Reading this article over at the Chronicle of Higher Education website, I was wondering about how other folks imagine high school youth groups influencing or not influencing our actual intellectual lives. I’ve got good friends from college and seminary who, as far as I’m concerned, do a heck of a job bringing some fairly high-level theology and church history into their youth groups’ experiences, but I do wonder whether the very practice of having separate meetings for teens might itself be a problem. Here’s the segment I’m thinking of from the Chronicle piece:
One of the consequences of K-12 schooling (and of college, to a lesser extent) is the creation of a narrow peer group. That segregation by age impairs the ability of young people to relate to anyone outside their cohort, as anyone with teenage children or first-year college students knows all too well.
One of the purposes of teaching, as I see it, is to negotiate the differences, real and imagined, between generations. At the moment, that means meeting the “digital natives” where they are, but it also means expecting them to meet the “digital immigrants” — the people who were not raised in front of personal computers — where we are.
My experiences as a high school youth group kid date from the early nineties, but I do think that this critique applies to them. How about you folks?
Also, I was thinking about renaming the blog “Dawg Cogitans” for a little Latin flavor to our title. What do you think?
I certainly think it’s possible that high school youth groups can teach decent theology that challenges students. (Honestly, though, most of the youth groups I’ve encountered seem far more preoccupied with entertaining the kids.)
However, I think the generational issue is exceedingly significant. Unity in the church is such an issue in our society, and personally, I think the more the church segregates according to age (and marital status, for that matter) the greater is the divide, both relationally, as well as theologically.
Oh, and I think “Dawg Cogitans” is most excellent.
Acknowledging that my Latin skills are rather meager, doesn’t the new name mean something like “a dawg who thinks” rather than “dawgs who think”?
It does; I haven’t taken the time to get my Latin grammar off the shelf and figure out the conjugation (or declension–I forget what one does with participles) so that I can make it “thinking dawgs” rather than “thinking dawg.” That’s why I rendered Dawg singular in the (provisional) new title.
[update: Now that I think of it, since there aren't articles in Latin, one could also render it "The Thinking Dawg" and sound really cool. Yes, I think I'll leave it singular until someone changes it. (We're all admins on this blog.]
Julianna (I can’t call you TA; that’s my title!),
I do wonder if this sort of thing becomes more of a concern as one puts more distance between oneself and high school youth group. After all, Sunday morning service where I attend (and where Michael has seen me preach) uses music from my own high school youth group days along with stuff that’s more recent CCM vintage far more often than it does my own preference, the older hymns (as in from Luther’s and Wesley’s eras). I might be overstating the case if in fact big people church is becoming more and more like youth group.