Every Kid Included
I’ve seen it, and it’s sad. It’s sad that it would happen anywhere, but when it happens in one particular location, it is heartbreaking.
And it really hurts when it’s your own kid.
It’s when, for some reason, a young person is not part of the youth group. Oh, they are part of it by age or grade, but, for all intents and purposes, they are outside the group. And it’s as much the fault of the adults in charge as it is the young people who are being taught.
Of course kids (yes, even church kids) can form little clans and can, at times, be quite mean about things. That is no excuse, though, for the adults in the room to let it happen.
It has been going on for a long time. Social media and group texts (where not everyone is in that group) have only exacerbated it. So, this is a long-term problem among young people.
However, the adults who help with a youth program–whether it’s a youth minister, some deacons, or the parents–need to work tremendously hard to make sure that every young person is included and involved.
Maybe a lot of the kids in the youth group play or love sports, but one young man has no interest at all. That’s totally fine, so long as he is not excluded or treated as weird for not being a jock.
Maybe there’s a youth group where everyone goes to public school except one young lady. The adults need to treat her just like the other kids and not make every conversation about what’s going on at the local school.
Maybe the youth group loves singing and there is one kid who is legitimately tone deaf, thus making the singing not sound all that great. That kid should be just as much a part of the group as everyone else, and the adults need to instill that.
It starts with adults making sure to talk to every young person. Get to know them all. Make sure every kid is invited to events. Monitor how things go on bus rides. Does one kid sit alone? Is one kid always on his phone while the rest tell jokes and stories?
But also, involve every kid. No matter how much you love sports, don’t make every illustration to a lesson something from football or soccer. Speak to other interests. Show that it’s okay to love music or reading or art.
This may seem like a trivial thing, but it will pay off major dividends in the future. Too often, those kids who feel left out decide the church is not for them because they are just too different. They either draw back as they grow in the youth group or they wait until they are grown and they drop out of church (or they show up, but are not involved at all). After all, church is just not “my people” and even the ones in charge have only made that more clear.
But Jesus did not build a sports’ church or a cool kids’ church or a gamer church. He built HIS church, and it should be incumbent on every adult to make sure young people learn to get along with and include very different people. Because, praise God, the church is made up of a lot of very different people!
AUTHOR: Adam Faughn