It resonates with me because I have worried lately about church and my 13-year-old. I am also so thankful that as a kid I was able to develop many meaingful relationships with adults at the churches my father pastored, including many members of the Greatest Generation.
Among my sweetest memories are the times I spent on the Fousts farm in Kansas and the Browns farm in Texas. I remember riding my bike to Pauline's house during summers so she could French braid my hair. I remember the sandwiches Ruby fixed me after school, when I stayed with her when my parents went out of town. I very much benefitted from involvement in a multi-generational church experience. Thus far, Juliette cannot relate to any of this.
Here is an excerpt from Fitch's post:
"Prototype youth groups are built on the worst of modernist assumptions concerning the way human beings develop as cultural beings. They play into the worse impulses of parents who don’t get what is happening right before their very eyes when their children start to take on the moral formation of the ubiquitous culture at large. (Parents want young hip experts to save their kids – UH THAT DON’T WORK!!). They think the answer is to somehow get their children to a place where the youth culture attracts them and somehow makes Christianity attractive to their age group. All these things, I argue, work against the child growing up into a vital and real relationship with the living God and what He has done in Christ for the world."For nearly 20 years, I attended a church with 3,000+ members, but in December, after a lot of struggling, we began attending a church very close to our home that has a reported 8,000+ members. The worst part about leaving my longtime church was pulling my daughter out of the youth group she loved. The worst part about attending the new church has been knowing she's the new kid in the youth group and everyone else has been friends since they were practically babies.
And, I'm still struggling by the way. I want to serve among the poor and the broken, and yet, despite this desire, I more often than not have found myself farthest (and furthest) from them on Sundays. I believe we are all poor and broken in some way, so to be specific when I say "poor" I am referring to those living at or below the poverty level. When I say "broken" I mean those who have gone to hopelessness.
Last Sunday, we visited a church that runs about 30 people in morning worship. It's located in what some would describe as a barrio where 99 percent of the residents live at or below the poverty level. This church does not have a youth group. Naturally, I was nervous about Juliette's reaction, but she said she loved it and wants to return. It seems like the right place for our family, but like the Proverby says, we make our plans, but only God knows which way we will go.
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4 comments:
Very dramatic headline ... very good post. I believe your message transcends just church you group though. I'm not a religious person and did not raise my daughter that way either as a single father. But that has nothing to do with the point you're making.
My daughter was always interacting with adults, strong personalities - where she had to hold her own in conversation on our level otherwise she wasn't included. To segregate young people from adults in church or other thought provoking settings does a disservice to both generations.
The Milennials need to be able to exercise their minds in areas outside their normal peer discussion and the members of their parents generation need to be shaken out of their myopic view of the world formed twenty years ago.
Thanks for sharing this. About a year ago my 12 and 13 year old daughters told us they no longer wanted to attend the childrens ministry. They felt like outsiders because we were fairly new to the church and the other children didn't exactly go out of their way to make friends. I guess that could have worked both ways. And then after a few months of going to church the girls would tell us that the pastor had not even bothered to learn their names. This really bugged the heck out of all of us.
The girls have since then started attending the adult church and they like it a lot better. They say they feel more relaxed and enjoy the pastors sermons. And they are finally starting to communicate with the other teenagers that go to the regular service.
I'm not sure what the childrens Sunday school had to offer my daughters, but I know they are much happier now that they go to church with us. And I am always pleased with the sermons and the message the Pastor leaves with us. I know too that my daughters walk away with something from the service because they will ask us questions later. I don't remember them doing that after a day in Sunday school or any other activity they went to.
Hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving.
Mr. Fitch may accurately describe some of what happens in a lot of larger churches that have the resources to separate their youth programming from the rest of the church. But I don't see it in smaller congregations, even those that have youth programming or perhaps even part-time youth directors.
And of course, his preferred "pedagogical approach" of saying something controversial in order to gain attention and then explaining himself is exactly what he believes isolationist youth ministry does in item no. 3. It attempts a bait-and-switch attention grab and then goes somewhere else. The youth groups "play on" teens' "sexual insecurities" or "desire to be cool;" Fitch plays on the shock value of a statement he admits is more extreme than he actually means. I'd also have liked to have seen some more citations by those "people smarter than him" who've said the same things he has -- his stated preference for exaggeration for shock value's sake also trains me to want to see more backup for his assertions than just his own words.
I'm happy to pray for the ministry of Mr. Fitch and his church and celebrate their successes. I also pray he rids himself of his "bad rhetorical habit" before it trains more people to ignore him because they figure "He's just saying that to get attention."
@CLAY - You make a great point - youth are segregated across numerous arenas in our culture. We even separate them from each other compartmentalizing them by clearly defined age groups. I appreciate your comment - especially shaking Millennials out of myopic world views.
@SOMETHING HAPPENED SOMEWHERE TURNING - Thanks for the comment. Looking back, I took very little away from the one youth group experience I had as a teenager (11th and 12th grade after my father retired). I would trade it for the farms of elder generations any day. It just nurtured my crushes on boys and, yep, even insecurities. Not worth repeating, I'm kind of sad to say...
@FRIAR - Really, I need to publish this comment as a post. You are too smart and informed. =) I was highly annoyed by how dramatic of a statement he made and then the bait and switch as you so eloquently put it. He does run the risk of having his message fall on deaf ears, which is unfortunate, because he has a lot of great things to say. Most importantly, I'm not engaged with this subject matter, so he said things I've been thinking for years - decades even - but never put to pen and paper. I also absoultely agree - there are major differences between small and large church youth groups - at least in my experience and observation.
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