In case you’re wondering, I am going to finish this series this week, so that means three more high places to go. Here is the third of the five:
3. The Idolatry of Youth. I know the high place all too well: many Christian parents have made an idol out of their children. Considering how frustrated we can all get with our children, it’s hard to think how we’ve made idols out of them. But think of how our schedules are dictated by our kids, and how most of what parents talk about revolves around the kids, and how getting our kids “every advantage” in life takes precedence over church, the husband-wife relationship, and just plain commonsense.
I love my children as deeply as any parent. I know there are sacrifices we all make (especially moms) for our kids. But I also know the temptation for many Christian parents (including me) is to let our children come before everything else in life, to nurture them (along with the rest of the world and the social media) toward narcissism, entitlement, and laziness. The old adage that kids should be seen but not heard may have been a little lopsided. Kids are kids after all. They do screwy things. But we have completely loaded down the see-saw in the other direction. Our finances, our time, our home, our social life, our marriage, our commitment to church–everything revolves around the children. Our grandparents would think this pattern very strange.
Moreover, we idolize youth culture. In this regard we are a product of our larger culture (which is, after all, what makes high places so hard to spot). Everyone is gunning for the 16-29 year old demographic. Everything is geared to what the next generation likes. Youth culture is our pop culture. This is true inside the church just as much as outside. No church talks about reinventing church so it resonates with old people. But plenty of us are concerned about how to change everything so the young people will like it. Perhaps this is because the older folks are mature enough to forgo their desires in the hopes of making church more palatable for the youth. This would be an example of selfless humility. But this doesn’t mean we have to automatically assume that what young people like is what we ought to be in to. Young people often don’t know what they should like. In most cultures throughout history the old have been revered for their wisdom and respected for their age. Have we not done the opposite in our day and revered the youth for their tastes and respected them for, well, not being old?
Most importantly, we have not honored the older members in our church like we should. Whether it’s because we fancy them too liberal or too conservative, we tend to assume that those older than us just didn’t get it. True, sometimes they didn’t get it. But the assumption we start out with ought to be: these brothers and sisters have walked with the Lord for a long time, maybe they’ve seen something I haven’t learned yet. Instead, we have assumed that because we are young our tastes and styles should rule and Pops can just deal with it.
Because we have many internationals in our church, I have become more aware of how little my American culture encourages honor for parents and respect for our elders. Sadly, we see this in too many churches where youth ministry is everything and seniors ministry is practically nothing. Our church has never had many retirees so we are just now learning how to love and minister to these folks better. They are not helpless by any means (though eventually most of us will be), but they face special challenges (health, loneliness, the death of friends) that younger generations don’t understand. We have coddled kids when they should be challenged to do more for themselves, while we have not given enough help to the elderly when they really can’t do as much on their own.
We need to do away with any unwritten rules that senior ministry doesn’t really matter and churches filled with old people are not worth a young pastor’s time. And we need to stop separating every generation into its own niche group. The young need the old too much for that (and the old will benefit from the young too).
Idolizing our elders is not the answer to the problem of worshiping youth. But there’s a whole lot more biblical support (and historical precedence) for showing honor and deference to what older folks think, than our current obsession with the whims and wishes of tweens, teens, and twenty-somethings.
