Many of our youth laugh at the LifeTeen masses.
They know that some adult is telling them what is Hip. What they want. From what I heard, many of the attendees of the LifeTeen program are past teen and the leaders are those kind of parents who want to be friends with their kids. Their hearts are in the right place but they don’t get that serving candy to kids is not going to make them eat right.
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We don’t have them in my parish. The last Mass on Sunday is the “youth” Mass. It’s a regular Mass, but the youth choir sings, the youth do the readings, serve at the Altar, take up the collections, usher, etc. I don’t know what seperates it from a Teen Mass per se, they use guitars (but violins as well), but I’ve only been a couple of times (my sixteen year old nephew plays the guitar for it, he’s a good boy, says the rosary every night, I’ve never been able to tell him I’m not clear on the whole guitars at Mass issue
because I love him and he’s so enthused).
I suspect that your observation, Netmil(name removed by moderator)s, is accurate and most telling of what’s problematic. “Adults telling kids what’s hip.” We’re not supposed to KNOW what’s HIP! That’s part of them distancing themselves from parents and growing up a bit, they start determining what’s “cool.” If we get locked into some kind of notion of what kids think is cool or relevant (and as adults, we’re supposed to KNOW what’s relevant, that’s OUR job), then we make the same mistake the hierarchs made with Church music. In the time just after the council, what music was both “relevant” and at the same time, in style most capable of being introduced into the Mass? FOLK music (rightly, they couldn’t bring themselves to bend to aicd rock, like Jimmy Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”). And we’ve been stuck with it ever since. Every song in the OCP “Music Issue” that isn’t a traditional hymn sounds like it should be sung by Peter, Paul, and Mary or the Pete Seegar or the Kingston Trio. Trouble is, in this effort to be “relevant” (as the world uses that term) the Church can’t keep up. The world has moved beyond folk music, they’ve moved beyond acid rock into stuff that make Hendrix and Joplin look like Carmelite nuns singing the “Te Deum.” So the music that you hear at Mass isn’t really “relevant” to anyone except a few old (and I use that term advisedly, with my own bald head and my bifocals), liberal flower children who want “Spirit in the Sky” played for their funeral recessionals.
Deep down, kids want parents to be parents, not hipsters. And the Church is a parent, that’s why we call Her “Holy Mother Church.” I like our model of a “teen Mass” (where the children learn how to serve) rather than what I’ve heard of the official “Teen Mass”), but I understand that the Church has tightened up on the liturgical irregularities and so forth, and lots of teens seem to like it, so…But the Church is never going to get anywhere trying to be “relevant.” She’s already relevant, She’s what everyone comes home to when, hopefully, they’re tired of “relevance.”
