A Jester in the King's Court

Let's be frank, I am not the world's most ideal youth pastor. Yes I have the traditional youth pastor goatee, but my jeans are not form fitting, I hate coffee and the only V-neck shirt I own is orange and was bought on accident as a workout shirt from Wal-Mart. My wardrobe does not look like a Good Will store specializing in 1960's and 70's apparel, I think having youth eat a gallon of mayonnaise is disgusting and I find food fights disrespectful. I hate the "small group" model that most groups follow, I'm not a fan of having a band of some sort come in and try and woo youth to show up, make emotionally charged decisions and then never show up again...and it took me 5 tries to get "decisions" misspelled close enough for spell check to tell me the right spelling.

At core I'm an apologetics guy. My heart is in the defense of the Christian faith and seeing orthodoxy in the lives of others. On the whole, this isn't the most important thing to a large majority of what we call Christian. Be it Joel Olsteen style self help, or William Young feel good experientialism, or Rob Bell's casserole of wrongness...the church does not on the whole care about orthodoxy. The care about assimilation. Be that assimilation into acting like everyone else, or going out of your way not to act like everyone else (and join the large group that does just that...the irony). Either way, the dogmatic concern in the church as a whole, and in youth groups predominately, is a concern on action.

Action clearly is important. However, a youth pastor's job is not to make the youth act a certain way. Philosophically speaking, act comes from being (Colin Gunton has a great book on this). Since I can only act in such a way that I am, even if I do action "x" for a while...if I m actually person "y", then over time my action "x" will stop and action "y" will be what is left. This is why my job is not to teach youth not to lie; rather to teach them that God is truth. If I teach them "don't lie" that will only go so far as their conscious and their thinking I'm right" can take it. But if I teach them that "God is truth" and that therefor a lie is an affront to God, then there is a reason to not lie. Telling the truth has nothing to do with me or them, and everything with God.

This is why when I'm in charge of a youth group, they know CS Lewis. They know Augustine and Luther (Martin, not Lex...they know Lex cause I'm a geek). Many youth pastors think that youth only need the basics of the faith, and maybe that is because that's all they can bring to the fore...but our present society is not the type where any Christian just needs the basics. Teenagers are the target of worldview assaults like crazy. If a teenager graduates High School and thinks homosexuality is wrong, that is a rare thing. In a society in which the average age that a child is introduced to pornography is 11 (it might be 10, I cant remember the study I looked at), if they make it out of High School...or even to High School a virgin, that is impressive. But those things only happen thanks to a deep and firm relationship with God, not a passing feeling about Him.

That all said, I teach obscure theology to my teens. They know the titles of books by RC Sproul and GK Beale and use zeitgeist and diaspora as zings. And oddly enough, they invite friends to that type of group. Starting tomorrow we are going to start talking about worldviews and other religions, and we are actually going to hammer out the fact that as much as we love our unsaved friends, they aren't going to heaven so they need to hear the gospel. It's going to be fun.

Do I talk over the heads of some youth? Totally. But you know what happens when you teach 7th-12th grade at a 7th grade level? The 12th graders stay jr highers. If you teach 7th-12th at a 12th grade level? The group as a whole, over time, matures and can think at a higher level. Its painful at first, but has yet to fail. And, in 2009 there is not a single issue a 12th grader faces that a 7th grader doesn't face.

Hence, I've always said that I focus on Discipleship and Dodgeball. Deep teaching and fun games that teach them not to take themselves seriously. No real reason I decided to write this today aside from the fact that I realized I probably should have this written some place.