How do you feel when a teenager begins to question God and doubt the very premise of their faith? Is it something you encourage, or view as the beginning of the end? Becky Coster explains why a healthy grasp of doubt is essential for growing lasting faith in young people.

Picture the scene: The hall is full, the crowds stand with arms outstretched to heaven, the
music plays above them all and the worship leader announces that he can ‘feel the presence of God in this place’. The crowds nod in agreement while, at the back of the hall, a lonely teenager, let’s call him Joe, wonders to himself, is this God even real?
In fact, while Joe has been left thinking that he is the only person in the history of mankind to ever feel this way, the truth is that most, if not all Christians will silently and secretly journey through periods of doubt and of wilderness.

We like it when we are able to nod in agreement, are certain of our faith and when we are in the land of the plentiful. We like to talk about the periods of success, of certainty and of prosperity.

We are even quite happy to discuss the dark periods that we have come through, providing we can feel happy and even smug about the situation we arrive at. However, ‘the problem with the theology of the permanent smile’, says Mike Pilavachi in his book Wasteland, ‘is that it produces Christians who live dual lives. Their church life is full of empty Christian clichés and platitudes. Then there is the secret, guilt-ridden life where
there are doubts, failure and even depression. Of course the Lord wants to deal with our doubts, release us from our failures and heal our depression. He cannot and will not do that, however, if we do not acknowledge they are there.’

So why is it that the issue of doubt remains one of the greatest taboos of the Christian faith? How can we better explore those periods of uncertainty in our lives and help young people not only to survive such seasons, but rather to grow through them?

To consider the issue of how we enable others, and perhaps even ourselves, to grow through these wilderness periods, we first need to identify when they occur. For some of us, and for some of our young people, the route of our confusion is hard to identify, perhaps because we’re so good at keeping our doubts locked up in secret, hidden places that, by the time they have grown and we do have to deal with them, we are not even sure where they started. So let’s take some time to consider the environment most suited for the growth of doubt.