoy doing together, and do it together”). But with all these very practical ideas, Chris is careful not to pile on any kind of pressure to perform, but to emphasize that “it’s not all up to you. It’s all up to him” and “God already has your situation completely under control”. It’s about us getting on board with what God is already doing. In the intense teenage years of what feels like continuous progress tests, mocks and exams, I think this is a really important message.
And so Chris finishes with a resounding encouragement to “lean into God’s plans” for your life, as Mary did at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel. He explains that faith and evidence are not two opposite ends of a see-saw – “the more evidence you have, then less faith you need; the more faith you have, the less you care about the evidence” – as our culture might tell us. Actually, the Greek word for faith “doesn’t mean believing in spite of logical arguments and evidence. It means following the evidence, seeing where it leads, and putting your trust in that.” And so we read that “Mary… wondered” which in Greek means “to make an audit… weighing and pondering”. She weighs up the costs and disruption that it will cause and decides that it is “absolutely worth it” and that she can trust God (Luke 1:38). And that is clearly Chris’s yearning for his teenage readers.
This is the first book aimed at teenagers I’ve ever read – if they’re all as engaging, accessible, thought-provoking and relevant as this one I think I’ll read more of them! I hope that by sharing some of the things that struck me as I read it, you will be encouraged to recommend it to your young people too.
