Responding to ATF

This will be the first of hopefully a few posts responding to a weekend I just spent with thousands of teenagers at a Teenmania Aquire the Fire event. I had a group of 12 teens with me, along with some chaperones, including my lovely wife, who was very gracious to go.

The speaker for the event was some guy named Joel, a bona fide Superchristian. Dad left when he was 14 months old; mom married again to an alcoholic abusive guy whom they had to spend lots of their teenage years running from.

At age 14, Joel was radically saved at a Christian camp, and by age 16, he was preaching from cafeteria benches in his high school during lunch time. He even brought a white picket fence into school with him for a few weeks, and when asked why, he explained that you can either be on the wrong side of the fence or on the right side with Jesus. Believe it or not, he was "persecuted" for this. (I'm a Christian, and I think I would have taken his fence and hid it on him, too).

The great thing was, after everyone "got saved" the first night, the next day we learned about how shallow we all are since we've only got the gospel now, and how we need to (1) read the Bible a lot; (2) pray; (3) witness a lot, apparently being as obnoxious as you can while doing it; (4) go on a Teenmania missions trip; (5) go home and break all secular cds; and (6) make sure you're at the big Teenmania Battle Cry event next year. These are the secrets to the Christian life. This is what it means to "go deeper."

There was lots of yelling and shouting, and kids were told they were in a war with everyone who gets abortions and has premarital sex and needed to take a stand.

The theme for the weekend was "keep it real." Funny thing was, it was all about the wonderful victorious Christian life and not sinning and stuff. Not a single (not one!) mention of real life struggles with sin. Not a single mention that Christian teens sin. Joe, the Superchristian was on fire for Jesus all his life, and you can be, too. There were lots of references to how the "world" and "sin" and other such things are not "real," but the whole production looked like MTV baptized into the Christian subculture.

At one point, they got the kids all hyped up about donating to help the Dalits (lowest caste in India), and followed it right up with an advertisement: the ATF 2005 event was on DVD for $30, but act now during the next break, and you can get it for only $25. In fact, it was amazing how often flow of the weekend went like this: (1) Get the kids all fired up at the end of a message, then (2) present something for them to buy or some Teenmania event for them to join.

I'm certain Teenmania thinks they just won a bunch of teens for Jesus. I say they created thousands of little monsters.

I posted these thoughts over at the BHT, and Michael Spencer responded with a good summary of what these types of youth events are normally like:

-Raw emotion
-Stupid, lying speakers
-Hawking of someone's CDs and shirts
-Blatant attempts to get emtionally damaged people as upset as possible with lots of stories of abuse, etc.
-Manipulation of emotion and thought through media, to the point of little critical thinking.
-Constant appeals to legalism and fanaticism.
-Lies and more lies about what will result if you come forward, pray, surrender, etc.
-Little or no reference to anything Biblical that would matter past the last altar call.
-Fanaticism constantly held up as healthy and normal.

I would leave these meetings beyond upset. Really, if you think I am emotionally damaged, these are the people to sue. I can give you the names.

A good summary, indeed. Thanks, Michael.