Good Kids and Bad Kids

This is another train typing post, which I always feel funny about – although they are usually more popular with you all than most other posts, so we’ll see how we go. I feel like I actually left last night’s (well by the time this got posted – the night before) post on “Crash” only having covered half the ground that I set out to, but I ended up following the racism path to the end. And the fact of the matter is that I think we are kidding ourselves if we think that the only stereotypes that are doing serious harm in the community at the moment are racist ones.

As someone who was a teenager not so long ago, and who does a bit of youth ministry stuff, one of the stereotypes that really just gets me riled is the notion that all teenagers are either good or bad. And basically, as far as I can see, it seems that adults across the board are willing to split teenagers into the goodies and the baddies. The media in this country are often the biggest culprits. If you were to base your opinion of youth in Australia purely on the fear-inducing tripe that spews out of “A Current Affair” and “Today Tonight” (and lets be honest, there’s a decent chunk of the community that does just that) you would be forced to conclude that 90% of all teenagers are sex-crazed, drugged out, thieving, foul-mouthed, satan-worshipping scum bags. And almost the strangest part is that the teenagers who do something right, who do something good, suddenly are portrayed as being portrayed as completely alien from youth culture and angelic in every way.

The part that riles me the most about our strict delineation between the good kids and the bad kids is when it happens in the place that really should be the most understanding, the most accepting, and the most willing to look past the external appearances of our teenagers and start actually looking at what’s going on underneath. Church. But the fact of the matter is, there are few places that are less willing to categorise our young people than in our churches (in my experience).

Our church has a group of skater boys. They are mischevious to say the least, and they look like they would struggle to construct a sentence that has more than three suyllables in it. And that’s how huge chunks of our church treat them. They get left off to the side, thrown disapproving looks, and are quite often made to feel like we bear them because “we accept everyone”. And we have some very clean-cut, very sweet, nice kids. And they get treated as such. We point them out to people in our church. We put them in our worship teams. Parents set up their clean cut sons with other parent’s clean cut daughters.

When our nice kids go out and participate in our servant evangelism activities, everyone admires their giving spirit and how enthusiastic they are to go and serve the Lord and we all hold hands and sing Kum-ba-ya (well, maybe not quite). When our skater boys go and participate in servant evangelism they are just looking for somewhere to go so they can avoid the sermon. That last part was a direct quote.

This has probably been overstating the influence of these stereotypes in our church, because the fact of the matter is that our church IS a very accepting place and these events are not as commonplace as the previous paragraphs might have made out. But the underlying feeling is there. And it hurts both parties. We get left with kids who are disillusioned with what church is about, and about their own place in that. Church becomes a place for people who aren’t like them, people who can sit still all the time and are super-polite and say the right thing every time. Kind of like how the Pharisees were, only you can’t say that because we all know that we’re not going to be like Pharissees. And the fact of the matter is, some of those boys are the most mature christians in our entire youth group. And they are actively doing stuff about it – they are going to the parties and keeping each other accountable and together staying well away from any alcohol.

And these stereotypes hurt the good kids equally as badly. You don’t have to be over the age of 18 to feel the weight of the expectations of the entire church. They know that they can’t be seen to be bad. They know how important it becomes to keep up the facade. So they segment their lives. They keep their social lives completely separate from their church lives because if anyone found out that they aren’t who people think they are then imagine how many people they’ll have let down.