Political Issues

What if our issue is political and not moral? It's still hard to accept things we don't like, and there may be some part of us that would like to "fix" cultural tendencies that are unlike our own. Cultural trends develop because they work for the dominant force within a society, so we should be careful about which cultural factors we want to battle. Others might think it's just as silly for a child not to be able to look an adult in the eye as I think it is to expect girls to be circumcised. That perspective could lead someone to think that because teens should be on an equal level with adults we need to liberate the child from this oppressive culture.

Let's be careful when choosing issues for liberation. I used to think children were not empowered in certain environments, but treated like second-class citizens. Like any youth worker, I want kids to feel important and equally validated by God. I then realized these children are empowered by learning the ropes through a hierarchy of power. The idea is that while God may validate us equally, society does not; and kids in oppressed communities need to learn how to work for respect. Respect isn't given. It's earned. I didn't learn to love that message, but I learned to work within it.

Once we've dealt with our own ethnocentricities, we'll be better able to help kids deal with their cross-cultural experience. If you have that one Latino kid, or Black, White, Asian or first-generation American, you have a kid who's trying to figure out how to function within two ethnic worlds that sometimes are contradictory.

Be open. Be willing to learn and know the cultural norms of those in your youth group. Know the basics of how your students relate to authority figures. On a regular basis, I deal with kids—already stressed because they have to live in different worlds—who are upset and confused because some authority figure couldn't, or wouldn't, hear them. No parent wants his or her child to feel alienated. Such a parent will feel forced to leave and join a congregation where that child isn't the odd one out. If 11 a.m. on a Sunday is still the most segregated time in America, we can't benefit from the gift of diversity God has given us.