Any life well lived will still have plenty of questionable decisions scattered along the wayside. These attempted diversions, or half abandoned side projects, all help to shape and define who we are. I, like everyone else, have a past littered with cringeworthy moments, but I think they were overall important in helping to guide the sort of person I want to be. And yet, there are a couple of decisions from my teenage years that leave me simply baffled, so much so that I feel I can neither truly completely defend or admonish them. For example, at the age of 15, my willingness to volunteer to preach at a Christian youth group for 3 months.
At least it started with the foundations of a good idea. I needed to volunteer to tick some boxes for my Silver Duke of Edinburgh award. For my Bronze, I had volunteered my Monday lunch breaks to the school library, but unwilling to spend any more time with the terminally friendless student librarians, I opted instead to help “run” the Friday night youth alpha course at a group I already attended.
In an attempt to capitalise off of the sacred momentum myself and the other young people from Saint Lawrence’s benefitted from attending Christian summer camps, we begged the parish council to let us make use of the Sunday school rooms on a Friday. The group would focus on a bit of spiritual discussion at the start of the evening, followed by snacks, fizzy drinks and general socialising for the rest of the night. It was run by two genuine saints, who were willing to give up their early weekend evenings to watch a group of 14 year olds beat the shit out of each other. I asked if I could run a few sessions instead under their supervision, as a means to quickly sign off the volunteering quota needed for some paltry extra UCAS points.
There were two problems. First, was the text I would be reading from. The Youth Bible was a well meaning but ultimately embarrassing attempt to make The Bible more relatable to a teenage audience. Helpfully, it would include little tableaus of moral dilemmas alongside scripture, short stories of conflicted young Christians navigating the complexities of their faith. There were stories about premarital sex, alcohol consumption, and drug use, like a spiritually charged episode of Waterloo Road. Tellingly, nobody who I know that still identifies as a Christian reads this version of The Good Book. There’s plenty of reasons Abrahamic religions have survived thousands of years, and I would wager taking the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" approach has contributed massively to its innings. Like New Coke, The Youth Bible simply had people clamouring for the original.
The second problem was my own wavering faith, which, in the consequence of already volunteering to run the group, was hilariously ill-timed. Predictably, soon enough I began to deviate from the recommended readings of the course. My sermons included short films I had made in the week, my opinions on the Alien franchise, and a whole manner of non-sequiturs. Perhaps I was uncomfortable preaching a message I no longer was 100% convinced of myself. I would read from The Bible to my peers, before offering up the ways other religions told similar stories, or even how atheists explained the same phenomena.
“But that’s only one way of looking at things!” I would implore diplomatically, with all the theological expertise befitting someone in the school year above my audience.
Despite my own growing reservations about Christianity, I didn’t see it as my responsibility to dissuade anyone else from their own personal faith. I simply wanted to offer people options, and consequently, my own lasting legacy as a preacher was to leave a collection of young Christians as confused as I was.
Soon, the actual grown adults overseeing the group took back control of the wheel, swerving back on course to a more structured path to righteousness. I left the group not long after, feeling I was old enough to embark on some proper mild teenage rebellion beyond my wanton spiritual vandalism.
If there's anything I picked up from the experience, it's an admiration for the openness of the discussions, and the sheer, brazen, teenage male confidence, to lead weekly homilies about something I truly knew nothing about.
These days, I hope the young people at Saint Lawrence’s are being led to their own enlightenment by someone much, much more qualified.
We can only pray.