Fakey Fake Youth Groups

[EastCoastGal]

Hello everyone! I have a question to you about youth groups you've been in, observed or are in... (or possibly led at one time)

 

Youth Group Rant::

 

I attended a youth group, and I have to honestly say, the kids in the youth group did not seem to actually believe in God or hold any Christian values. They appeared to be using the Youth Group as a way to get money, trips and gifts from the flock of adult sheep in the church.

There were several things about the youth group that I found odd.

1. First was leadership. When I began attending this youth group I was 14 and there was an adult mother leading the youth group. It was very poor leadership. The Group was just a chit chat time for the teens (when there was supposed to be instruction), and the mom would whimpily insert a random "I don't know if Jesus would like that" every now and then into the conversation. While waiting for the instructor to show up, the other teens would whine and moan about having an adult interfering with their Youth Group, because as much of a pushover as the leader was, the youth didn't feel free to make out and pick on each other in front of her. Six months into my attendence at the Youth Group, the other teens had convinced the minister that the Youth Group should be free from all adult guidance and that to really "talk to God as a teen, we all needed to be together without adults" So every day after the church service all the teens would gather in a basement room of the church and act like complete a-holes.

There was always a couple of kids making out, a couple of kids assulting one another, etc etc. (You know, the cool kids asking the uncool kids why they were so ugly and whatnot). Mainly the cool kids talked about good ways to get money and trips from the church, like framing a plan to demand a trip to Diseny world so they could think about Jesus there. (which actually worked out for them)

2. Next was the age of the youth group. As I aged in the youth group, those who were older than me were already turning 21, 22 years old. The church encouraged them to join the adult Sunday School, but they would cry and throw tanturms demanding to stay in the Youth Group. As far as I know, some of those people are around 28 now and still acting like little kids, sitting around in Youth Group demanding cash and trips. Talk about immature. ewww. It amazes me when I see 25 year old women crying and using their 5 year old voice screaming "But Maaaa, I don't waaaaannnnaaa sit through service, I wannna go to the Yoooooouuuuuth Group!" Once again, gag. I remember how embarassed I felt for them all when the minister would say, "And now the Youth Group will put on a short play" And a group of 12 year olds to 30 year olds goes up to perform.

3. Entitlement. I've touched on this earlier. Probably the most annoying aspect of the Youth Group I was in was the "aged kids" running around whinning "But I want to speeend Spring Break in Cancun on the beeeech to talk about JEEEBBBUSS. But no one can come with me, especially not the old people cause that would be embarassing, but I waaaaaaannnnnaaa go on vaaacation for JEEEBUSSS"

Then all the adults would be moved by their love of Jesus and send the college and adult aged "Youth" on their personal vacations.

Also, who remembers those brownies and such snacks after church services? I do. Now how irritating would it be if some 25 year old adult came running up to the snack table saying "I should get first dibs on all the snacks cause I'm a youth!" Or watching the young adults walk out of service early to fill their chops with snackies before the old people are released from church and eat all the "good stuff".

 

IF YOU ARE 20+ YOU ARE NOT IN A YOUTH GROUP ANYMORE, GET OVER YOURSELVES!!!

 

Did anyone else have a youth group this self serving?????????????

[EastCoastGal]

I would like to clarify that I'm not a Christian, and was mainly just appalled that the young adults of my generation are just so babied and spoiled and such utter liar manipulators! It makes me fear working with people my age!

I will say, I've found that most people in their 20s aren't running around crying for Ma like these kids were, but seriously, are we overly pampering our "youth" or what!

[Vomit Comet]

Wow!

 

While I've seen elements of what you describe in most youth groups I've come across, I've never seen such an egregious example. So in other words, the example you provide is extreme, but the kinda shit that went on certainly goes on in many, if not most other youth groups. Stated yet another way, your youth group was atypical in terms of degree rather than in terms of its nature.

[EastCoastGal]

Wow!

 

While I've seen elements of what you describe in most youth groups I've come across, I've never seen such an egregious example. So in other words, the example you provide is extreme, but the kinda shit that went on certainly goes on in many, if not most other youth groups. Stated yet another way, your youth group was atypical in terms of degree rather than in terms of its nature.

 

 

I thought so! I had been bounced around in a few other youth groups prior to that horrid one myself, I'm telling you I have a theory as to what cause that horrid youth group to develop in such an extreme manner.

1. The Youth Group was in a fairly non religious part of the country, so there was no real religious pressure outside of the small church we were in to be a christian. Because of that the youth was not the typical brainwashed sort.

2. The town was small, and this strange Youth Group clique was also in public school together as a clique

3. The church just happened to be populated by a bunch of families with the hands off parenting approach, where no one wanted to hurt their kids feelings by setting limits as long as they said they loved God once in awhile

4. The families were pretty much all rich, and the kids were adjusted to being placated with belongings.

5. I could tell the congregation was kind of embarassed by the behaviour of these young adults, but no one wanted to say anything "because at least they loved God". Yeah right

6. These were the type of parents that would call a college proff and yell at him for giving their baby a bad grade (heliocoptor parents), so of course they let there babies self soothe with first Brownie and Snack time choice.

 

Ick, this is why small groups of people ferment in strange ways, You gotta mingle the heard from time to time!

[Kyle]

It sounds like you grew up in a really weird place. With your parents and the people around you, it is amazing that you are not in an institution.

[woodsmoke]

My experience mirrors VC's (surprise, surprise). It wasn't at all uncommon for the local youth group to not be especially focused on Jebus, but there was never that degree of excessive entitlement. Have to admit, though, it would have been pretty cool to have been able to use mutual (LDS version of youth group) as a cover for snogging.

[Arctic]

been apart of 3 youth groups,

 

nondenominational 1

Southern Baptist 2

Pentecostal 3

 

 

The Non denominational church youth group had a good youth leader, but his church was filled up with confused young people that cared more about playing sports and just having a good time then anything about the youth services, they were just there and never seemed to get anything, although maybe the leader was not that good then lol but I felt the young people did not really care about god beyond Sunday and was full of hypocrites, I remember when the youth leader threw almost the entire youth group out for awhile because he got sick of them all getting saved every week and wanted to see progression but later he left and the youth group system was shut down and he became a pill addict sadly, and the church pastor resigned and the church went from 200 to now just 15,

 

that was my first church I was apart of from its high to its bottom, my father was apart of the worship team but the leadership tried to get rid of the worship leader who the worship team adored and was a great music leader and half the singers and players left the church with him and that really lead the downfall, my dad left the church as well and I had to leave my post as door greeter and usher as well,

 

 

after leaving my parents and moving in with my grandmother I started attending a youth group at a large Baptist church, it suffered from lack of any of its members doing any outreach and it being a rather cold in closed group of people, after going on field trips and being apart of it for a year, I left with no friends out of it, also young people at times would come to be in secret wanting prayer for sexual misconduct and doing rather sinful actions that they told no one, I guess the reason why they came to me was because I was alot more spiritual then everyone in the Baptist church because I was not raised in it but in a much more spiritual system in my first church, but I have now witnessed alot of there young people grow up and leave there faith or just get mixed up in society struggling, last time I checked the youth is struggling due to a lack of older youth and no leadership within the social groups, as the older ones are now to old, its a rather young group now, but it has a great youth leader that I still enjoy talking to but he better be good, he is paid full time for it, this church has got money!

 

 

the 3rd youth group was not really a youth group in my eyes, it suffered from the lack of young people, it was mainly made up of older people and the youngest being around my age at 18 to 23 but we have people up to 28, for the most part there all really strong Christians and the church was one of the most enjoyable to be apart of but this youth group just suffered from lack of people but it has everything I think a group could need, except people,

 

this being a Pentecostal they were way to heavy in what they called spirit but more like blind emotion, the church services can just turn into sideshows sometimes and this was the last church I was apart of before turning into a atheist, last I checked they have there church structure set up really well but they have to many leaders and not enough sheep to fill all the programs from child to teen to adult,

 

its neat watching my former youth groups evolve, some fall apart, some rise and some just get downright screwed up until it explodes and watching the aftermath and fallout of young people and church's struggling to handle it, I have been apart of church's exploding and church's rising.

[ShallowByThyGame]

Honestly I don't blame some of these kids. They are caught between two realities. The joy of life and the pleasures therein, and pleasing their parents by appearing Godly.

[Neon Genesis]

My youth group was rather cliquey but not that extreme. The people there would pretend to be nice to you to your face but unless you were popular and had lots of friends, they'd only hang out with you three times a week at church and then just ignore you the rest of the week. Even when they spoke to you, all it was just casual chit chat and love bombing to make sure they get you to come back. None of it was ever really genuine friendship and the kids would make fun of you if you were too geeky and didn't have mainstream interests. The members were all moderately devoted fundies but not super hardcore Jesus Camp types. Like they would say they believed the bible to be the inerrant word of God and they knew all the cliches to justify their bigotry and they would have devotionals, singing, and apologetic videos, and some of them would go to other countries to evangelize. Yet they only had a superficial understanding of scripture and church history at best and they didn't speak in tongues or talk about Jesus all the time or anything like that, but they didn't go around making out and stuff like that either. The youth group was more or less like high school cliques but with some Jesus mixed in.

[Vendredie]

My youth group was based on AWANA shit. Every kid in this youth group (there were only about 6 of us, actually) was in the same clique at the same school... I hung out with the "non-Christian" (they were Christian, but didn't go to church) kids. (We all went to the same school, or had at least).

 

I wound up dropping out of it because I just got bored with it and I didn't fit in. I was 13 at the time and going through my "goth" stage still, and I was stuck with a bunch of preppy kids who listened to Xtian bands while I wore black most of the time and listened to Linkin Park/Evanescence/etc. I was a HUGE Harry Potter fan, and the other 5 kids weren't allowed to read HArry Potter. Or wear two-piece bathing suits. Or date (I had a boyfriend at the time). Or wear shorts above the fingertips. OR... etc etc etc.

 

That youth group you went to must have been on the very extreme side, because I've never heard of a youth group like that. Generally after age 14-15 there was no youth group or Bible study or Sunday School class, you were stuck with the 13 year olds or the 18-n-ups.

[♦ Fuego ♦]

You've brought up the concept repeatedly about kids saying with their mouths that they looooove Jesuuuuuuuus, but then do whatever "sin" they feel like. I saw my niece do this as well. She was (and is) all Jesus all the time, but she was scrogging her boyfriend in direct opposition to her parents repeatedly. Then there was that case that made the news of a boy that came to take his girlfriend away from her parents and ended up murdering both parents. The girl has a MySpace page where she gushes over Jesus. WHAT..THE..HELL? None of the religion is real, it is just emotional wanking.

 

Anyway, to your question. My original youth group (Nazarene) was small and was led by a super-cute college guy and girl. He was serious about the faith and went on to bible school in Canada to become a pentecostal pastor. The kids were really immature for my taste, so I usually avoided them and went instead to the college group, which was filled with serious believers (this was during the Keith Green music era). After the youth leader left, the group dissolved. The church tried to make it go, but it was very sporadic. I never missed it because I was not really part of it.

 

Later, some of the kids got caught with pot and the big authority hammer came down on the girl that was trying her best to lead the group. She wasn't even involved in the pot, but they saw it as her responsibility since she was the leader. That is a heavy trip to lay on a 16 year old girl.

 

I did make a couple of friends, one of whom is still my best friend (and now a Catholic).

[WCrystal]

That description of a youth group was quite accurate of one that I attended with a friend for about three months (I stopped attending 'cause I just couldn't stand the fuckers anymore). Sad thing is, when my friend went to that church, she was ONE of them!!

 

And it's really pathetic when the people of the "youth group" are over 30 years old. When I went to visit my [same] friend out of state last summer, we HAD to go to a "youth group bible study", and people around 35 years old were the same way!! My friend grew up, but it seemed that these people were still 8 years old (and they were all 25 or older)

 

It's sad.

[Vomit Comet]

1. The Youth Group was in a fairly non religious part of the country, so there was no real religious pressure outside of the small church we were in to be a christian. Because of that the youth was not the typical brainwashed sort.

 

It kinda depends. I was born and raised in L.A., which isn't Seattle/Portland but it ain't the Bible Belt, either. External social control (people outside the church/youth group keeping you in line) may not have been the same as it would be in a city like Houston, but I suspect that internal control (people within the church/youth group keeping tabs on each other) might have been a bit tighter. More of a siege mentality where folks assume there's more "out there" beyond the four walls of the church that can lead their kids astray.

 

Also (I'm going to have to look this up to be sure), there was a recent New Yorker article about abstinence among Christian teens. They cited a study that claimed that in high schools where a lot of kids take abstinence pledges (50%+ or so), the kids are more likely to break them because... well, the more kids that take the pledge, the more meaningless it becomes. Whereas in high schools where only a minority do (less than 35% or something), the kids are more likely to keep the pledges: in such high schools, a kid is stigmatized for taking such a stand, so they are pretty much a "beleaguered minority" that band together and keep each other close. So in other words, kids that take an abstinence pledge in a high school in the Bay Area of California are more likely to stick to it than kids that take the abstinence pledge in a high school in Savannah, Georgia.

 

3. The church just happened to be populated by a bunch of families with the hands off parenting approach, where no one wanted to hurt their kids feelings by setting limits as long as they said they loved God once in awhile

4. The families were pretty much all rich, and the kids were adjusted to being placated with belongings.

 

Marin County, California? What you describe sounds like the West Coast to me, somewhere between Santa Barbara and Vancouver and no more than 30 miles inland.

 

Ick, this is why small groups of people ferment in strange ways, You gotta mingle the heard from time to time!

 

No shit. It's like social psychological inbreeding!

[Vomit Comet]

And it's really pathetic when the people of the "youth group" are over 30 years old. When I went to visit my [same] friend out of state last summer, we HAD to go to a "youth group bible study", and people around 35 years old were the same way!! My friend grew up, but it seemed that these people were still 8 years old (and they were all 25 or older)

 

It's sad.

 

Jesus, it's like being in your early 30s and being made to sit at the "kid's table" at Thanksgiving dinner.

[Vomit Comet]

My youth group experiences may have been a bit atypical.

 

The youth group I got "saved" into was by-and-large a hardcore outreach group. Maybe 10% of the kids were Christian kids from that church; the rest, like me, came in off the street, sometimes quite literally. Fucking every brand of deviant was there. Gutter anarchist punks, serious gangbangers (not white kids playing the part, but the real deal; the youth pastor was regularly doing gang funerals and shit), druggies of every stripe, you name it, they were all there, all under one roof. You know how many evangelical youth pastors dream of having 200 such kids under one roof on a given night? In the case of that group, the dream was real.

 

Needless to say, social regulation was all but non-existent. Maybe 20% of the kids ever tried to take it seriously, and they usually failed in the end, though it would always be chalked up to the world around them having gotten the better of them. I guess it would've been different if they were good, squeaky clean kids with Christian parents in the church. So basically, the kids were given a very wide berth, and the leaders were just happy to have them actually showing up in the first place.

 

Then one day, the youth group was destroyed. Why? The church elders decided to ban smoking on church grounds. Within two fucking weeks we went from 120 to 200 kids a night, to about 20 and falling. It was such fucking bullshit it wasn't even funny. It made me want to puke. Even to this day it makes me want to puke. From that point on it was mostly the church kids that remained, although occasionally we'd get a smattering of "off-the-street" kids here and there, and it started to resemble other more typical youth groups, except with more hard drugs and pregnancies maybe.

 

Shortly after that whole cataclysm had hit, I started visiting another youth group. They were attached to the local Vineyard church. To me they were a breath of fresh air. Totally on fire for God, and any who were hypocrites sinning on the side would have been really compelled to keep it under wraps, because those kids just weren't fucking around, they were dead serious about that shit. Those kids were total holy roller fanatics. At the time I thought it was the greatest fucking thing ever, although the floppy fish 'Toronto Blessing' shit they were into really creeped me out, and their "more spirit-filled than thou" attitudes would eventually grate on me. In hindsight, falling in with that crowd was one of the worst things that happened to me, despite the close genuine friends I had. Because of them I started seeing demons and shit, and the demons would keep me locked in a roller coaster spiritual warfare faith nightmare that would last into my late 20s. I would have deconverted or otherwise backslided years and years and years earlier than I did were it not for that shit. Thanks, assholes.

 

Eventually, I became a youth leader and sometimes co-pastor over the descendant of the outreach group I had gotten saved in. By then it was very small and most the kids were church kids from that church. I was a pretty hard-ass youth leader and whenever I sniffed out hypocrisy I would be on the little fucker like ugly on an ape. At the same time I was a wild and crazy guy, so most the kids thought I was cool. I saw it as my mission to keep the little fuckers in line and to regularly chastise hypocrisy and lack of commitment whenever I detected it. To this day I think I would've made a great fucking drill instructor.

 

"You look like one of those guys that would fuck somebody in the ass, and not even have the common courtesy to give him a reach-around!"

 

Well, that's my youth group experience in a nutshell.

[Jedah]

My youth group was fake in a different manner. All of them really did believe in Jeebus, but they were extremely hypocritical about it. Jesus was only a part of their conscious decisions when they could get something out of it.

[MatG]

I come from one of those 'policing' type of youth-groups. Where if you appear to be doing 'something wrong', they will reach for credits by the 'pastor' by "ratting" on you. You couldn't miss a single meeting, else you were considered a backslider -- and would most definitely be told off by the leader(s).

My problem is that I enjoyed controversial music, and the harder side of the sounds -- so they seen me as a heretic and spreading 'devil music'. So kids would constantly have reports on me(and others) because it was their 'duty' as good servants of 'god'. If we even as much as watched a movie with swearing -- we would be 'reported' to the higher church authorities and 'rebuked'.

My Youth/Young Adult group was more of an initiation/preparation into the upper echelon of rules -- the 'main service' -- where the head tyrant was even worse with his demands and expectations...

Maybe i'll start a discussion on this

[OpheliaGinger]

I never attended a youth group like that. I live in the middle of the bible belt and everyone is middle class. Once they graduated from high school, they either had to attend the adult group or the college group (if they wanted to go to the youth group, they would have to be the teacher). Most parents take the authoritative approach to parenting but some take the authoritarian approach. Youth groups were definitely not play time.

[Scorpion]

Well, I've never been in a Youth Group. I live in a mostly secular country and the most common brand of religion is softcore catholicism. Just so you have an idea, the Communist Party has had the mayor's office since there are free elections (35 years this year).

 

One of my best friends is on Sunday school. He teaches young kids, but it's really open to anybody. He's allways telling me about all the Xtian girls there, and considering that all except his most recent girlfriend were girls he met at sunday school and the sheer amount of girls he knows, I've been wondering recently if joining the "Youth Group" wouldn't be a good move for me, socially!

 

For what I gather, most are just regular joes (or janes), no Jesus Camp figures. No holier-than-thou attitude, and consequently, no hipocrisy. Everytime he tells me about the Sunday School's "Parties", those mofos party harder than me, and I'm a godless Atheist! They also have some wicked retreats, and I'd really like to go.

 

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I wish we had atheist youth groups. If only to meet all the godless women!

[Guest nonreligiousbelieverinGod]

Yes, I had a horrible youth group experience myself. I don't want to talk about it but it was similiar. I am glad you saw through it and are out of that.