Teenagers will be Teenagers

So a while back our church started a Youth Group. You may wonder how that idea got past my dad. Well the three leaders are people who all think youth groups tend to be pretty lame and generally stray away from the point. So they decided to keep it simple and have one game to play and a roughly fifteen minute long sermon. NO WORSHIP TEAMS.

But my point for writing this is that last youth group, I saw the first steps towards a contemporary christian youth group. I thought to myself, "How could this have happened when this is exactly what we are trying to avoid?" I found that it simply isn't what the youth pastor does, because he always has good intentions for the kids.

It started when I showed up at the practice field. Everybody was waiting there to get a game of ultimate Frisbee going. So about seven minutes into this some others showed up being "fashionably late". Being fashionably late in this situation usually includes being wild and crazy for attention along with flashy clothing. So we started fitting these people into the game. Some of them were complaining that they didn't want to be on the bad team (the team that somehow didn't get as many capable players), and others were complaining that they were not on the same team as their friend. sooner or later we got the game back on. And then people played for two minutes got bored and began socializing either in the middle of the field or on the side line. This got in the way of the players and altered the teams uneven. So the the guys all started talking to the girls that they liked. And it got time to go back to the church, and listen to the sermon. Well some other people had other plans instead. They decided they would go swing dancing at CJ's rather than stay for the sermon. The leaders had tried to stress earlier in the group that if you are going to play the game you are going to stay for the talk. Nothing else really happened after that except for people sitting together in their cliques.

So the leaders are not to blame not matter their intentions, unless they were acting like teenagers. But when you get a bunch of high school students get together, they will start socializing with their friends every chance they get and forget why they are really there. I have solution ideas for this but it is almost impossible to fix with something like a youth group.

You notice that children and teenagers usually keep quiet during normal church. That's because church has not changed so that it has the average teenager in mind (depending on which church you might go to, but at mine at least). Where as Youth Group is a watered down version of church in which teenagers are more comfortable to be wild and crazy and disrespect what the leader has to say. I believe that teenagers think there are problems that adults have and there are problems that teenagers have. So adults go to church for their issues and teenagers go to youth group for theirs. Wrong. They all can learn from good old fashion church.