In the past 200 years Korean Church has made peerless development. There were only one million Catholics in the 1970's, but two million in ten years, 1980's. Now there are over three million Catholics. Inactive Catholics who were baptized but no longe...
In the past 200 years Korean Church has made peerless development. There were only one million Catholics in the 1970's, but two million in ten years, 1980's. Now there are over three million Catholics. Inactive Catholics who were baptized but no longer go to church take a large part have. In particular young people who will lead our church in the future have greatly decreased and are still decreasing. The future of Korean church, therefore, will face a grave crisis if things go as they are.
So I have chosen this issue as the subject of my study, and tried to find ways to build a better and closer relationship of parents, ministers, and catechism teachers with teenagers in order to share and solve their conflicts and hardships.
The object of this study is to examine and understand conflicts Catholic teenagers have in their religious lives, find out and analyze the factors of those conflicts, and give pastors objective and concrete information and data.
The subjects of this survey were middle to high school students of 21 churches in the six major cities. 1,500 copies of the questionnaire which has 70 questions were sent in proportion to the number of churches and students, and then were received. Then 969 copies were used as the final data.
'SPSS/PC^(+)'(Statistical Package for the Social Sciences / Personal Computer Plus) and 'SAS'(Strategic Application System) were used to analyze the fifty cases of conflicts and twenty items of social statistics variables. Out of the fifty items thirty-one items were adopted for analysis of the factors, and classified into five kinds of factors. They were "Institutional Factors" characterized by the system organized through the custom and tradition of the church ; "Pastoral Factors" related with the ministers, and the religious ; "Environmental Factors" related with inside and outside of the church or surrounding situations ; "Personal Factors" derived from one's own inside ; "Education Factors" related with school life, learning, and entrance examinations. Along with analyzing these five kinds of factors those 969 subjects were reviewed according to their genders, school years, whether they were baptized or not, whether they were confirmees or not, and whether they went or stopped going to church. And then analysis of the factors was done by using 'multiple-factor ANOVA'(analysis of variance).
The result of the analysis were as follows
a. The frequency of conflicts of Catholic teenagers had in the six major cities was 0.220. This showed that they were mentally stable, compared with young people in other groups.
b. The frequencies of conflicts the subjects had on each factor were as follows. The frequency of conflicts teenagers had because of their own inner problems - "Personal Factors" - was 0.395 ; The frequency of conflicts teenagers had because of "Environmental Factors" was 0.321 ; The frequency of conflicts teenagers had because of pastors or the religious-"Pastoral Factors" - was 0.221 ; The frequency of conflicts teenagers had because of "Institutional Factors" was 0.196 ; The frequency of conflicts teenagers had because of "Education Factors" was 0.150. The frequency of "Education Factor" conflict was the lowest, while that of "Personal Factor" were the highest. When all the factors were calculated in terms of percentage, 32.5 percent of all the factors were "Institutional Factors", the largest ; 16.9 percent of them were "Pastoral Factors", the second largest ; 14.7 percent of them were "Environmental Factor", the third largest ; 9.6 percent of them were "Personal Factors", the fourth largest ; and 8.6 percent of them were "Education Factors", the smallest.
c. "Institutional Factor" conflicts were more among high school students than among middle school students. The subject who were more devout had fewer conflicts.
d. Among "Pastoral Factors" conflicts, they had more conflicts on the items related with catechism teachers than on the items related with the religious or clergymen.
e. Among "Environmental Factor" conflicts, male students had conflicts more often than female students, and middle school students felt conflicts more often than high school students.
f. Teenagers have many "Personal Factor" conflicts in general. Male students, students in higher school year, and students who had led christian lives longer had conflicts more often than female students, students in lower school year, or students who had become Catholics recently.
g. "Education Factor" conflicts were the fewer among the five. Teenagers showed that they had a lot of conflicts with their parents on education, while most students themselves had fewer conflicts there. Students who had once stopped going to church had more conflicts than the others.
Considered overall, Catholic teenagers seemed to adjust well to the institutions and pastors that consist of the church. On the other hand they seemed to feel a lot of conflicts about the ares related with their religion and their surrounding situations. Therefore an appropriate study should be made to solve conflicts students have on the areas which consist of their environment and also efforts should be made to walk on the field which can improve their doctrine catechism education, and faith.
In conclusion, I'd like to suggest some guidelines to achieve proper and bound religious life and education for the whole man for teenagers.
First, the church should get ready to help and receive. In other words it should have good atmosphere and be the place teenagers are willing to talk about their problems on their identity, their boy or girl friends, religious doubts, and their careers. Then the church will be regarded as a place they'd like to stay. To put it concretely, clergyman, the religious and catechism teachers should be humble enough for teenagers to get to them easily. Also they should try to find various ways to approach them.
Second, the church should secure space for teenagers to act in and use freely and exclusively. As there are few leisure facilities or places where teenagers can freely share talks and have rest, they feel isolated, wander about, or hang around unwholesome places. And this makes it hard to form proper personality. Therefore the church should provide leisure facilities for teenagers will be able to creat a new culture.
Third, the church should have a variety of education programs for teenagers. The church should helf youngsters not only have proper value through weekly doctrine education and sermons, but also restore their hidden abilities and genuine emotions which have been forgotten for a long time by offering retreats and various traing programs.
Fourth, in the long term, in order to foster teenagers as children of god and to keep spiritual and warm-hearted relations with them, the church should have experts on juvenile education.
I'd like to make it clear that in this study the notion of 'conflicts' is based on the premise that they are not merely a negative things which therefore should be pressed down or removed, but something normal which comes out of all human relations and can be constructively and positively used. It's undoubtedly true that improvement of humanity and maturity of faith can solely be attained through suffering and hardship. Therefore Catholic church should continue to improve education and guidelines, taking teenagers' conflicts into account, and strive to make a profound study of counselling programs which offer teenagers realistic helps.