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Yesterday I did two things that make many people want to curl up in the fetal position and rock themselves silly – I drove a bus for a group of teenagers going on a school trip, and hung out for a couple hours at hotel filled with teenagers at some sort of convention (two separate events).  As I watched all these young folks milling about, I was mentally cataloging a list of behaviors – universal tendencies if you will.  After fifteen plus years in student ministry, I can pretty confidently assert that teenagers are, in many ways, just teenagers.  With that in mind, and because it’s a sunny day and I’m feeling fun, here is a quick list of some of my favorite teenager-types (3 from the bus, and 3 from the convention).  Feel free to add some of your own.

1. Stand up on the bus guy.  This seems to be a pretty strongly male characteristic.  On every bus trip ever, there is one kid that just seems to find standing up while the bus is moving irresistible.  He’ll tell you he’s trying find his gum/ipod/water bottle/socks but in reality he has one of two agendas in mind: 1) “accidentally” fall into the lap of the girl he’s too afraid to actually talk to. 2)  he envisions himself as some kind of super hero, defying laws of gravity and semi-flying down the road.

2. Get truckers to honk their horns kid. This role is open to both sexes and holds a certain amount of appeal to everyone at times. But, there’s always the kid that can’t let it go.  They can’t be satisfied with one honk, or even ten.  They believe there’s always a better honk out there and they refuse to rest (despite pleas from their now-former friends) until the hear them all.

3. Start repetitive songs kid. This is most common on the bus, but hotel lobbys and other public venues will suffice as well. There’s always one kid that wants to sing “The Song that Never Ends”, “The Wheels on the Bus”, or “99 Bottles of beer/___ on the Wall” (fill in the blank with non-alcoholic beverage of choice for the Christian kids’ version).  Like his/her trucker-horn-loving counterpart, this kid easily rallies temporary support, but insists on singing about 9 verses more than anyone else in the crowd.

4. Impress you at the convention kid.  This kid comes in both gender varieties,  but is more obvious in guys.  Take today for example. It’s 85 degrees and humid. Most guys as this convention are sporting jeans and golf shirts or t-shirts, some are even wearing kakhy shorts.  ”Impress you” guy is wearing dress pants, dress shirt, tie, and sweater.  Sure, he’s sweating a little bit, but he looks good…just needs the right girl to notice…still waiting…

5. Impress you by not impressing you at the convention guy.  This is the guy who clearly wants all attendees to understand that he is not concerned with being here.  He’s underdressed.  He’s unkempt.  He’s unimpressed.  His only concern is that everyone notice how unconcerned he truly is.

6. Super Convention Kid. Name tag – check. Dress code compliant, yet comfortable- check. Pen, pencil, highlighter, journal (not just the free conference notebook), schedule committed to memory, map of venue, background information on all speakers, and game plan for claiming optimal seating – check, check, check, check…

What are some of your favorites?

Hi friends.  It’s been several weeks since I last posted.  In the time since then, I’ve experienced something that is totally novel to me.  Simply put, I felt as though I did not need to say anything for a while.

This wasn’t a case of writer’s block – I have a running list of topics that I want to write about.  Particularly during the season of Lent, as I did my best to empty myself before God and come face-to-face with my own brokenness, I had a constant feeling that I just didn’t need to be saying anything right then.

I won’t attempt to explain it more than that because I don’t want to end up sounding like I’m trying to convince you of a great spiritual awakening or of my personal spiritual depth and maturity…it wasn’t like that.  It was just prompting to be quiet for a while.  As far as I can tell, that time has passed.  So, I’ll be putting some thoughts out here again on a regular basis.  I look forward to interacting with you all again.

With Ash Wednesday (the official beginning of Lent) coming up tomorrow and a lot of new Lent-practicers out there, I thought I’d re-visit this post from the past.

1.  Make it about giving stuff up.

For Lenten  practitioners, the 40 days leading up to Easter brings a commitment to give something up or fast from something.  This is most often related to food or drink although there are any number of other things (technology/social media is a popular choice right now as well).  The key to really hating your Lenten experience is for the thing you give up to become the focus of Lent.  Yes, some folks will treat it as season of repentance and introspection – a disciplined time of coming before God to face their own sins head-on and walk through the cleansing fires of repentance and confession – but who needs that?  It’s much easier to just say you’re not going to eat chocolate and be done with it.  Of course, you’re likely to grow really bitter about giving it up (and you’ll probably cheat here and there along the way), but at least you won’t have to deal with all the soul-searching.

2. Give up something you don’t really need.

While you’re considering what you’ll give up – try to find that balance of something that you like having in your life but that you really won’t miss all that badly six days a week.  Don’t get too radical.  Don’t make yourself too uncomfortable.  What you’re looking for is something that you can get a little put out about giving up, but can find other crutches to lean on its place – that’s the real key.  If you get too crazy giving things up you’re likely to have to adjust your lifestyle and may even feel compelled to pray for strength and discipline as you go along and who needs that headache?

3. Treat Sundays like any other day

For many, Sundays are celebration days during Lent – kind of mini versions of Easter.  If you really want to throw a wet blanket on your Lenten experience though, don’t get carried away with the Sunday thing.  Certainly you want to make sure you gorge yourself on whatever you’ve given up but otherwise, just do your normal thing.  What you don’t want to do is change your schedule, do any extra reflecting or praying (you’ll check those boxes in your normal Sunday worship service), or go out of your way to celebrate God’s presence and resurrection in your life.  The busier you can be and the less thought you can give to Sundays, the greater your potential to maximize your misery over giving up that thing you don’t really even care too much about the rest of the week.

Good luck!

Author note: I’ve learned these through experience.  I’ve also learned that a Lenten season can be salvaged by righting the ship mid-Lent if you find yourself losing your ferver and discipline.  “Lent for man, not man for Lent.”  If you find yourself having a bad Lenten experience, you have the freedom to change that immediately.  Re-evaluate your prayer time, your discipline, your priority, your fasting, your schedule – all of it.   May God sharpen all of us through this season as we move toward the celebration of the greatest moment of history.

Like most who work with young people and families in churches, I’m reading, thinking, and theorizing a lot right now about the alarming rate at which young people leave the church after high school  (recent studies put the rate upwards of 50% across evangelical denominations).  If you’re a parent or church leader and haven’t read Sticky Faith, Real World Parents, and You Lost Me (just to name a few front-runners), you need to do so immediately.  

The question that is nagging at me is this: What if the problem is not just about educational philosophy, program design, or church structure…what if it’s about a foundational misrepresentation of the Christian faith?

Christianity, at its core is a mystic religion. Simply put, this means it hinges on supernatural powers and realities.  We believe in a God who is entirely “other” than we are.  We believe that, by means we cannot fully understand, we are able to participate in the death, burial, and resurrection of God’s son Jesus.  I doing this, our sins are canceled, we partner in God’s redemptive work on earth, and we anticipate being with God forever in a place we cannot fully describe or understand.  We believe in the presence of evil, particularly as conducted by Satan (a spiritual being) and those forces working alongside him.  We believe that we are given power and direction for navigating this life by the indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit.  This (although a very simplistic representation of the whole) is a mystical set of beliefs and it is the foundation that all of our rules, practices, and principles rest upon. 

Enter the Enlightenment, Scientific Method, Rationalism, and The Industrial Revolution.  Over the course of the last few centuries, western Christianity has tried to frame itself as a rational religion.  Very simply put, his means we focus on finding answers to supernatural phenomena and we value individual responsibility and work ethic.  

This collision of world-views has created what I believe is a faith-based case of cognitive dissonance – the painful psychological state we find ourselves in when our beliefs and realities to do not match.  Unfortunately, we’ve been trying so hard for so long to rationalize Christianity that we are blind to the problem.  We are so far removed from a mystical understanding of our faith that it doesn’t occur to us to think about this as a gap in what we’re passing on to the next generations. 

Now, enter generations Y and iY (labels for those born since 1980).  These folks show up at church with a postmodern, post-Christian worldview.  They don’t feel obligated to accept propositional truth just because the preacher tells them to.  They distrust anyone that claims to have the answer.  For these people, a rationalized depiction of a mystical religion just doesn’t feel right.  Perhaps they cannot put their finger on exactly why that is.  Perhaps they don’t have a robust enough theology to explain their discomfort, but it’s very real.  And for this generation, it’s enough to cause them to look outside the church for something that seems more real. 

What if Christian faith is exactly what they’re looking for, but the modern, Western church isn’t the place to find it?  

What if the problem isn’t that they don’t want Christianity, but that they don’t resonate a rationalized version of God’s mystical work in redeeming our world?

What if they SHOULD be leaving the church because the church has reduced the mystical power and nature of God to a set of principles and formulas, which frankly, aren’t that compelling?

What if GOD is leading them out of the church, not to kill the church, but to reform and reshape her – to call her back to faithfully witnessing to the mystical, unfathomable, holy nature of the tri-une God?

Note:  These are questions that are ruminating in my mind.  They are speculations.  I do not claim to be the one person that has solved the riddle of young people leaving the church.  I am confident that the issue defies any one explanation and certainly any one blog post.  I do see some connection here though.  Please feel free to add your thoughts to the conversation.