Reasons Why I’m Not a Youth Pastor – 1

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on a previous iteration of this blog in August of 2018.

It was the spring of 2008. I had just finished college in December and moved to Los Angeles in January. And I was so sure I was right.

It’s tempting for me to tell this story with me cast as a martyr; I’m going to try not to, but I feel like it’s important to be clear that that’s almost definitely going to happen anyway. After all, I’m still pretty sure that I was right.

I was pretending to be a youth pastor at a charismatic, evangelical church that already had one. I was at the weekly staff meeting which took place in a room with a faux brick wall and wooden sliding doors. We–that is, the senior pastor, two associate pastors, the worship leader, the actual youth pastor, and myself–were sitting in a circle on leather couches. An e-mail had come in from a parent of one of the students in our youth group that had set off a lively discussion, and, like I said: I was so sure I was right.

As it turned out, we were a couple of weeks away from the “Day of Silence”, an event to spread awareness in schools of bullying and harassment of LGBTQ students. The e-mail had come from some sort of evangelical Christian organization and the parent had dutifully forwarded it on to us. It advocated that Christians respond to this demonstration by keeping their children home from school on that day to lodge their protest and, I don’t know, demonstrate that we really didn’t care what those pesky gays had to say anyway. Sorry, I still can’t let go of being right.

I thought that, instead of doing the petulant nonsense the professional Christians were suggesting, we should take a totally different approach. This, I argued, was a fantastic opportunity for us to jump in and participate and show the marginalized people in our community that, regardless of who they were, we as Christians would stand with them against harassment. Instead of trying to fight against people who were just trying to stop being harassed, we should partner with the gay and lesbian student association and look for ways to demonstrate the kind of love we talked about being core to our faith. The real youth pastor, who was sitting next to me, agreed with me, but the guys across from us (of course we were all white guys) were unmoved. They couldn’t believe that I was really advocating for an approach that strayed away from abject condemnation of these students.

And I thought that if I explained my position well enough, that if my reasoning was sound enough, that if I parried their scripture references with some of my own, they’d come to see just how right I was. But I was wrong.

I was not wrong about how we should handle the day of silence, or whether “the gays” had a place in God’s kingdom, or what action should spring from the love of which we so often spoke; I was wrong about my ability to change their minds. It became clear to me later that no matter how well I performed in that room, there was a fundamental disinterest in change on this issue with that group of leaders. They–and a great many evangelical Christians I've come across since–were not so much interested in whether the argument that I was making was correct or sound; the criteria for acceptance was how well my conclusions matched their preconceptions. This was the fundamental “failing” of my theological education in preparing me for work in local churches. In my university experience, it was precisely the reverse in that we were rewarded for compelling arguments regardless of their conclusions and punished for doctrinally orthodox conclusions without intellectual rigor backing them up.

My training in theology (in youth ministry specifically in fact) is perhaps THE reason why I could not make it as a youth pastor. Rightness simply meant something else to me than it did to them.