adulting
So let’s ask an important question….
What exactly does it mean to be an adult?
There is a child's definition: Someone who is older, authoritative, decisive, and doubt-free.
There is the post-World War II definition: someone who is married, has children, and, if male, is supporting his family, and, if female, is caring for her family.
Legal definitions vary. A person can drive at 16, vote and serve in the military at 18, drink at 21, and rent a car at 25.
There are also today’s kidults: the adults who refuse to act their age, who embrace their inner child, play video games, wear youthful fashions, read books targeted at adolescents, and listen to teen music.
Then there is the psychological definition: someone who is self-sufficient and responsible for her or his own decisions.
In almost every definitive way, today’s high school student is considered and expected to be a young adult in almost every context of their young adult lives except one.
That one exception, for the most part, is their respective faith community.
I know a teenage girl who, when she turned 16 years old, along with driving by herself to school, started carpooling with two teenage teammates four nights a week from north Atlanta to Buckhead and back for soccer training.
At the age of 18 years old, she voted for the first time during the midterm elections.
She navigated the complicated and nuanced world of friendships and relationships, discovering along the way who she is, what she stands for, what she values, and who she considers a true friend and confidant.
This young woman traveled by plane, without her parents, multiple times, both nationally and internationally. She’s been on foreign soil serving others and playing soccer against other countries’ teams.
She was responsible for her academic standing and meeting with teachers when she needed help. She made her own meals. She got herself out of bed in the morning. For two years, she woke herself up at 5:00 am several times a week to go for a run or work out before school. She attended weekly leadership meetings before school. She met on her own with her small group leader and with a group of friends for accountability. She procured a job on her own.
When it was discovered that the superintendent of the school system she attended was recorded using incredibly hateful, deplorable racist language, she stood in front of a frenzied, standing-room-only Board of Education meeting and emotionally pleaded for justice and for adults to hold themselves to a higher standard of integrity for the sake of her classmates and school.
We know this because that young woman is our youngest daughter Cameron.
And Cameron is simply a microcosm of the everyday lives of today’s high school student.
High school students navigate an ever-changing world daily where they live, breath and have his or her being in a post-modern, first post-Christian, narcissistic, internet, media, anxiety, sex-saturated culture where they are the loneliest, most multi-racial, sexually fluid, self-directed, under-protected, digital heartbeat generation in history.
High school students are a part of student bodies, teams, casts, bands and jobs where classmates, teammates, cast mates, band members, fellow employees and employers are depending on them and vice versa. There is an incredibly high level of accountability.
These students are making the difficult choice of where they will be spending the next four years of her or his life in regard to college or within the work force. Many have worked extremely hard to have scholarship opportunities, and to make a choice as to where you will attend college many times means to whom you are choosing to become loyal.
And what does a teenager’s world look like within their faith community?
Generally speaking, when a teenager starts attending church, they are told who she or he will be in a small group with. They really don’t have a choice in the matter.
The girls or guys in their respective small groups were selected by the leaders of that respective youth ministry.
They are usually chosen because they are the same gender, in the same grade, attend the same school or live near each other.
Never mind that they may not have anything in common, or that they may be in different places in their spiritual journey, or even if they can trust each other.
A youth leader or team of youth leaders, many times removed from the firsthand understanding of a specific teenager’s story or needs, decide: “This is who you are going to be accountable to, be transparent with, and trust your most innermost secrets to.” Youth leaders, this is in essence what we say to high school students when we make these types of decisions.
Furthermore, when a teenager does attend youth group, many times they sit and experience a time of worship led by professional musicians and singers, sit and listen to a professional communicator communicate, and then move to this circle of friends that has been created for them, where they sit and listen to a caring adult try to coax the people they didn’t choose to be friends with to be vulnerable and talk.
And, sadly, many have experienced a paralyzing and heartbreaking truth; that something shared in confidence in small group can get plastered all over the internet via social media and text by the same group of people they didn’t choose to do life with and weren’t sure they trusted in the first place.
And we wonder why teenagers struggle to be consistent in attendance?
I would imagine that someone reading this will have major and serious objections to the premise I have submitted. Some may say that high school students are way too busy, that it is their parents’ fault, and that parents like me are a part of the problem.
I would actually probably agree with that, to a point.
Our perspectives, however, may part ways at that place where the same prognosticators absolutely destroy the next generation for being soft, having no grit or toughness, and ill-prepared for the world at large. Brene Brown articulated this so well when she said,
“What makes children happy doesn’t always prepare them to be courageous, engaged adults.”
We can't lambast Generation Z for a lack of resolve, toughness, and grit, bemoan them as the demise of our nation, and in the same breath discourage them from environments and contexts that are best positioned to teach those very things.
That makes very little sense.
Every single parent I know feels the weight of responsibility to prepare their teenager for the world they live in now, not the world that was when we (the parents) were teenagers. And having lived and led on both sides of this equation, both as a youth leader and as a parent, I must confess that most youth leaders give little thought to the enormity of a parent’s task of trying to raise captains in an MVP world. The decisions are complicated and more nuanced than “get your teenager to church every time the doors open.”
It is by far the hardest thing Kellee and I have ever attempted to do.
And the most rewarding.
You may also object to my rebuttal by saying that a high school student can and should be as committed to their faith community as they are sports, drama, band or a job. Let’s be crystal clear: teenagers need a faith community. Period. End of story. Cut, wrap, moving on. That is not the question on the table. Most parents understand and believe this as well.
Maybe the persons to whom we should be asking better questions, to attempt to gain perspective and clarity, are the high school students we continue to treat like 8-year-olds?
Maybe we as youth leaders need to admit that much of our angst and frustration regarding teenagers and attendance revolves around our desire for critical mass in a room for whom we have poured a ton of energy and resources programmatically and many times to whom we personally are communicating….and rarely considers the power of authentic community first?
Maybe we should consider that perhaps the reason why students are choosing sports, drama, band, and employment is that something is actually expected of them and someone is actually relying on them there, other than just showing up and being a spectator. Even more so, then being placed in a circle of people they didn’t choose to be in a circle with and expected to be honest and vulnerable to?
Maybe the idea of a small group works perfectly until, developmentally, teenagers can now decipher who they are, what is important to them and who they want to do life with?
Maybe the next generation is further down the road to adulting then we want to think or believe.
Let’s wrestle with this.
Be anxious to matter.
