Feels Like Teen Spirit

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For some, it's not a moment too soon. Shea Mosquera, like many girls her age, has a cascading set of anxieties that seemed to arrive in tandem with turning 13. She loves her parents but finds herself clashing with them more and more. Life for her, as the third of five children, has suddenly gone from mildly annoying to downright suffocating. Her family recently moved to a new town, and she is worried about friends, grades and fitting in at her new school.

Although her father is an evangelical pastor, Shea says she had just a "half-relationship" with God until she got involved with Dietz's program. Now, after she was baptized by him in a New England lake last summer, she has committed herself to praying as much as she can between schoolwork and other demands. Shea says she prays to make sense of her new, sharper emotions: "I'll pray, 'God, I don't know why I get so mad at my mom. Why am I being mean?'" Shea's father wants to pray about her problems together as a family, as they did when she was younger. Increasingly, though, Shea prays alone. "It's kind of hard to say the things I want to say to God out loud to my dad," she says. "Sometimes they're not things he wants to hear."

Like many of her friends at the nondenominational Grace Chapel, Shea has a routine that includes morning, meal and bedtime prayer as well as daily "devos," or devotionals, a sort of scriptural homework. She says the regimen is paying off. "One thing I think God did do for me was to give me my own room [in the new house]," she says with a smile. "It's a bit of privacy God gave me to be alone more with him," she adds, "and get away from my sister."

Grace Chapel's senior pastor, Bryan Wilkerson, says a key factor in reaching kids like Shea is the youth of the middle school pastors--most of them volunteers in their 20s. "We know that 13-year-olds are going to move away from their parents," he says. "The question is, Where are they going to move to? In the youth pastors, they see people who drive jeeps and love Jesus."

Many evangelical churches see 13-year-old hearts and minds as the ultimate battlefield in the culture wars. If Jesus is competing with 50 Cent for the soul of today's youth, megachurches like Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, are making sure the Lord is not outgunned. Their junior high worship area features a million-dollar sound system and mammoth movie screens that play to an audience of as many as 1,000 teenagers on Sundays. Prestonwood's executive pastor, Mike Buster, makes no apologies for the slick production values. It takes a good show to expose kids to the good word, he says, because there is so much competition from what he calls a "perverted" teen culture in the U.S.