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Sometimes I’d like to be able to read the minds of young people in my church,
to find out what they think is happening in our congregation and why they
think we do the things we do. Do they feel as though they fit in and are
welcome? What do they say about our church when they’re with their
friends outside of our church?
I wondered whether I was reading the mind of a Mennonite teenager recently
when I read A Complicated Kindness by
Miriam Toews, an award-winning writer from Manitoba. Nomi Nickel, the protagonist
in this novel, is a teenage girl growing up in a rural Mennonite community
where the people deny themselves “the
pleasures of this world” in order to be “first in line to enjoy
the pleasures of the next world, forever.” The biggest sin among these
Mennonites is to be sure of oneself, and the next biggest sin is to want
things.
There is not much grace in this town—only a complicated kindness, mixed with legalism and hypocrisy. The community in A Complicated Kindness is, of course, an imaginative one. Still, I have to wonder what residual effects of Toews’ own youth get fictionalized in this riveting novel.
Too few of us adults engage the world of youth, either because we’re too preoccupied with our own agendas or because we’re fearful of what we’ll discover there.
I’d also like to be able to read teenagers’ minds to discover what kind of world it is they must live in today. I have to agree with Chap Clark, who argues convincingly in Hurt: Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers (see page 48) that most adults do not have a clue about the complex world our teenagers inhabit. It does not suffice for us to simply look back to our own teen years and assume that we traversed the same passage adolescents are now navigating.
Their world is one that we adults not only don’t comprehend; it is a world too few of us engage, either because we’re too preoccupied with our own agendas or because we’re fearful of what we’ll discover there. The result is that youth have become what Patricia Hersch calls “a tribe apart.” In order to survive their alien world, youth band together to find their own way through it, which only cuts them off further from the adult world.
Despite whatever cool demeanors or brash exteriors they project, many youth are relationally starved, says Clark. They need homes where they feel wanted and welcome, and they need adults, other than their parents, who accept them just as they are, without any expectations or hidden agendas. Unfortunately, Clark says, teachers, coaches, youth ministers, and other adults who work with youth tend to give 80 percent of their time to 20 percent of the youth—to either the gifted youth who excel or the troublemakers who act out as a way of getting attention. What about the other 80 percent of the youth who are as equally in need of adults to befriend them and mentor them through this passage called adolescence?
The church too has ways of marginalizing youth. Rather than putting youth at the core of our congregational life, youth programming is often provided that separates them from the rest of the congregation and doesn’t integrate them into the life of the church or engage them in ministry.
Integrating youth into the church as a whole, of course, doesn’t mean they don’t have special needs, nor that they should never do things in peer groups. But the best things we might do for the youth in our congregations are to pay attention to them, to get to know them, to befriend them, and even mentor them. Such an endeavor will take more than mind reading.
Richard A. Kauffman