You and Youth
by Si Munsie
As I was standing on the playground waiting to go into the school hall for the delights of a recorder concert from 7-year-olds, I was chatting with a few other parents and couldn’t help but agree with one mum’s statement. “I wouldn’t want to go back through my teenage years again. Especially not with all they have to face these days!”
Most coverage of the lives of young people in the media tends not to be all that positive. Particularly so in the portrayal of young people and their families and places like schools and churches and so it’s little wonder that young people are looking to find where they belong…where their place is.
“Youth subcultures offer participants an identity outside of that ascribed by social institutions such as family, work, home and school.”
Subculturism (yes, I’ve made that term up!) is a huge deal in young people’s lives today. Knowing your tribe is one of the ways the world offers to survive in the mixed world of online and real life. It’s not necessarily new though…depending on your era, think Grease or Mean Girls for examples of subcultures on display! But subculturism has always appealed to young people’s desires to stand out whilst blending in with their crowd; to find their place whilst feeling out of place.
But none of that sounds much like the Gospel, does it? Finding our identity in anything other than Jesus Christ is a recipe for disaster for any of us whether in family, work, home, school or online in the ever-expanding stratification of tribal lines. But the gospel of Jesus Christ offers us hope that we are not simply at the whim of the age to which we belong.
Jesus gets at this whole idea as we get to ‘listen’ in on his incredible prayer in John 17 “I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.” He seems to have a pretty good idea about what ‘the world’ is like and his answer is not to ask that the church, or its young people, hunker down, huddle together and hope that some make it through. His solution is to pray to his Father that they would be kept from the evil one and sanctified with the word of truth in the world.
For our young people, the pressures on identity are rife and rampant but even in the church we must be so careful in not subculturing them into being the ‘youth’…the next generation…the future leaders. Nonsense. Either we are the church or we’re not. The beauty and diversity of the church is only amplified when everyone finds their place, including our young people.
Commission Festival gives us an opportunity to speak to the church that includes our young people as part of it; not separate to it. We will be looking through the book of Hebrews with brilliant teachers to see that our identity is found in Jesus Christ and that we are the church and that we all have a role to play. And I promise there will be no recorder concerts…
Two things you can do today:
Pray for our young people during their time at Commission Festival – that they will know and be unshakeable in Jesus.
Serve - If you love the church and you love young people then prayerfully consider joining us in serving. More servers, more conversation, more place-finding, more glory to Jesus through the church. Are you in?
