Imagine your youth group. How many stories do you hear each week about the stress of making it to practices and club meetings all while trying to study and hang out with friends? And what about the internal pressures you don’t hear about as they try to cultivate an online image of themselves among unattainable celebrity and peer examples. It’s no surprise that in February 2019 the Pew Research Center reported rising rates of anxiety and depression in U.S. teens. The dilemma, like all social crises, begs the question: What will the church’s response be? The answer is already embedded in our tradition—the commandment to keep Sabbath.

The purpose of this six-week Lenten study pack for youth is to offer the opportunity to reflect on the frenetic consumer culture that demands their time, energy, and loyalties and consider how Sabbath can be a tool to resist the “culture of now.” Based on Walter Brueggemann’s book Sabbath as Resistance: Saying NO to the Culture of Now, the sessions in this study will help participants see how, in our contemporary context of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath can be an act of resistance. Sessions will explore how topics such as anxiety, exclusivism, and multitasking are consuming our lives and pulling us away from relationship with our God and neighbors. By focusing on Sabbath keeping throughout the season of Lent, youth will rediscover the God who has created and redeemed them and who longs to sustain them by offering them a place to lay down their burdens and find rest.

Each week includes a Participant Handout and a Leader's Guide that helps a leader facilitate a fifty-five-minute session. Activity ideas available in the Leader's Guides include: small-group discussion and reflection questions, Scripture study activities, suggested prayers, personal reflection opportunities, teaching alternatives, and more.