Author: Robert

i hate senioritis! it’s a very personal hatred too. i don’t hate it because my seniors are not around to be leaders within the youth ministry anymore – truthfully it seems to me each year that the junior class within the student ministry are almost always better leaders/servants than the seniors. it’s not even that the number of seniors attenders to our weekly services goes down because the past two years it hasn’t – last year we had more seniors attending at the end of the year than at the beginning and the same thing seems to be happening this year.

nope the real reason i hate senioritis is completely selfish – i don’t get to spend as much time with my seniors as soon as senioritis kicks into gear. even though we have more seniors coming to our weekly programs i don’t see the same seniors as often and when i do see them they don’t just hang out as much. we have a fair number of teens who regularly participate in the ministry. yet the whole thing still feels small because everyone loves each other and there is always allot of hanging out that happens before and after things. for some reason it seems like every year the seniors just don’t hang out as much. i love these guys & girls. i’ve spent four years getting to know my senior class. i love the circles of conversations that form after our wednesday night worship service, the view. in many ways these “circles” are the life blood of our ministry. i hate senoritis because it keeps our seniors from being a big part of these “circles”. they simply have other things going on now so they attend, they sing loudly, they listen well but they don’t hang out. that saddens me.

in addition to the fact that our kids love to hang out with each other one of the things i love about our student ministry is that our teens and adults desire to be apart of making things happen. we aren’t just putting things “on” for people to come to. we have a group of people who want to participate in the process of ministry. they show up early, they volunteer to help with things, they come up with ideas for things to be involved in and ways to improve what is going on, and last but not least they aren’t afraid to try something new and possibly fail completely (we frequently try things that fail miserably). senioritis leads to our seniors merely being “attenders” when they used to be “participants.” that saddens me.

slowly but surely our seniors are pulling out of our hang out “circles” and becoming attenders rather than participants. it happens every year and i guess i should be used to it by now. i’m not and i hope i’ll never actually be “used to it.” our seniors are showing up for events and programs and then leaving. they have new directions in life that are pulling them in new directions. i understand that but i still don’t like it. honestly, i feel like the new directions are pulling the kids away from me. yes this is all about me. i’ve seen them grow from eighth graders, small little pubescent punks :), to young men and women. i love hearing their stories. i love and enjoy these seniors (just like i did last year’s and the year before’s) both as individuals and a group. i miss them when i don’t get to spend as much time with them. every year about this time the seniors start simply coming to things and that’s when i start missing them.

i see it happening already and i am beginning to miss these kids already. that saddens me.

a friend of mine (chris) sent me the following “open letter” via email. i’ve since found it on brian mclaren’s site. anyways, i was amazed by this letter.

As a 24-year-old youth leader, I have had many conversations with teens and twenty-somethings, both churched and unchurched. If we truly listened, they might say something like this:

Dear Church, Leaders:

By now, some of you are beginning to notice that we, the high school upperclassmen, college students, and young adults, have lost interest and have decided that our time and money is better spent elsewhere. For those who actually want to know why, here is your chance to listen – and we know that this may be hard since many of you have learned to pretend that you’re listening to ease your aching consciences. Just so you know, you haven’t fooled us; we can see through your pretentious attempts. However, this is one last chance to hear us out – we may not speak again, so fasten your seatbelts.

Whether you realize it or not, we have actually learned very much from you, our priests, pastors, teachers, and parents. Sadly, we have learned more from your lives than from your lectures and sermons. We have learned that it is much more important to seek financial stability from high-paying, prestigious jobs and collect needless junk than it is to pursue a life of self-sacrifice and adventure. We have learned to evaluate others on the basis of race, gender, income level, and appearance. We have learned that memorizing mindless creeds and analyzing theological systems have little power in making us better people.

We have learned how to outsource responsibility. We have learned to leave childcare to the professionals, caring for the poor to the government, social justice to the ACLU and NAACP, reproductive decisions to Planned Parenthood, and environmental awareness to the Darwinists and tree-huggers.

Most of us will never return, at least not to an institutionalized church. We have zero interest in participating in your silly, religious subculture. Honestly, it’s ridiculous, cheesy, and self-serving. We will never give you our money, which we’d rather spend on rent and alcohol, so that you can make your Lexus payment or add to your building fund.

Do we sound too harsh? Where do you think we learned how to judge?

It may surprise you to find out that, although our church attendance is slipping, we are very interested in spiritual matters, perhaps more so than you. We are desperately searching for something touchable to transcend our lives of quiet desperation. We hate our jobs, we don’t know how to have healthy relationships, we are constantly seeking the next thrill. We are terribly bored and dissatisfied. We are screaming for answers.

We have also learned that we don’t want the life of any adult that we know.

You asked for it, so here’s our wish list:

We want our lives back. You told us that God wants us to live exciting lives, but that’s not what we found. We want our individuality valued. You told us that God created us exactly they way we are for special reasons – why do you invest so much time and energy trying to strip us of our uniqueness so that we can fit inside the same tiny little box you try to put your God into!!! By the way, most of us who may appear at a glance to be lazy are simply unmotivated. We’ll spend hours on creative projects; however, we simply have no desire to participate in a dehumanizing workforce that requires us to leave our individuality at home just to play a monotonous role in making another piece of worthless junk. Give us a reason to put our hearts back into our work.

Teach us HOW to think. You want us to believe that God is Sovereign and self-evident and that absolute truth exists. If He does, then He can speak for Himself. He doesn’t need a hypocritical entourage to defend Him with sleazy, used-car-salesman manipulation tactics. Teach us how to identify spiritual truth and how to spot the work of God in our lives – don’t hand us a pamphlet to memorize.

How about a little compassion? Whether we think Jesus is the Son of God or not, most of us have a favorable opinion of Him and recognize that he knew how to live a selfless life. We may never participate – after all, one of the other things we learned in Sunday school was how to live comfortably with a disconnect between our beliefs and our actions – but if you made honest attempts to follow His example, at least we could respect you.

One last thing: stop trying to make us fill your seats and sing your songs and listen to your sermons before you will “minister” to us. If you have no interest in forming actual human relationships with us, then don’t even bother. We are not projects. We aren’t an untapped market. We don’t need another program. We don’t need another product to consume. We do need friendship and we do need identity. Meet us here, and we might listen. Oh, and by the way, at that point you still might not need to say much because we pick up so much more from watching than from listening.

Sincerely,
Your prodigal slackers

HURRAY! blogger has updated their comments! now non-blogger users can post comments with their name and website. ah, yes. it’s good.

SIDE NOTE – i uploaded the summary video from our fall JESUS project retreat. i made the video in imovie and therefore the format is quicktime rather than the usual realmedia that i publish the other movie files in. i’m not very pleased with this video. i wish it moved a little faster. it feels like every scene last about 4 seconds too long. it makes for a slow feel through out the whole video. of course, i made the video in the 30 minutes before our last worship service on the sunday that the retreat ended so i guess the video is as good as time allows. i really need to figure out how to use final cut express 2. i’ve just been too lazy to really dig into the program and figure the whole thing out.