Adolescents and Church People: Cut from the Same Cloth

I used to be amazed at how bitter and unhappy students around me used to be.

One example: a lost my temper with one student, and I said some words that I regretted.

One kid overheard the comments that I had made -- and he refused to let it go.

"Remember when you called that a kid a . . . . .?"

Twice he pressed me about this. All I could do was cringe, shrugged my shoulders, then moved on.

Some students just refuse to let go. In my more cynical moods, I remarked to another teacher that adolescents tend to act like church people, just without the church, like Pharisees intent on pointing out the flaws and failures of others.

I can understand why church people and adolescents have those unpleasant characteristics in common. They are pressured by group peers to conform to a set of rules and standards. Rather than prizing the skills and traits which they already possess, church people and adolescents try to live up to someone else's standards, and inevitably defeatist program which leads to despair and dysfunction.

For teenagers, some of them contemplate suicide. Church people tend to conform more readily, or they just find another church to fellowship in. However, a growing number of adults refuse to go to church at all, so frustrated have they become with the gossip and the finger pointing which is pervasive in churches.

Like church people, adolescents nurse grudges, or at least they tend to do that. When individuals break down into groups, they can become warring factions very quickly. When life becomes about being in the "in crowd", being in the "We" instead of the "they" cohort, very quickly individuals rack up resentments and define others by what they do and have done wrong.

This kind of cold war proliferates in churches as well as in schools, and grows worse in large part because opinions about spiritual matters and identity are imprinted very deeply for individuals who are either learning about their place in this world or in the world to come.

Youth who cannot get a grip on who they are in high school will gravitate toward groupthink as adults, a shameful prison from which very few break free, so accustomed have they transformed themselves into following the patterns and thoughts of others, seeking the approval of men instead of resting in the approval of God the Father who created us and seeks to redeem us.

Young people can get caught up into the bitter tirades of the holiness crowd very easily.  I am astonished at the number of young people in Sunday Schools and Children's Church who still practice a great deal of vice and dysfunction, mostly because even in church they are taught to value the favor of men instead of the eternal love of God the Father through His Son Jesus Christ.

Conformity to the world is a static prison of imprints and glazed malaise, where a man or woman may fit in, yet undo the holy fitness into which we are called to enter and enjoy ourselves.

Adolescents and church people indeed are cut from the same cloth: group pressure enshrined in rules and regulations which have nothing to do with reality. Human beings are designed indeed to cooperate with others, but we cannot help each other if we depend on one another for our security and definition of ourselves and our standing in this world.

Young people, whether in secular or sacred settings as far as the world is concerned, need to learn that who they are and the values that live within them depend on Someone far greater than what they can sense or discern with their five senses. Traditions, beliefs, hopes and dreams, information and insight depend on forces, on facts, on a faith far beyond our day-to-day hopes and experiences.

We must break young and old free from the inane folly which bluntly and crudely claims that we can make our way in this world according to our own limited dictates. No set of shallow reflections could be more damaging to our youth entering an unknown future than the flimsy notion that their life, their values, the truth and error that they are acquainted with, all depend on them. They are entering a world where the rules of the game have not been taught to them, where they fear failure in large part because they do not know how to define success nor how to discern and distinguish the good and positive from the wasteful and negative information in their lives.

Young people who do not graduate outside of the opinions of others as their stable data inhabit churches and social clubs, looking for power, prominence, and purpose, yet finding none of it.

The embittered hordes of adolescence in many cases grow into the battered hordes of adults still seeking answers in our churches, where pastors and church leaders lean on public opinion instead of eternal truth.