Do You Want To Be Better?

“How do you reconcile your love for someone with the revelation that they have behaved badly?”

This question was raised by NBC’s Today Show host Savannah Gutherie after former co-host Matt Lauer was ousted and fired for inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace. I have wrestled with trying to find an answer to this question within my interpersonal relationships.

 Now, the time has come to grapple with it again because of the #DoBetterYounglife movement.

Younglife was single handedly the most formative part of my high school experience and college life. No words can accurately describe the sweeping joy of rushing with the masses into a chaotic clubroom at a Younglife camp. The deep, authentic, belly laughter I have shared as a student and a leader will never be matched. Even in the seasons of my growing edges as a student and leader, I gained a profound understanding and appreciation for the role of a Younglife leader; an incarnational figurative showing up full of Love and hope to share. As a Black kid from a working-class family in rural South Carolina, that’s who and what I needed, and as a college student, it’s who I was called to be.

Yet, as life-changing as Younglife was to my development as a Black man trying to follow Jesus, I didn’t escape the racism and classism that is deeply embedded in the organization. The assimilation I went through, culturally and theologically, still may be the greatest con I have ever fallen for. I lament the idea I needed to buy Chaco's, use multi-color highlighters for my Bible, and listen to white Christian music to feel like I was a part of what God was doing.  As a Black kid, I felt forced to sacrifice the parts of my blackness I loved and the parts I didn’t even know existed to have a seat at a table which was built on white normativity. I do not like Comfort Colors shirts, but that’s what I wore, because Younglife told me that’s what I should like. My blackness was once used as the punchline of a skit, because as my Area Director said, “There would be nothing funnier than a large, angry, Black man coming in and tackling someone!”

My raft of Black dignity could no longer handle the milky tsunami of Younglife. I began drowning in the bottomless, salty sea of whiteness with no lifeboat in sight. I have come to the realization that there are only two differences between being a Black man in America and a Black man in Younglife: America actively chooses not to listen to me, whereas Younglife simply doesn’t know how to lower the volume of Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors long enough to hear me.

Younglife culture is toxic for Black kids, and it needs to be reconciled.

This summer has also unearthed the hideous cruelty Younglife has perpetrated against LGBTQIA+ persons. As a Black man, I am also cisgender and heterosexual. With these social identities in play, I acknowledge the privilege afforded to me in which they never factored into my Younglife experience. #DoBetterYounglife has earned the right to be heard, exposing story after story, the cataclysmic wounds, trauma and scars, the organization’s anti-LGBTQIA+ policies, and its leaders have inflicted. These actions by Younglife are beyond shameful.

Younglife is homophobic. There’s no way around it.

 I say this as someone who actively purses allyship for LGBTQIA+ persons, and makes it an obligation to challenge, daily, my homophobia, my biases, and even my theology.

The homophobia that exists in Younglife is of course fear, but it’s also more. It says, “because you are gay, there is nothing about Jesus you can teach me or high school kids.” It exclaims, “Because you are trans, people cannot learn from you or be led by you”.  And they dress their homophobia in the name of being “biblical” and doing it in “love”. Younglife fears the Jesus they have been preaching about exceeds the depths of the shallow theology they’ve taught for so long. Jesus was the original author of welcoming children, and Younglife has put asterisk on who the children are.

Younglife theology is toxic for LGBTQIA+ persons, and it needs to be reconciled.

So, with a toxic culture and theology, how am I reconciling my relationship to Younglife? I decided to pull a script from their playbook.

Younglife leaders are familiar with the story of the man at the pool of Bethesda. It is typically told during the “need talk” at camp or at a local club. The Gospel tells of a man who has been laying by a pool for 38 years due to a disclosed aliment along with other folks. Allegedly, an angel would come down and create a ripple in the water, so that the first one in could be healed. Thirty-eight years of being stuck. Four hundred and fifty-six months of doing the same thing over and over and over again. Time wasted and pain ever growing believing this way of thinking was the right way, maybe even the only way to live life. Until one day, Love incarnate showed up. Jesus asked the man “Do you want to be made well?”

The man made an excuse, telling Love there is no one to help him into the pool once the water is stirred. It begs the question, “Did he truly want to be made well?” Sometimes, what we want is not what we reveal. He was committed to this way of life. He dared not expand his mind to conceive there was another way of believing. To be made well, to made better, this man would have to lose his old life, and the rigid comfortability of his being and thinking to take on a new life. And this new life comes with responsibilities and privileges.

With all power and authority Love tells him get up and take his bed with him. Love knew this healing was just a small taste of defeating death until Love’s final swallow of death would happen through a resurrection which would extend eternal life to all.

 Younglife habitually asks kids to put themselves in the story. The organization says a fuller and richer life can be theirs if they leave the metaphorical pool at which they sit and accept Jesus’ invitation to be made well. However, now it’s time for Younglife to put itself in the place of our faithless man.

For 78 years, Younglife has been at the pool. “Every kid, everywhere, for eternity” is an inoperative mission when your mobility is limited because you exclude and discriminate on the basis on sexual orientation and gender identity.

 Certainly, Younglife was not made for this.

God is doing a new thing through #DoBetterYounglife and an invitation to this newness is being extended to Younglife. It would mean for Younglife to start anew, and what an incredible journey that would be! Whiteness would no long be the default mattress Younglife lays its head on at night. Instead, Younglife would never rest until racism and white supremacy is erased from how they do ministry. Imagine Younglife no longer being a gatekeeper to who gets to share the Good News of Jesus Christ.  Younglife would have the sacred privilege of telling LGBTQIA+ kids they are loved not in spite of who they are, but simply because of who they are. Younglife would have the responsibility to celebrate Pride. Leaders would be able to share that the Pride we celebrate is not the opposite of humility, but the opposite of shame.  And the shame the world tells you to feel was nailed to cross of a God who delights in all of who we are.

 And isn’t that life in Love?  To be connected the source who is the wellspring and from where living waters flows? God is continually on a mission, breaking and bending the world towards justice and restoration. Because of divine love, we are invited into the labor.

Jesus, whose love sees us in our brokenness, whose waters are life-giving and life-sustaining, and whose words heal in an instant, is gathering the fragmented pieces, the dry bones in the yard, and those who sit at the desolate pool. It’s a gathering of all things and all people into Love. And in Love, there’s renewal. It’s in the renewal, the redeeming, and the restoring of the all and all in Christ, where reconciliation happens and we are made complete.

Seventy-eight years is long time to be at a pool not knowing there’s newness in the ways you can be healed.  Yet Jesus has walked in. And it’s about time. Jesus, the first and ultimate Younglife leader, is reaching out his almighty gracious arms of love to pull Younglife in by asking, “Do you want to be better?”

*Mitchell W. Felton is from Greenwood, South Carolina and is currently a seminarian at Virginia Theological Seminary as a Postulant for Holy Orders in the Episcopal Church. He holds an Associates of Arts degree from Piedmont Technical College and a Bachelor of Science degree in Sociology from Lander University. Mitchell just recently finished his first book and hopes it will be published next year. When Mitchell is not writing books or for journals, he loves to read and watch movies, attend music festivals and laugh way too much. Mitchell is most famously known for cosplaying as the character Eleven from the hit Netflix series, Stranger Things, were the pictures went viral and he gained national publicity. To connect with Mitchell, please follow him on social media!

Twitter: @mitchellwfelton

Instagram: @mitchell__felton (that’s a double underscore)