Kids these days…
09 Aug 2011 Leave a Comment
Old man rant time! I’ve been working with youth since the time I became an adult (cough, twelve years ago, cough). I went seamlessly (well, not really seamlessly so much as dramatically through a conversion experience that radically changed my life) from being a youth to leading youth. My own youth was spent in deep depravity and rebellion. My work with youth has mostly been in religious contexts. These facts have colored my perspective in a couple of ways that I know of. First, they force me to accept that, even to the extent that I may think that things have gotten worse (and no, this isn’t a post all about how downhill things have gone since I was a kid, though it includes some of that), sin in youth is nothing new and in fact should be expected. Second, for as much as we recognize that all are sinners, over the years I have become more and more deeply convinced that we should permit no room for accepting this as ok, especially in the Lord, especially when working with youth in a formative situation. God wants to sanctify His people in order to truly make them a light to the world (which is way darker than even I am regularly exposed to). Third, I have tremendous hope and aspiration for the possibilities and potential that living a righteous life from youth can afford.
My main observation about youth today (and I’ll throw in here that, of course, I’m not talking about every single person, but the general trend) is that, more than ever before, their problems and issues are direct manifestations of the popular culture. This is true because of our new era of entertainment and communication, which has blossomed with the explosion of television and been crowned with the internet, has made possible instant and constant access, with a residual movement toward turning all of reality into nothing but an entertainment program with each of us as her or his own producer (at worst co-producer, at best celebrity star of the show). This has multiple ramifications that are a big big deal for those of us who raise or otherwise minister to them. For one thing, it means realizing that, above and beyond the normal youth vs adult or human vs authority temptation for rebellion (which I do also posit has special impetus in our time) there is a new, and in my opinion stronger, force to reckon with in the battle for each person to buck off any interruption to their own desired programming for their life. In short, you have to hijack their show, maybe their whole station, in order to shape their being for good.
This is true even when their parents give you the right, and even when the student is religious, for even general Christianity today tends to present itself as self-help rather than demanding self-surrender, and especially where it pertains to submitting to another human being. But, I digress. This means shattering their delicate voyeuristic fantasies over and over in a way that never had to be done with kids of the past. And generally speaking, the older the kid (and the more cool gadgets they have and freedoms they have from parents), the harder the hammer has to be to shatter it (again we’re not talking about the good kids so much, though what we call good doesn ot exempt them from having the same need that I’m discussing here). The great news is that, on the other side, the child can find that reality isn’t something they need to hide or escape from, and that it can in fact be a great adventure and a loving kingdom, more wonderful than any of their own machinations! It may even be true that such “broken in” students are more open and pliable to truth than previous generations because they haven’t spent all their time getting calloused since they’ve not really been engaging in it (though there is definitely a lot more confusion to correct along the way).
Another major ramification is that it is far more difficult to do anything with youth that does not meet their sense of instant entertainment gratification. It is commonly observed that we all used to create our own fun and enthusiasm in various ways (some pin it down to “imagination” though I don’t accuse our youth of lacking that per se). Youth today just seem increasingly unable to do this. Motivation for engaging real life must often be provided (like a director to an actor) by someone else or else by the overwhelming nature of the activity at hand being very inherently entertaining or special. Since life is not at all like that all the time (nor even most of the time), there is a frustrating rub here. Students must be challenged to do more than they think is fun and adults must constantly consider the nature of life’s motivations for doing things in order to transfer healthy values.
According to my evaluation, the worst effect in all of this is that any and all of the terrible ways of our secular society are that much more assimilated and practiced by our youth from earlier and earlier ages, to the point that our 3rd and 4th graders are joking about sex! So many “isms” are not only underlying the stuff kids ingest through media (relativism, nihilism, hedonism, narcissism, etc.) in heavier doses than ever before, but these also are natural derivatives of living for entertainment in the first place. In a time when Christianity is being proffered as a “personal experience” I suggest we return to a more fundamentalist approach of hard core, absolute reality check. Either Christ is Lord of all or He isn’t. Either we need to revere Him or we don’t. Either love is right and righteous, or it isn’t. And on and on the list could go. We can’t begin to think we are competing with the multi-billion dollar industries that have their attention. Our truth needs to be so solid that everything else becomes starkly hollow by contrast. Our proclamations shouldn’t be like commercials for a product we’re selling, but rather like declarations of war on all lies to the contrary, with an army of arguments to back them up. Youth today will not be truly changed until they are truly challenged. Will we be bold enough?
