I have been thinking a lot lately about generational conflict. Specifically, about how I feel like I was failed by previous generations, particularly within the church. I do not mean individuals in my life but the attitudes of generations that came before me as a whole.
Let me explain.
Growing up in the church I feel like the older generations of the church failed to fight for me and they failed to equip me for the struggles that they knew that I would face. Instead I was given mandates; “don’t even think about sex until you are married,” “that’s wrong because the bible says it is,” etc. And we were not given the harder answers or really even encouraged to think about our faith and how to live it and what it meant. I feel like a lot of the time my generation was given what the right answer should be but weren’t given the opportunity to question why and, by extension, learn why. Then, when we came across difficult questions, we did not have real answers for them, and we did not have a real understanding of why we were supposed to live our lives certain ways. We were bombarded by logical, well thought out explanations, and had no resources to defend ourselves other than saying, “that’s what I was taught.” We thought that pressure to sin would come from outside of us and were shocked when it started bubbling up inside of ourselves. We thought that all sexual attraction was lust and grew discouraged when we did not know how to take command of our own bodies. We lost battles and turned away because we were not taught enough to defend ourselves. Is it any wonder that so many millennials claim to be Christians but don’t live out a relationship with God?
On the other side of that, I feel like the church also told my generation that they did not care about us.
I grew up in churches that were always fighting about music. The battle of modern worship vs hymn and hymnals. The King James Version vs the New Living Translation. The older people I went to church with would complain and lament that they couldn’t get their child or grandchild to come to church and they would do anything to get them to come… except attend a church that had the nerve to incorporate a drum set into worship. In high school my dad pastored a church that had a Wednesday night worship service before the youth group would meet. Unfortunately, the church choir had practiced in the sanctuary on Wednesday night at that time for the last 50 years. During worship the choir would file in and sit on stage glaring at the teenagers who had the nerve to meet in their before youth group on Wednesday nights. We weren’t just being told that we didn’t matter, we were being told that we were the enemy, that we weren’t wanted in church. My dad fought with that church for a year to reach the youth of our community before the church told him he wasn’t wanted there either. Is it any wonder that many millennials claim to be Christians but are unchurched?
The generations just before me failed my generation, especially in the church, and honestly, I am mad about it.
There is a lot of generational strife going around these days between baby boomers, bloomers, gen x, millennials all blaming each other for various things. Millennials are mad about the circumstances they inherited and about getting blamed for destroying industries while Boomers are mad about degradation of values and that millennials are lazy. And while we are all just pointing fingers at each other and fighting over whose fault it all really is I cannot help but wonder who is fighting for the generations that come after me. Yes, I am mad that it seems that the church did not fight for me, that it did not fight for the hearts and souls of my generation but what good can directing that anger back at them possibly do? We have to stop trying to assign blame for the world being the way it is and start taking responsibility for the fact that the world can be changed. I can say I am mad at the generations that came before me for not equipping me for the battles I was unprepared to face or for preparing me for a world that no longer exists but if I do not take that information and prepare the kids who are younger than me for those things then I am failing them in the same way I was failed.
In Proverbs, the bible says to train children in the way they should go and when they are old, they will not depart from it (proverbs 22:6). It does not matter if we were not trained the way I think we should have been, it is our job to train the generations coming after us and equip them for the battles that they will surely face.
Make no mistake, we will be held responsible if we fail.
The question is, how can we do that? How do we take the personal battles that we lost and use them to equip the next generation to win them?
I spend my summers out at a youth camp, most recently working with middle schoolers, and when I was asked to take on the task of directing middle school camp I decided that I wanted to focus it around how we behave in the world and how do we act like Christians in every situation, and I wanted them to critically think about why we make the choices we are asked to make. One of the ways that I feel failed by the older is that I feel like I was given a lot of rules for how to act but never had them explained. No one told me that it was okay to question a rule so that I could know why it was in place. Instead I often felt like there was a committee of Good Christian Bitches who had standards they wanted me to live by but never told me why.
“I get that it is one of the 10 commandments but WHY does it matter to God whether or not I have sex before I’m married?”
I get that there are rules that are in place to protect me, but I don’t know what they are protecting me from.
So, I wanted to be sure that the kids were thinking about why certain things were asked of them in their relationship with God and in the way that they interact with the world. All of my discussion questions were terribly vague, generally using the words “discuss.” I wanted to give them resources in the bible that show them the reasons for certain things. Most importantly I did not want to say to them that there were things that they were not old enough to know about because they were middle schoolers.
That is another way in which I felt failed. Many of my friends who grew up in the church alongside of me talk about how they did not know certain stories. There was information they were deemed too young to learn or that they were not ready for yet and their discipleship did not grow with age. To me one of the defining marks of a cult is there being information that you have to be deemed worthy of knowing. You have to get to a certain level of knowledge and then you learn the next level of information. We should not treat our kids that way. They are capable of understanding and thinking and we need to allow them the chance to think critically about things.
I have spent a lot of my adult life working with teenagers and preteens and I know they think very deeply about things. They want to understand, and we should give them the chance to really, deeply understand and to understand that there are things in this world that are terrifying but that does not mean that they cannot be brave and good in the face of them.
There are so many more ways that we can take our losses and turn them into future victories if we understand that we cannot effectively change things if we are busy placing blame. It does not matter if I am angry at the generations that came before me or not. What matters is whether or not I fail to equip the generations that come after me.
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