Accent on Youth

A few years ago a friend of mine who had a very beautiful little daughter was approached by an artist friend of his. The artist wanted to paint a portrait of the little girl for the cover of a national magazine. The girl had a pet kitten that she loved very much, and so it was decided to pose the little girl with the kitten in her arms. This put a look in the little girl’s eyes that the artist wanted to capture.

The painting was turned down by the magazine until the artist was able to replace the kitten with a picture of a puppy. And what was the reason? Well, the publisher wrote, “too many people don’t like cats.” For the sake of sales and the assumed wisdom of what the public “wants,” the truth and reality of the whole enterprise were twisted. I saw the picture and heard the story and I like puppies better than kittens, but the whole thing left a kind of bad taste in my mouth that I have been trying to analyze ever since. Pressure had been applied at the wrong place, and I think for the wrong reason.

Although it is hard to know what the media are doing to our tastes and to our values, anyone with any maturity, or any time to think on these things, knows in his bones that every magazine and every newspaper and every TV outlet, whether for news or for advertising, has its own “twist.” And so we are being constantly twisted.

If you have been interviewed for anything or appeared on any kind of a talk show, you know that you are being used to answer certain kinds of questions in a certain kind of way, and that even the “wrong” answer will be used to get at least some negative interest. The interviewer never really wants to plumb the subject of you; he merely wants to stay inside some accepted clichés of the day that at the moment are thought to be of great importance.

I hold that accent on youth is one of the clichés of our day. It always has to be the same kind of thing: their great intelligence, their honesty, their opinions, which always must be “listened to,” and a general outlook that brings guilt upon the parents and blasts the establishment for lack of understanding. The kitten always has to be replaced by the puppy, because otherwise the picture won’t sell.

If you are a bible-believing Christian you might want to look in the Bible for a youth program. I search in vain. John addresses himself to the young men in his first epistle, and one might draw something out of Paul in Ephesians by implication, though he is really talking about children obeying and parents not provoking and what the age of the children may be there is no way of guessing. Apart from a brief scene in the temple we know nothing about the youth of Jesus. Even at that point in the story we are told that from that period on he was “subject to” his parents, which isn’t a bad idea for youth, though I don’t hear it mentioned much in youth programs. The food, fun, and fellowship of most youth programs find no reflection in Scripture, except by the stringiest kind of implication.

Although the accent on youth is nowhere in Holy Writ, in our churches today it has become almost the essence of what we are about. If one wants to argue this point he is welcome to do so. Insofar as the programs produce and nurture Christians we can give nothing but three cheers; but what concerns me is a queasy feeling that apart from the false emotionalism so often involved, and the popularity hunger of the youth leaders, and the fact that “everybody’s doing it,” the real problem is the adults’ “copout.” They would like to throw the emphasis on the “youth” program so that they won’t feel the pressure of the “adult” program.

The fact of the matter is that the Bible is an adult book; it is aimed at adult sinners and expects them to stand and deliver, to find new birth and new life, and change society, and say their prayers, and meditate on the Bible—and take on the Christian responsibility of training their own youth in their own homes! How often you hear as a pulpit committee discusses the possible candidates: “We ought to get Joe Blow; he’ll be so good for the young people.” No man over thirty-five need apply. And so we are satisfied with the youth program and endure whatever else this young fellow has to proclaim. Besides, we can turn the edge of what the young fellow says, because after all, he is so young.

This leads to the question of how much we have to endure of amateurism. Youth speak to us on every hand. We listen to them on college boards and at civic meetings, and their pictures in these procedures make good material for the local papers. But it becomes increasingly irritating to listen to young people participate in church services, to hear them read the Scriptures badly, to hear them read a prayer that someone else has written, to hear them discuss a big question into which they have put little preparation. They are healthy and eager and attractive, and sometimes they are even cute, and so a man goes down to his house warmed—but he has neither approached nor been fed by the living Lord. One girl gave her witness at an adult meeting recently, and in the midst of tears and words like “fantastic” she shared this with us: “We stayed up all night talking about the rapture and all that stuff and how neat it is.”

Another thing that raises my suspicions: youth work is so easy. I worked for many years in private boys camps, and I have had more than my share of youth conferences. The easiest age group to handle in camp is nine to twelve. You can run them bowlegged all day, they are full of enthusiasm, and they sleep well. Note then how the age level of church and conference programs has been depressed. In the last twenty years a conference I know of has had the average age level of conferees lowered from twenty-five to seventeen, which means there are lots and lots of fifteen-year-old youngsters there. The conference is now not only a different thing—it is a different kind of thing.

Where is the accent of your church program and where is the accent of the Bible? And while you are at it you might look up “child evangelism.”

ADDISON H. LEITCH

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