Teenagers

 

I found this description of Moore's time as youth pastor at a church really thought-provoking. The last sentences I have highlighted at the end of the first paragraph really made me stop and think and pray for our children- how I don't want this to be true of them but how easily it could happen growing up in a christian home. Please Lord would our children embrace the gospel, be amazed and alarmed by it and encounter the Lordship of Christ.

Moore:

There were two groups that divided the youth group there in Biloxi. The first group was made up of “churched” kids, those who did what was expected in the Bible Belt, and made professions of faith, followed by baptism, as young children. These kids knew the gospel, from start to last, and could rattle off the right answers at will. The gospel neither surprised nor alarmed them. They knew how to embrace just enough of an almost-gospel to stay within the tribe, without embracing so much gospel as to encounter the lordship of Christ.

But, as time went on, another group of teenagers started to trickle in to our Wednesday night Bible studies. The second group was mostly fatherless boys and girls, some of them gang members, all of them completely unfamiliar with the culture of the church and with the message of the gospel. Some of them unwittingly reversed the Protestant Reformation by persistently calling me “Father Moore,” just because the only clergy they’d ever seen were Catholic priests in movies. Prayer request time often proved challenging, with one girl asking for prayer that she wouldn’t get pregnant that weekend since she’d run out of birth control pills and her boyfriend didn’t like to wear a condom. Some of them would show up in a cloud of marijuana. The church was so strange to them that they didn’t know what to hide. 

The churched kids, though, learned the dark side of Bible Belt culture—how to know the books of the Bible in order, how to answer all the right questions in small group discussion, and how to get drunk, have sex, and smoke marijuana without their parents ever knowing it. Recognizing that many of the baptized kids in my orbit were, in fact, pagan, I shared the gospel, but I kept hitting wall after wall of invincible intelligence. 

The unchurched kids laughed at the Bible studies based on television shows or songs of the moment. They weren’t impressed at all by the video clips provided by my denomination’s publisher, or to the knockoff Christian boy bands crooning about the hotness of sexual purity. What riveted their attention wasn’t what was “relatable” to them, but what wasn’t. They were drawn not to our sameness but to our strangeness. 

“So, like, you really believe this dead guy came back to life?” one of the unchurched fifteen-year-old boys asked me one day. “I do,” I replied. He said, “Wait, for real?” I responded, “Yep. For real.” He blinked and whispered, “Dude, that’s crazy.” But he stayed around, and he listened. 

The “churched” kids, and some of their parents, were outraged. Didn’t I know, they asked, that some of these adolescents were in gangs, that they smoked weed, and had sex? It was beside the point that almost all of these things (save gang membership) were going on among the “churched” kids too. The point was they knew how to behave. I explained that “how to behave” could be translated as “how to hide sin” through a cycle of Saturday decadence and Sunday repentance.