If the world is going faster, why are Western young people slowing down?
It’s impossible to keep up. The world hurtles at dizzying speed toward it’s final destiny. There are new wars du jour whenever we turn on the TV; Armageddon seems to be in dress rehearsal mode. Meanwhile science grows exponentially, and, among other things, develops increasingly efficient ways to annihilate the planet’s population. Tempus megafugit. Yet for all this haste, one area where things are impeded is the maturation of young people.
In a recent article called “Let’s End Adolescence,” former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich writes: “We have to end adolescence as a social experiment. We tried it. It failed. It’s time to move on. Returning to an earlier, more successful model of children rapidly assuming the roles and responsibilities of adults would yield enormous benefit to society.”
Whatever society does, the Church needs to return to Bible thinking. The transition since Bible times in almost every culture was considered to be in the early teen years, as still practiced by Jewish families with their Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah ceremonies.
Gingrich observes: “Adolescence…has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation that has produced one of the most destructive social arrangements in human history: consigning 13-year-old males to learning from 15-year-old males.” He notes this has led to the following: “Trapping poor people in bad schools, with no work opportunities and no culture of responsibility, we have left them in poverty, in gangs, in drugs, and in irresponsible sexual activity. As a result, we have ruined several generations of poor people who might have made it if we had provided a different model of being young.”
While such tragic results have not been replicated among local assembly youth, how many young people largely waste a decade or more on the sidelines. Men like T.E. Wilson and David Long were in the heart of Africa by their 21st year. Johnny Phelan, one of the last pioneers of the mid-south, told me he headed to Nashville to see an assembly started when he was 21. However he was working with an older brother—who was 22! Brother Phelan observed, “We didn’t know what we couldn’t do, so we went ahead and did it.” Pitching a tent through the winter, they saw souls saved and a work established. What would you think of two men (would you even call them men?) in their early twenties doing such a thing today? Foolhardy? No, let them sit and observe how older saints do it for a while.
Gingrich concludes: “It’s time to change this—to shift to serious work, learning, and responsibility at age 13 instead of age 30. In other words, replace adolescence with young adulthood. But hastening that transition requires integrating learning into life and work.”
There is some debate over the ages of the Lord’s disciples. Some think most were still in their teens because Jesus only arranged for Peter’s temple tax, required from age 20 and up. But there should be no debate over Paul’s instructions: “Let no one despise your youth, but be an example to the believers in word, in conduct, in love, in spirit, in faith, in purity.…give attention to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine. Do not neglect the gift that is in you…” (1 Tim 4:12-14). Of course if young adults want to be taken seriously, they need to be serious. So we also exhort: “be sober-minded, in all things showing yourself to be a pattern of good works; in doctrine showing integrity, reverence, incorruptibility, sound speech that cannot be condemned” (Titus 2:6-8).