At Home On Piety Hill

My friends, Dan and Sadie, are committed Christians who don’t shy away from difficult tasks, including working with the youth group. They seem perfectly suited to the task, because they are in their thirties, they are hip and more importantly, they love Jesus and the Bible. Mark and Sue are their mentors or whatever term is fashionable this week for mature, middle-aged “youth workers” (there’s a whole youth industry in the church and the jargon, along with the t-shirts and graphics, change monthly to remain relevant… or, so the “experts” think).

You know, I still find it hard to believe that so many churches will treat the teens as an afterthought or have some good looking, 22-year-old guy, straight out of college or seminary or a Bible Bootcamp/Recovery Home in charge of a flock of adolescents. My friend Alex once counseled me (and, he has never been wrong… really), that the youth group is the hardest ministry in a local assembly and it will always be the main focus of controversy. Sadly, it is most often the parents that cause the heartache. The kids? They have their moments, but they usually seem to rebound and move on, while the parents stay mired in the memory of hurt feelings and controversies which have long since passed.

That brings me to this article. I found it disturbing, but I must admit it didn’t surprise me.

The Australian: Pastor, teachers beat teen for not going to church [July 08, 2005]: “Pastor, teachers beat teen for not going to church
David King
July 08, 2005

A pastor and two Bible studies teachers bashed a 19-year-old Korean woman because they thought she had been disrespectful to her parents and had stopped attending church.

Chi Yeong Yun, a junior pastor at the Open Door Presbyterian Church in Chatswood, and Bible study teachers James Kang and Tom Chae-Young Lee pleaded guilty yesterday to assaulting Angela Kim at a park at Sydney’s Bobbin Head in July last year.

Somehow, Angela’s behavior sounds fairly common for young people her age:

The NSW District Court heard the men believed the young woman had stopped going to church, had been disrespectful to her elders and had been spending too much time on her web page… “She had no idea of respect, she was just hanging around with her friends,” Lee said.

Either the folks at the Open Door Presbyterian Church are a bit more serious in their faith than I am or, perhaps, they are new to youth work and need to learn “the old paths” of prayer and personal, gentle pastoral care, which comes from years of experience with God’s flock.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 8th, 2005 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Christianity, Each and Every, Wacky and Weird. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.