This is an excerpt from a longer blog post called "Why I walked out of church" The same problems are caused when we segregate children by age in schools, but here it's even more important because it tends to interfere with the very gospel:
Age segregation
It would behoove some of the leaders in church to read The Death of the Grown-up. While some of the book becomes a little too nostalgic for specific generations and, oddly, jazz music, it nails it on the idea of how we segregate by age and, sadly, create a self-feeding monster that means teens look to each other for cues and kids look to each other for cues, and the adults "leading" them are pandering to them to get their attention. The end result? Idiocy. Never-growing up. Never asking for behavior beyond what we have let them tell us is normal for their age. They only learn to function in their age level and have no examples or incentive to reach beyond that and mature. We make no demands on their behavior, only bemoan its current state.
The church is especially notorious for doing this. We have kid's ministries and youth ministries and young adults and older adults -- all separated from each other because of age, thereby negating any positive and necessary influence the different ages might have on each other.
The children are removed from the boring main service for their benefit, and the parents get a break. The youth are in youth groups and, consequently, only learn to be youth and actually intensify the silliness of their age by reflecting off of each other. The adults trying to lead the youth fall for the idea that unless we have games and parties and other dumbed-down stuff, we can't keep their attention.
Why would we be able to keep their attention? We've let them take ours and tell us how to treat them. We've taught kids and youth to expect to be entertained and now we are in a vicious cycle on how to up the quotient and keep their attention. This is magnified and made even more ugly in a church setting when we try to find a way to insert the gospel into this machine of age segregation.
Age segregation
It would behoove some of the leaders in church to read The Death of the Grown-up. While some of the book becomes a little too nostalgic for specific generations and, oddly, jazz music, it nails it on the idea of how we segregate by age and, sadly, create a self-feeding monster that means teens look to each other for cues and kids look to each other for cues, and the adults "leading" them are pandering to them to get their attention. The end result? Idiocy. Never-growing up. Never asking for behavior beyond what we have let them tell us is normal for their age. They only learn to function in their age level and have no examples or incentive to reach beyond that and mature. We make no demands on their behavior, only bemoan its current state.
The church is especially notorious for doing this. We have kid's ministries and youth ministries and young adults and older adults -- all separated from each other because of age, thereby negating any positive and necessary influence the different ages might have on each other.
The children are removed from the boring main service for their benefit, and the parents get a break. The youth are in youth groups and, consequently, only learn to be youth and actually intensify the silliness of their age by reflecting off of each other. The adults trying to lead the youth fall for the idea that unless we have games and parties and other dumbed-down stuff, we can't keep their attention.
Why would we be able to keep their attention? We've let them take ours and tell us how to treat them. We've taught kids and youth to expect to be entertained and now we are in a vicious cycle on how to up the quotient and keep their attention. This is magnified and made even more ugly in a church setting when we try to find a way to insert the gospel into this machine of age segregation.
Amen.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I think we do a disservice to young people when we segregate them from adults and from other young people by age. I have conducted research on the advantages of age-mixing of children and adolescents. You might enjoy my recent postings on this topic on the Psychology Today website, at http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn
ReplyDeleteBest,
Peter Gray