Be Interested

Please welcome Rocky Supinger to the PYM blogging team. Rocky is the Associate Pastor for Youth Ministry at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago. He has served churches in California and Missouri, and blogs at yorocko.com. 

I don’t know who said, “Don’t try to be interesting—be interested instead,” and I’m certain the advice’s author was not addressing youth ministry when she said it, but I have adopted it as my working definition for our work: be interested.

We are interested in teenagers, because we have learned that you can’t love what doesn’t interest you. Their schoolwork, their relationships, their drama, their social media habits, their family dynamics, their ADHD, their impulse control issues: we take an interest in all of it. Youth ministers take a posture of curiosity toward these often maddening behaviors and dynamics because we are looking for the image of God in there. We’re not trying to manage or coerce or even guide. We want more than anything for these middle schoolers and high schoolers to feel interesting. We want them to know we are with them, not because we are paid to be but because we want to be. Because . . . them.

How is interest measured?

In questions. “What’s the big deal with Snapchat?”

In quiet observation, like that of a museum-goer perched on a bench taking in a Monet.

In laughter—fart jokes are valuable currency for adolescent community.

In tears shed together and in private for the pain teenagers bear, sometimes quietly, sometimes with great flair.

Youth ministry is interest-taking in adolescents. It is also interest-taking in all the things with which we have to be interested in life, our “attention collections,” as David Dark calls them. We do youth ministry well when we let teenagers in our nerdy obsessions with comic books, social justice, theology, “Scandal,” and the mid 90’s Scottish rock band Del Amitri. We take care here for boundaries; my interest in “Game of Thrones” ought not be indulged in the presence of 8th graders. In fact, my relationship with those 8th graders makes me think carefully about that interest, and all my interests.

The highest praise a teen ever paid me was to tell his mother that I was the coolest uncool person he knew. He knew I had interests, and he thought that was cool, even if my interests were decidedly uncool.

We’re interested, in public, in front of young people, in the things we’re interested in.

And we’re supremely interested in teenagers themselves.