In 2009 Bob Dylan was interviewed for the first time in 19 years. The interview was conducted by Ed Bradley who drew out some rare insights about how Dylan views his work and his legacy. What I found particularly fascinating was the way that Dylan talked about his early days of writing music and the flurry of creativity that he harnessed before the age of 25. Early on in the discussion Dylan references the opening lines from “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”:

Darkness at the break of noon

Shadows even the silver spoon

The handmade blade, the child’s balloon

Eclipses both the sun and moon

To understand you know too soon

There is no sense in trying

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn

Suicide remarks are torn

From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn

Plays wasted words, proves to warn

That he not busy being born is busy dying

Later, when explaining how he wrote this song (at age 23!), Dylan says, “well- try to sit down and write something like that. There’s a magic to that. It’s not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, you know, it’s a different kind of a penetrating magic…and I did it at one time.” Ed Bradley follows up by asking, “You don’t think you can do it today?” Dylan shakes his head and answers with a simple and almost sentimental, “mm-mm”.

As a person who works with teenagers for a living I found this comment to be extremely intriguing. Here was a man at age 68 admitting that he couldn’t do, creatively, what he was able to do when he was 23. There are things, physically, that older folks can’t do that are much more obvious, but I had always assumed that creativity, wisdom, intelligence, and insight increased with age and I suspect most adults think that too. It made me think about my own adolescent years and how I often experienced bursts of creativity that appeared out of nowhere. I don’t have a scientific explanation for that, but my hunch is that those creative bursts had something to do with not overthinking things. When you get older you start to overanalyze information from all the new angles and insights you’ve gained over the years, which has the potential to inhibit creative expression.

This got me thinking about the role of prophets and especially how young people can often play that role in profound ways. In my experience, youth bring a raw edgy energy to life that can be disorienting, but also deeply insightful. This can take the form of questioning stale and outdated traditions that are no longer useful, railing against systems and infrastructures that harm and oppress, or simply pointing out small daily acts of hypocrisy. Students I work with also offer startlingly helpful new ways to read and apply scripture. Furthermore, because young people aren’t bogged down with a particularly robust sense of political correctness they can communicate in a way that shocks people out of their comfortable views.

The Dylan interview also got me thinking about how The Church, and youth ministry programs in particular, often stifle this impulse in young people. This is a problem because the church needs these voices and scripture is clear that the Holy Spirit uses them to challenge and build up God’s people (Acts 2:17). And anyways, God is often about the business of choosing unlikely spokespeople to promote truth.

So why do we adults inhibit students from exploring their prophetic gifts? The answers to that question are probably infinite and vary from context to context, but I think it mostly has to do with a mild abuse of power. Human beings generally like to be in control and adults are given a not-so-subtle mandate from tradition and society to exert that control over young people. It’s pretty hard to control the way God may be speaking to us through another adult (although it’s not impossible), but it is fairly easy to write off a potentially prophetic word from a teen as simple run-of-the-mill insubordination. And I get it; parents and youth leaders are maxed out and just trying to keep kids from breaking stuff and ruining church facilities or interrupting a talk. But there is a difference between complaining about pizza toppings and pointing out the flaws in a pastor’s sermon.

So this begs the question: what is a prophet anyway? The most helpful explanation I could find comes from Old Testament scholar- Walter Brueggemann:

“The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that make it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing future alternatives to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”

This is a fairly disturbing passage for me as a youth pastor for many reasons. It makes me think about all the times that I have played the role of the tyrannical king who promotes a bland one- note version of reality in the name of teaching. I have absolutely been part of the “royal consciousness” that shrinks imagination. And yet I have been blessed with moments of hearing God speak through kids when they critique my lessons or question the way I spend my money or help me imagine how to be the church.

Years ago I was studying Acts with the youth group and when we read about the early church the students said it seemed really important that the new believers were sharing a meal together. After a lively discussion we decided that we were going to cancel Sunday School once a month and have a morning where we ate breakfast together and prayed for each other in small groups. As I type this out it seems fairly insignificant, but it was something that everyone looked forward to and it became one of our favorite elements to our youth group. It seemed like the right way to spend our time and the kids had ownership of it because it was their idea. Some parents and leaders were concerned that we weren’t having a lesson that day and we had to adjust some numbers in our youth budget to buy the breakfast materials. These seem like unimportant details now, but they are often times just the types of details that get in the way of young Christians receiving the backing of their adult brothers and sisters. How many prophetic words and kingdom oriented visions have we adults missed out on because we were too focused on our calendars and our agendas? How many times have we stifled God’s voice because we were more concerned with our plans and what we think is best? What are we afraid of? I think it comes back to this need most of us have to be in control

Control is a satisfying feeling and being capable of controlling small portions of our lives when the world, as a whole, seems to be completely out of control helps us maintain a feeling of sanity. Wanting to be in control is not necessarily a bad thing, but most of us have a tendency to over-do-it, right? I can think of instances in my own parenting where I arbitrarily “put my foot down” and then felt like I had to stand firm even as my kids (and wife!) picked away at my logic or my motivation. There have been times where, as a youth pastor, I have felt pressure by my co-leaders to say something to regain control of a trip or a particular narrative. And that might be the most challenging part about viewing youth as potential prophets; society actually expects adults to be in control of our youth and relinquishing some of that control can often times be viewed as negligence. What I have come to believe, however, is that we adults are guilty of negligence if we neglect the voices and insights of our young people because of insecurity, laziness, or need to control. Furthermore, we are cultivating a spiritually stilted life that methodically muffles the voices of a demographic I believe God uses to shape and challenge us.

In his book, “How Children Raise Parents”, Dan Allendar, Ph.D., asks a provocative series of questions that have the potential to help us adults begin to take a deeper look at what might be getting in the way of us seeing our kids as vessels of wisdom:

“Why is it so hard to believe that God intends our children to train us just as much as he intends us to train and guide our children? Why is it so inconceivable that God would design a child to be the best qualified human to thwart and shatter a parent’s arrogance and self-righteousness? And why don’t we put this responsibility to learn on par with the parent’s responsibility to rightly shape the hearts and minds of a child?”

When I read this a whole lifetime of memories and experiences were shaken up like a snow globe and began swirling around in my head; it was the beginning of a personal paradigm shift. As a kid growing up my assumption was that adults “know stuff” and the task of adolescence is to learn from the adults. Of course adults have wisdom, knowledge of science, life skills, and important insights to pass on to the younger generation, but if we enter a relationship with a young person with the premise that we are the teacher and they are the student everyone misses out. Adults miss out on true genuine wisdom and young people miss the invitation and the practice necessary in their developmental journey to become more comfortable contributing their unique spiritual insights to the Body of Christ.

In my experience most people I talk to are excited and open to creating space for the voices of our youth to be heard more frequently, but the task is harder than most people think. This is due to our propensity to value our personal opinions over others’ regardless of whether or not they are teens. Dr. Lee Ross is a well known and respected professor of psychology at Stanford who specializes in Attribution Bias. Attribution Bias is basically a way to describe the flaws in our ability to understand the reasons for other people’s behaviors or beliefs. I was listening to Dr. Ross speak on a podcast called You Are Not So Smart. In this particular episode the topic was why we always assume our beliefs and perspectives are right and others’ are wrong. In the middle of the episode Dr. Ross asks a very interesting question. He essentially asks the listeners why we assume our opinions are better or more valid when we are older. He is saying that we even have a bias against our younger former selves. What Dr. Ross proposes is that we slow down to consider that we might have had a more valid perspective on certain issues when we were young. Here’s how he explains it:

“Well of course our views are not static. They do change and they change as a function of the way WE take in new facts; the facts we’re exposed to; the way we interpret those facts…but at each stage in that process we think that our CURRENT views are rational ones. So in the famous statement that if I’m not a socialist at 20 I have no compassion, I haven’t got a heart… and if I’m still a socialist at 30 or 40, or whatever the year is, I haven’t got a brain; I lack common sense.  

Well the person who is making that statement is well aware that they’ve changed their view as a result of additional experience and new facts, but they think that the 40-year-old now is rational and the 20-year-old was less rational. They never entertain the possibility that ‘at 20 I saw the world accurately, but now that I’m 40 and I have a wife and kids and am inflicted with credit card debt and bourgeois values I no longer see things the way they really are.’”

This way of thinking about our relationship with our own opinions and world views is, I believe, necessary for hearing the voices of people we may disagree with and it’s also a way for people to develop richer and more accurate opinions (if they’re interested in that sort of thing). Too often our over-confidence gets in the way of us seeing a more nuanced perspective. Our over-confidence can also get in the way of us hearing out a better perspective that we possibly might write off as naïve..

As Brueggemann says, “it is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination.” Youth certainly aren’t the only people in our communities that can play the role of prophet, but they are too often disproportionally side-lined and this is to The Church’s detriment. When we pause, listen, and commit to collaborate with the voices of our youth, when we begin to understand that they have a role in shaping us into better disciples, and when we understand the bias blocking our ability to listen, we will begin to become more open  to potential “future alternatives”. We will also communicate to our young people that they have a seat at the table when it comes to discerning how God is trying to form us and that will in turn create better adult disciples who will have had experience listening to God and participating in the life of The Church.

When Bob Dylan was finishing up his album called Another Side of Bob Dylan in 1964 he wrote a song called My Back Pages in which he laments his optimism and idealism in his earlier work. He talks about how his songs had called people to “rip down all hate” and that he had a “self-proclaimed professor’s tongue”. In the refrain after each set of verses Dylan proclaims, “Aaah, but I was so much older than, I’m younger than that now”. It seems like he was already grasping at what he eventually was able to admit to Ed Bradley more than 40 years later; namely that, in some ways, his younger self was more capable. More capable of writing poetry, more capable of being righteously indignant, and more capable of waking up his audience to injustice. Dylan would obviously go on to have one of the most successful, and unpredictable, careers in rock history. As he “grew younger” he was not any less talented, but his penchant for writing “protest music” certainly decreased. And the thing is I think we would all agree that we needed the early Dylan and still need the early Dylan. We need the Dylan that calls out hypocrisy and aggressively, yet beautifully, exposes inequality. We need the younger Dylan who was somehow “older” when he announced that the “times are a changin”.

And we need the “older” voices of our young people. We need their propensity to poke at the royal consciousness and imagine a better future.  They’re already attempting to speak to us. Do we have the courage to listen?