Today was a terrible day. I won't go into why it was a terrible day, that isn't the point of this post. Lets just say that I am a married 25 year old mother of two in heaven and three on earth who had a TOUGH day.
I was taking a break after dinner while DH put the kids to bed. I decided that we needed Starbucks as a good end to a mutually terrible day. While I was driving, a song came up on my favorite radio station. The song talks about how the artists (who are teens) are going to live for Christ while they are young to avoid the heartache of bad decisions when they are older. At first blush, it sounds great, "awwww, youth who want to live for Christ". But this song has never been a comfortable one for me. I was thinking about it as I drove along and came up with a few reasons why a promise to "Live for Christ while you are young" bothers me.
Let me preface this with this, I am not bad mouthing youth ministers. I do not envy their jobs at all. They are pressured to fill youth group events to the satisfaction of the older church leadership in order to prove their "effectiveness". They also have to deal with the drama that surrounds teens, and demanding parents who expect the youth minister to fix the spiritual neglect of the parents. It can't be an easy job at all. Who I am talking about is everyone else who has grandiose ideas about the youth group being the last stand for the future generation of churchgoers.
Now, why does the phrase "living for Christ while we are young" bother me? It boils down to this. We feed teenagers the lie that their lives are at their hardest points. While a teen's life is probably the difficult part of their lives right now, the idea that living for Christ while they are young seems to promise them that the Christian walk gets easier and that they will have no regrets. HA! It sounds great to stand in a youth rally and pledge things like abstinence, no dating (for all those who were teens when Josh Harris was popular), no drugs, no parties, and no distractions. However, it feeds into the lie that once we are married, or in the right school, or in the right job that our Christian life will get easier because then we can have sex, or be old enough to drink responsibly, or finally have things finally figured out. There is very little discipleship going on, most of the emphasis is trying to get teens to NOT do stuff instead of focusing on the right things.
Service opportunities are still "fun things" like carwashes (where you get to see your crush possibly in a bathing suit), or volunteering for children's church (where you get to see how GREAT your crush is with kids while you dream of the day that his purity ring is replaced with your wedding ring). There is so much emphasis on making service fun that when a service opportunity comes along that isn't fun, they "leave it to the adults". Because, you know, you are only young once...
I remember many times where I stood in a group of teenagers making wild promises about how I would live my life righteously. Do you want to know what I found to be the cold, hard truth when I grew out of my teen years?
1. The church is full of sinners. That's right! Teenaged drama isn't just a youth group thing. People are going to hurt you, and you will hurt other people. It doesn't get easier to deal with people in the church. You are going to see the same personality types in the church that you saw in youth group. This means that all those great, godly older people you put on pedastels will come crashing down when you start interacting as peers.
2. Marriage does not make life easier. It doesn't. While it is great to have my wonderful DH and I couldn't imagine life without him, I am still faced with many new challenges. We see each other's flaws, we argue, sometimes it isn't easy to be "loving" towards each other. There is no magic formula that makes marriage work, and yes even bedroom issues can come up! Wearing a wedding ring isn't the magic solution that people talk up to teenagers! Then you add kids, household chores, bills, job obligations, health problems, losing a child etc and you've got a very tricky situation and no idea how to look for help within the church. The support that exists within the youth group is no longer there when you are a young married person with kids. You are supposed to "get it" by now, and you still have no idea what "it" is! Because the wedding ring on a fellow church goer's finger was supposed to teach you what "it" is!
3. Choosing to live for God doesn't get easier. It doesn't. You don't wake up one morning and realize that "hey! choosing a good attitude is easier now that I am an adult!". You find out how much you really don't know. People challenge your beliefs, and you find that if you can only say "well, pastor so and so said this..." your beliefs are not as fireproof as you think. Suddenly you realize that there are people that interpret Scripture differently than you were taught and THEY ARE RIGHT! Other times they are wrong, and you have to reconcile that with your own beliefs. This ties into point number one. One day you realize that someone you respected was wrong and if you don't know how to dig deep and stand your ground without the peer pressure of a group, then you will fall.
4. Even if you make every decision "right" according to church culture, you will have regrets. This is a biggie because this can challenge even the most seasoned Christian out there. Regrets are usually billed as the result of blatant choosing of sin, instead of the driving force behind maturity and wisdom. When you set up a young Christian with the idea that regrets are proof that you did wrong, you end up with discouraged people who don't see the point in continuing to strive for Christ. I try to raise my kids right. I have to make moral decisions every day, and you know what? I have regrets, tons! Some were a result of sin, some were a result of simply being naive. They don't have a single thing to do with my worth in God's eyes, but many times it can feel like they do. Also, "church culture" isn't always a magic formula. Find one verse in the Bible about dating vs courtship. I dare ya. Yet there are people whose faith can be destroyed because they did one or the other and ended up with regrets. Instead of focusing on the grace of God, the focus can be on the sin. When that happens it can be difficult for a teenager to feel like this faith thing is worth the effort. The "ideal Christian" doesn't have regrets, because they chose Jesus. That is the message that is given Christian youth of today. Guess what? Christians have regrets, and not all of them are sin related, part of growing up is learning to live with consequences. And sometimes, you have to deal with the consequences of other people's sins and develop regrets from them. And surprise, sometimes you end with regrets that you wouldn't necessarily change if you had the chance because you realize they made you into the person you are today.
So what do I think is the solution, now that I've outlined the problem? Discipleship. The church is failing our youth by counting on the "positive peer pressure" of a youth group situation, and then expecting the teen to become a productive adult the moment they graduate high school. Suddenly, they aren't supposed to care about the entertainment value of a church service, or an adult Sunday school lesson. They are supposed to start taking on "grown up" responsibilities with no incentive as to how much "fun" it will be.
As a youth who grew up with a hypocritical Christian household, an adult who was willing to take me on would have really changed my outlook at that time. As it was, I didn't fit in with my peers, I didn't fit in with my family, and the trite Sunday school answers just weren't reaching me. It wasn't until I left a legalistic college and met my future DH (who was raised with a lot of discipleship) that I finally felt like there was a solution to my need for human encouragement. If an older woman had taken me aside with a Titus 2 mentality, who knows how that would have matured me? I knew all the answers, but applying them beyond a rule following mentality was foreign to me.
There is a reason my generation is bailing out of the church, and throwing more money into youth rallies for the next generation isn't going to solve the problem. It is going to get worse. What we need, is a church that is focused on maturing the youth of the church, not just entertaining them so they keep coming back. We've already established that entertaining my generation didn't fix the problem, lets not keep doing the same things and hoping for a different outcome.
