In talking to someone recently about teenagers, and more particularly, why some struggle to show respect within the church, it got me thinking and while that's a rare occurrence, it bothered me for the past couple days. After all, I'm a part of this group I'm talking about. I like to think I was a respectful teen, and for the most part I never really showed disrespect to others blatantly, but I know I'm no angel here. I often passed notes throughout service instead of paying attention to the message (cell phones weren't quite yet as big a deal as they are today so this stood in place of current texting). I made wise remarks to those beside me about what was being said by the speaker who was trying to speak truth into my life. As a ballpark estimate I probably heard 300 messages in my time in youth group and when you ask me which stood out I can't tell you that many really stood out or were memorable, probably because I never bothered listening.
I only served as a youth pastor for one year but I sit here today, a failed youth minister, who failed not myself, but the teens I had been called to speak truth into the lives of. I'm confident that God overcame my attempts, but I feel that the heart of the issue for my failures might possibly be a theme that churches across the country are seeing, a lie we are confronted with; that in order to reach young people we must sell them on the idea of sticking around long enough to get through to them.
My generation has learned to live by a mentality of "the customer is always right." It permeates every area of our life. We buy the newest phone because our current phone doesn't perform quite as fast, a lot of us trade in our cars every 5 years.
We are the generation raised to accept divorce for far more liberal reasons than scripture might suggest. We're the generation that thinks loyalty to a company for more than 3 years is unthinkable, but the 30 years our parents may have spent with the same company is unattainable. We have come to think that taking care of yourself means abandoning whatever we don't like, but something is lost in that. The lessons of perseverance, mental toughness, and sticking with difficult situations for the sake of others are quickly becoming things of the past.
My generation is one of consumers. We're often criticized for this because trends of a prolonged adolescence and dependency on our parents are becoming closer to the norm. While there are certainly economic factors that go into this, I believe it is only made more acceptable by the acceptance that we should do whatever we want, feel entitled to more than we deserve.
Perhaps the most dangerous thing this consumer mentality does to us is that it teaches us that we are our own expert, a false teaching at that. Under this assumption, we believe that we know what is best for our lives and should have the authority to dictate what kinds of things are allowed to shape us during a time when we have little life experience to draw wisdom from. Instead of learning to love someone for their bumps and bruises, we end relationships that we were never truly committed to. Instead of fixing something that still has years of usefulness, we throw it away and buy another one from Walmart. And instead of letting the Church be more than the world has to offer, we demand that it increasingly move closer toward that line that divides it from the sinful world it is called to love, blurring which side is which over time. If the music isn't what I want, I'll go somewhere else and that youth pastor is faced with what appears to be an impossible choice. Do they buckle to my selfish demands out of fear that they'll risk never having the chance to speak words of truth into my life or do they let me walk out and speak words of truth into my life without making a sound?
Out of all the messages I didn't pay attention to, there was one that my youth pastor taught that I will never forget and it's not one that he planned on or even probably wanted to teach. We were having a teen weekend retreat and the guys all slept in the teen center, an old house that sat in the middle of the church parking lot. Most of us were sleeping in the main room on sleeping bags or air mattresses, but then some of us got the great idea to go into the basement where there were some ratty couches and bring them upstairs. This didn't please my youth pastor and while most probably would have yelled at us because they were tired at 1am (I most likely would have) he didn't make a sound. All he did was get down in a crouch like a catcher in a baseball game might and he rest his head in his hands while staring blankly out into the distance. He did this for what seemed like a half hour, but in reality it might have only been a couple minutes. Our laughter quickly turned to sly remarks and then to defensive justifications to each other before finally reaching the most deafening silence you can imagine. He never said a word. He didn't have to.
The couch went back down the stairs. He never spoke to us about it, nor did he need to.
I think my youth pastor understood that in times when there is need for conflict resolution, to teach a tough lesson to some young people, two things need to happen: 1. truth and what's right must be presented regardless of whether the recipient chooses to accept it or not; 2. it must be presented in love to those who have come to believe that love is only something shown when it's convenient.
He could have easily taken another approach. He could have yelled at us and told us how wrong we were. It would have gotten the point across even though it might have embarrassed us in front of our peers. The couch would have ended up in the basement. Or he could have let us get away with it and had us thinking we had the coolest youth pastor in the entire universe, but truth wouldn't have been presented and in the end he would have just been like any other in his position to give in to be accepted by the popular kids.
Instead he chose to not let us tell ourselves a lie but did so in love. Rather than letting us think in our foolishness that we were in the right, he risked letting us run away to someone who would. Of those who were involved that night, none of us stopped coming. Respect and love is earned, but it's often difficult for young people to truly know what either word means until it's taught to us. Sometimes it takes a church telling its youth that the customer isn't always right, or better yet, that we aren't the customer.
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