The 7th and 8th graders I work with can’t leave my iPod alone. I play it to add to the atmosphere–relaxed, welcoming, familiar. But it takes mere seconds before one of them–and then several of them–are fiddling with it: switching songs, turning up the volume, and then finally plugging in their own music player.
Yesterday I had a “Back-in-My-Day” moment over this and exclaimed, “When I was your age, if someone played some music, you listened to it. You couldn’t just hijack what they were playing for your own music.” Actually, when I was their age we did take control of the music people played in public, only by changing the radio dial. Your frequency of choice was an important marker of identity in my teen years, and any car outing I take with students shows that it still is.
But this is way different. These students have entire radio stations in their pockets, and it’s nothing for them to plug it in and dj the youth group. That is, until someone else takes over. Honestly, the likelihood that any one song will get played in its entirety is very, very low.
I want to celebrate this and to say that these junior high students are comfortable taking control of their experience (read: church) without waiting for instructions. But I don’t see this tendency extending very far beyond the iPod. Ask them what questions they’d like to explore in youth group and you get blank stares. Invite them to take some ownership of the Biblical narrative–to rework stories or to pick and choose content for study–and . . . nothing.
What’s up with that?
Does their musical mastery presage something constructive? Or is it simply a loyal consumer reflex?
YoRocko! 
I’d often assign kids to play DJ for the night. They were to make a playlist ahead of time, and the rule was, they plug in, press play, and leave it. Then they choose one song form the list and explain to the group why it matters. It often worked, though not always, but it drew its strength from ‘music-as-identifier’ that you mentioned, and also stopped the constant switching from one song to another, usually mid-song.
I’m totally stealing that. Thanks, Matt
Our youth, who are born and raised in this participatory culture (what Doug Pagitt calls the Inventive Age) have never experienced a church culture that resembles their native culture. Simply asking them to tinker with existing forms of non- or barely-participatory church isn’t very compelling. Instead, let’s invite them to completely reinvent the form.
Oh, and until we can communicate biblical stories as well as pop culture communicates its messages, youth (and adults) will always be more fluent in those languages, genres, and messages than the Christian story.
I wonder if the disconnect is because of how easy the iPod makes it to master music in general – whereas spirituality resists simple mastery…
Chewing…
John, I wonder if the stories that make up our faith are somehow qualitatively different and resist the kind of pop culture simplicity that drives Iron Man and Jersey Shore. I don’t know how “well” pop culture messages are communicated and just how effective and ubiquitous the market is that sells them. I kind of like the idea that we bear something different that resists those forces. That’s all well and good, but then how do you form young (and old!) people in that story if the printed pages of our Bibles aren’t doing it?