I’ve been a Student Pastor for 15 years, and for a big portion of those years, I always thought I was pretty darn good at it.
Then I discovered Facebook and woke-up.
After that, I found Twitter and Tumblr and Oovoo and Instagram, etc., and wanted to go back to sleep.
Because it was then, that I realized what a lousy pastor I actually was. OK, so maybe the arrival of social media didn’t change how effective I had become, it simply showed me how ineffective I’d always been.
I mean, how could I argue with the evidence, plastered across my morning Newsfeed; teenagers I counseled and prayed with and taught and baptized, shamelessly and thoughtlessly shoving every bit of their personal lives into the homes of hundreds of people, mine included?
There, slapping me in the face through my computer screen, were the racial slurs, half-naked photos, hateful statements and intimate moments of kids who, for a couple hours on Sunday could play the part of “Good Christian” to a T, and fool everyone.
“Have I suddenly become obsolete?”, I wondered.
“Have I slipped into irrelevance and uselessness overnight?”
“Should I get my resume together?”
But over the past few years, I’ve realized that what has changed most profoundly, isn’t me, but the children.
They’ve been turned inside-out.
In the unending search for attention and identity in the competitive crush of the daily information circus, young people have lost the ability to retain anything of themselves for themselves.
Everything is for public consumption; their deepest fears, greatest longings, their closest relationships, and their body parts.
These (hopefully) aren’t just the ramblings of some old guy, unable to understand teenagers…If my memory and knowledge of history serves me, I once was a teenager, and I remember much of that time; the incredible awkwardness, wild mood swings, raging hormones and the desperate desire to belong.
But what I, and what most of us who experienced adolescence prior to social media never had, were both the desire and the mechanism to broadcast those things to the world. That’s what had diaries and journals and friends for. (Yes, I used the F-word).
Ironic that Facebook builds its community on the word friend. As a result of the brilliant marketing of tallying friendships, a generation has stretched and molded and bastardized that word, from something that once meant “trusted and beloved confidant”, to now essentially consisting of, “some guy from Cleveland who once waited on my cousin.”
And simply having such people on a published, ego-inflating list isn’t enough, but we need to be validated and affirmed and congratulated almost continually by them. This, teenagers quickly learn, can only be done, by the sharing of more and more revealing, sensational, angry, and reckless content.
And so each minute, teenagers log-in and willingly turn themselves inside-out; bearing their souls and selves for an audience of people doing the exact same thing.
What Facebook and similar sites are proving day after day, is that young people would rather be “liked” by a multitude of virtual strangers, than loved by a few committed friends.
Please know, this is not a message about the corrupted state of teenagers. I cross paths with hundreds of them each week, and they are as passionate and caring and creative and good as any in history. I love the time I spend with them, and they are my calling.
And this is not an “evils of technology” message. All technology is amoral; that is, it has no inherent destructive power. It’s all in the way that technology affects the user.
And in this case, that technology is removing for so many young users, the sacred, protective coverings of intimacy, privacy and modesty that guard the deeper things; those not meant for the masses.
In the end, what is true for them, is true for everyone:
– We all need to have a life that belongs solely to us, and to a trusted few we let-in to share in it, once they have earned that privilege.
– We cannot let our daily activities become commercials for ourselves; platforms to broadcast outrageous lives that we aren’t actually living.
– We can’t afford to chase our profile view counts, while trampling over the very best of who we are.
As for me? I hoping that I can somehow help a generation of beautiful young people, take the most precious and vulnerable parts of themselves, and carefully place them back on the inside, until they are really ready to share them.
