Reply to Anybody's teens have experience with Young Life?

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[quote=Anonymous]I don't know, OP....there are quite a lot of posts here saying how chill and relaxed the Young Life chapters are, but I see yellow flags. There may be some really open ones, but the ones your daughter's friends are in sounds more intense and recruitment-focused.
This kind of thing doesn't sound like it's what you want for your daughter, since you mentioned a liberal Protestant denomination and it sounds like you want her to have an openness to people of all religions. 
It sounds like her friends have moved very fast with this group and are trying to sell her on it as well.  But there is no reason she needs to join Young Life to continue hanging out with these girls, correct? Or does all the socializing for YL members have to be done in the context of YL meetings, camps, etc? Can her friends still do activities with her which would naturally be nice and wholesome, just not centered around a religious organization? 
I had some friends who did Campus Crusade for Christ in college. I really liked these friends but their Bible Study and CCC activities were not for me, so I never attended. I was able to still hang out with these friends, but that was college, a big university where we had our own lives; and these CCC friends were being challenged with new ideas and had to learn to set boundaries between wanting to enjoy the company of others like me, without recruiting. I am not sure the high school equivalent would be as tolerant.

I am concerned that a lot of evangelical denominations focus on an 'us vs them' attitude...people like to be one of the 'us', to belong, because it's so social and everyone creates a sense of community based on their common beliefs. But this is also dangerous. It allows people to live in a bubble and not address the realities of life that may impact other people; that is, people form opinions and world views based on their church's doctrine without encountering people who think differently. This can really lead people to have --after a while--more narrow views and in today's world we really do not need more people with narrow views. 
I had a good friend from HS who got increasingly more devout christian when she went to a Southern college and later married a guy from her church. She became increasingly more resentful of my liberal intellectual life, even though I was socially VERY conservative still.
So, I cannot tell if that is the same attitude that your daughter's friends have or will be getting to have. I would hold off on letting her join and encourage her to spend lots of time with these friends away from the official YL group and with a couple of other friends in the mix too. If it is actually a fun and non-recruitment-focused local chapter, you will figure that out soon enough, and it would not be too late for her to join.[/quote]

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