Rehoboam rejected the advice the elders gave him and consulted the young men who had grown up with him and were serving him. Israel has been in rebellion against the house of David to this day~ 2nd Chronicles 10:8 and 2nd Chronicles 10:19
A number of trends have taken root in recent years that I see as super weird and perhaps even dangerous. The “everyone deserves a trophy just for trying” trend has robbed an entire generation of experiencing the elation of a hard-won victory and the challenge of learning to lose with dignity and grace. The “feelings matter more than facts” trend is rapidly turning our populace into a horde of overly-sensitive feelers incapable of thinking their way through even the most rudimentary of fallacies. Then there is what can only be described as the flat-earth trend of ignoring science in favor of the ridiculous and patently false notion that gender is nothing more than a social construct.
As weird as all that obviously is, there is an even weirder trend taking root in many government organizations, churches, and universities. Older leaders have begun leaning heavily on young people to draft legislation, solve complex problems and cast vision for institutions, business and churches
This trend has been underscored with (but is not unique to) the March for Our Lives Movement. Large numbers of young people (some of them not yet legal adults) have been marching in cities across America to end gun violence. News outlets and politicians have been lining-up to interview these young activists and ask them what they think we ought to do to solve the problem. The rightness or wrongness of their crusade aside, the more pressing issue (and the one no one is talking about) is whether or not young people should be enlisted to solve incredibly complex social problems.
Don’t get me wrong.
I sincerely value young people and what they bring to the table. I do NOT believe that young people should automatically be excluded from leadership simply because they are young (1st Timothy 4:12). I also believe that the passion, energy and determination to see justice done that is the embodiment of youth is a vital element of any healthy society (Proverbs 20:29). We would literally die-off as a race without the passion and energy of the young. Moreover, I have devoted a good portion of my life to teaching fourteen to twenty-five-year-olds the Bible because young people are the future and God calls His people to invest heavily in the future (Jeremiah 29:4-8, Psalm 102:18).
That said.
Does that automatically mean the young and untested should always be instrumental in the casting of vision or the drafting legislation? Does having passion around an issue make one an expert? Do the young always know more than the old?
I think not.
And not just because I fall neatly into the category of “older”. As a society, we ought to be cautious with this trend for at least four critical reasons.
Young people tend to see life in terms of black and white-
When I was young I was an idiot who saw life in extremely simplistic, black and white terms (1st Corinthians 13:11). I believed if people were poor or down on their luck, the government should give whatever they thought they needed, no questions asked. I also believed that if a person was a drug user local governments should provide clean needles for them to prevent the spread of disease. Near the end of my twenties it finally dawned on me that many of my ideas were stupid and would actually make problems worse, not better. I have since learned that problems (and their solutions) are rarely black and white and that the easy answer is seldom the right answer. No one comes to terms with that reality without life experience.
It goes against biblical principles-
Contrary to popular opinion, the Bible clearly teaches that the old should teach the young and the young should show deference to the old (Proverbs 1:8, Proverbs 16:31, 1st Timothy 5:1-2, Titus 2). Even when leaders were chosen at very young ages (David, Joseph, Solomon, Jeremiah, Timothy, Titus) they were typically in their late twenties or thirties before they actually began leading.
Young people have a history of selecting bad leaders-
The nature of youth is such that young people tend to get caught-up in social movements led by powerful leaders with charismatic personalities. As a result, young people have been at the center of some of the most horrific political and social revolutions of our time. Adolph Hitler, Pol-pot, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro all rallied young people (quite successfully) to support their causes and carry-out their plans. This does not mean that every young person is easily led. It does mean that astute adults are guarded about jumping onto the political and social bandwagons of youth.
When young people become leaders sometimes they stop growing-
The single greatest danger in any kind of leadership is pride (Ecclesiastes 4:13). Sometimes when a person is placed in a position of leadership they begin to believe the lie that they are where they are because they have life figured out and there is nothing left for them to learn. This is tragic at any age but especially tragic when it happens to someone who is young. No one is ever done learning, and if they think they are then they are worthless to the rest of us.
