Editorial

When it comes to pets, enthusiasm is key. That might be enthusiasm to see you, bounding up to the edge of the glass cage and giving you a hamster-y hug or affectionate nibble. Even enthusiasm to run away is fun, an endless game of chase around the cage, room or house, while the poor little creature desperately attempts to get away from cumbersome hands. The thing I cannot abide by in a pet is apathy. If a hamster has absolutely no interest in my existence – neither fear nor happiness – then there is nothing I can do. I can be loving towards it, or even attempt to frighten it, but if it point-blank refuses to care about me in any way, shape or form, it’s a losing battle.

Teenagers are not the same as pets (well…), but the same is true for teenagers and apathy. Give me a teenager passionate about something, anything, and I can work with that. Give me a teenager who really feels strongly about something, anything, even negative feelings, and I can work with that. Give me a teenager who is apathetic towards everything, bored by school, life and ultimately, me – and I don’t know where to begin.

It was Holocaust survivor and political activist Ernest Weisel who said: ‘The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference.’ If there’s one word which could sum up a generation’s attitude towards the Church it would be exactly that: indifference. Nonchalance. And as Weisel says, this is the opposite of love. Give us hatred or objection or active opposition any day over and above a disinterested roll of the eyes, a tut and a walk on by. Apathetic people don’t hunger for answers.

Apathetic people aren’t searching for meaning to their lives. The Church is answering questions they don’t care about, and is simply a whole lot of irrelevant noise which means nothing to them, or anyone they know.

In ‘Losing my religion’, Len Kageler marks this rise in religious ‘noneness’, or in other words, the dramatic increase in young people with no religious affiliation of any kind. He also provides some fascinating reflections on how to reach and engage with unchurched young people, depending on the different ways in which they have arrived at their non-faith. Increasingly, our role as youth workers must be to reach out and engage with young people of no religious affiliation at all, as the reality is that more and more young people will find themselves in this camp through deliberate intention or upbringing.

My days of apathetic pets are over, but my days of combatting apathy are not. As we seek to stir the hearts of the young people we work with and awaken the eternity within them, we must pray big, and pray hard, against the apathy they so easily adopt. And we must live both individually and as a Church body so passionately, so beautifully, so obviously, that they can no longer ignore or be indifferent to the message of Jesus.