Politically Correct Churches Dude

I hate political correctness anyway. I hate the way that if you want to discuss something, you're instantly anti-everything, a bigot and an evil schemer who lives in the past. If you know someone who's a moron and he's disabled, you can't say anything to him about his moronic ways, because if you do, someone will come along and tell you that you're anti equal-opportunities and hate disabled people.

In modern churches, I've found the hot-potato issue of political correctness to have nothing to do with gender, race or political views. It has everything to do with age. Because churches have, in the past, been run by older people, today's modern churches have responded with a knee-jerk and decided that enough is enough and you can't say anything bad about young people.

It's there all the time; you can talk about how old people are out of touch, boring, traditional, in the past and even smelly if you like, but don't you dare say a thing about young people. If someone's young, then they're beyond the reproach of anybody who five years older than them.

Just like organisations need measure their success by the percentage of minorities they have working in them, so do many modern churches measure their success by how many people they have in their leadership. It doesn't matter that they're any good, they're young and that's what matters.

Now, just as I'm not against working with any minority group you can think of, I'm not against young people leading churches. What I am against is appointing people so that things can look like something they're not.

I bought a toy watch for a child's birthday this week. It was modelled on the watch used by Doctor Who to store his Time Lord identity while he lived as a regular Human Being. It's nice. It lights up and makes sounds. But you know something? There's no real Time Lord in the watch, it's pretend. And so it is, churches try and get their quota of young people and sometimes, they completely miss the mark because they follow the simple equation young = right.

For the record, old = right is equally wrong, so don't go calling me all the bigots because I said that not all young people are destined to be cultural ambassadors for the church. But I will say this about the wrinklies, they may be stuck in their ways and maybe even grumpy at times, but they've seen a lot.