Dean on passion

"From the dawn of time, people have described passion in terms of fire to distinguish it from cuddly sentimentalism. Passion devastates. It is 'to die for.' And it is not to be denied--which is precisely why it leads us to God. Most of us spend our lives looking for ways to rekindle the passion of youth: the burning desire to be engulfed by love, to be ignited by a purpose, to radiate light because the love of another shines within us." (xiv)

"Adolescents are searching for something, for someone, 'to die for,' to use Erik Erikson's haunting phrase: a cause worthy of their suffering , a love worthy of a life-time and not just a Sunday night. In short, they are seaching for passion, even--maybe especially--in church. Teenagers will not settle for a God who asks for anything less. If we are honest, neither will we." (2)

"It is an obvious question: If adolescents and Christianity are both so full of passion, then why aren't young people flocking to church? Maybe it is because the church, like the greeting card industry, has largely sanitized love of suffering, leaving Christianity with a mealy-mouthed niceness that fails to ring true to young people who know in their bones that love and heartache go together. Or maybe it is because the church . . . has not been completely forthcoming about sacrificial love where teenagers are concerned, oblivious to the connection between the passion of youth and the passion of faith." (4-5)

"If adolescents search for something and someone to whom they can pledge their troth, the object of this devotion must be worthy of their lives, nothing less. Passion asks something of young people; in fact, it asks everything of them. This does not mean that youth invest their passions wisely. On the contrary, inexperience is an investor's worst enemy, and most of us have some notoriously bad investments in our emotional portfolio, especially during adolescence." (6)

Kenda Creasy Dean, Practicing Passion: Youth and the Quest for a Passionate Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004)