One of the popular buzzwords currently making the rounds in youth ministry is authenticity. What does authenticity mean with relationship to holiness of lifestyle and character? Isn't it true that what most teenagers are looking for in their youth leader is honesty and authenticity more than righteousness? How can we expect students to share with us their temptations, doubts and struggles if they feel we're so much holier than they? Mightn't we be better able to understand their struggles if we ourselves have experienced some of these same failures? One of the risks of ministry is transparency, allowing students to see our hearts—the good, the bad and the ugly. It's also an essential element of credibility.

On the other hand, should we really expect a student to seek counsel from a youth worker whose life looks just like his or hers or worse? Using that same logic, we would buy diets from fat people, hair growth products from bald people and abstinence advice from former presidents. As Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (AD 374-397) so vividly put it:

"Who seeks for a spring in the mud? Who wants to drink from muddy water?...Who will think a man to be useful to another's cause whom he sees to be useless in his own life?...Am I to suppose that he is fit to give me advice who never takes it for himself?"

Growing Old and Growing Up!

We need to affirm that there's nothing wrong with adolescence. We've all too often heard adults bad-mouth teenagers for everything from being irresponsible and selfish to dressing weird and piercing themselves in obtuse places. Adolescence in itself is not evil, as long as it's a stage of growth and not a place of stagnation. Scripture never urges us to grow old; it urges us to grow up, to grow into maturity (Eph. 4:11-15; Heb. 5).

What might be those marks of maturity? Let me briefly mention three.

A Sense of Perspective

As C.S Lewis observed, "The crisis of the present moment, like the nearest telephone pole, will always loom largest. Isn't there a danger that our great, permanent, objective necessities—often more important—may get crowded out? While the moderns [author's note: ...and postmoderns?] have been pressing forward to conquer new territories of consciousness, the old territory, in which alone man can live, has been left unguarded, and we are in danger of finding our enemy in our rear."

We need to remember that tides rise and fall; this has happened before and it will happen again. One of the significant elements of a mass media saturated culture is that stories get internationalized, magnified and ratified over Net and over night. Ideas are broadcast more widely; catch phrases are picked up more quickly; fashions are entrenched more readily; conventional wisdom becomes conventional too hastily. Yes, tidal movement is important; it's foolish to set sail without taking it into account. It may be, as Leonard Sweet suggests, that postmodernism is not just a high tide, but a cultural "tsunami." We need to be careful about relocating and rebuilding the foundation of our youth ministries every time the water rises.