This study examines the concept of adolescents and the adolescent culture that identified unique characteristics of adolescence in human development. With a focus on the characteristics of interrelation between adolescents and society, the types of culture led by adolescents, different point of views on adolescent culture, children of families formed through inter-ethic marriage, collisions between adolescent and society caused by the trend of increasing adolescents, and psychological conflicts that adolescents go through due to the lack of values they experience in various cultures in Korean society, Buddhism intends to look into the plans for Buddhist missionary work targeting adolescents from various perspectives and to establish a strategy by combining the unique characteristics of adolescence with the missionary work.
One of the adolescent cultures is delinquency. This culture should be corrected with Buddhist perspective on human beings. A strategy based on reasonable, analytic, and empirical perspective on human beings needs to be applied with the use of Buddhist strategic edifying method.
The current adolescents belong to MZ generation that has grown up using the Internet from an early age.
According to the results from various surveys, adolescents are familiar with having communication via the Internet. They communicate with people using text messages or with blogs, or KakaoTalk, a messaging and video calling app that 95% of the adolescents have on their phones, rather than meeting them in person. Therefore, we come to the conclusion that the strategy of missionary work for adolescents with the use of the Internet, a tool of communication, is very practical. The urgent issue for Buddhism circle is to develop diversity of the programs for adolescents who use the Internet. Though a variety of missionary programs for adolescents are being developed, it is referred that the production of programs that they would like is still in the beginning stage. This study considered it to be the basic data for the development of adolescent-only programs. Chapter 2 examined the overall concept of adolescents in detail, and Chapter 3 identified different problems that adolescents have. Chapter 4 presents plans to cope with such problems. Diverse changes in perception such as the way Korean society views adolescent culture and its historical trend should also lead to changes in Buddhist activities for faith and practice and perception of parent Buddhists. For example, not only the parents with children who are preparing for college entrance exam but also the entire family can join the prayer for good exam results. It means that the perception that only the parents with children who have forthcoming college entrance exam pray and the children concentrate on their studies should be changed. By doing so, the missionary work for adolescents will be naturally connected to gathering new Buddhists between generations. It will be the simplest and most natural missionary work for adolescents. However, by changing the existing missionary work, leisure time generated according to the five-day work and class promoted by the national education system and society should be used by reflecting the characteristics of adolescence and the changes in social environment in the strategy of missionary work for adolescents. Assigning the missionary work for adolescents to the instructors specialized in it and allowing them to play a pivotal role in this work, temples should be opened to let family Buddhists or people with no religion visit and camp there, suggesting camping programs for the families and helping the adolescents to believe that the faith and practice will be beneficial to them as they grow.
There are not many places to turn adolescents' "not interested" into "interested" and answer their questions, and the necessary counseling should be activated to solve related problems arising from the current social structure.
Our role performance in "this place now" will be a future-oriented Buddhism that can solve lots of problems that adolescents go through in modern society by performing reasonable, analytic, and empirical practice pursued by Buddhism.