If you’ve been in youth ministry for more than about 20 minutes, you probably already have a sneaking suspicion that kids have a lot of disposable income — and they seem predisposed to dispose of it, mostly by spending it on themselves.

A 2000 worldwide study of nearly 30,000 teenagers in 44 countries backs up your hunch, and American teens are in the top 10 spenders. Actually, you could argue that they’re on the frugal side, compared with their global peers. (See “Teen Spending Worldwide” on page 45.) At an average weekly payout of $37.60 they’re spending about $4 less than their counterparts in Brazil and Argentina, and more than $12 below the Krone-happy teenagers from Norway.

But few would deny that one of the really troubling aspects of adolescent life in the Western world is rampant hedonism and materialism. These attitudes mark everything from clothing to entertainment to lifestyle choices. We wish we could say it doesn’t impact Christian kids — that somehow they hunger more for “the God life” than for “the good life.” Certainly there are students like that. But the majority of our students are so caught up in the “global teen market” it gets hard to tell where Abercrombie stops and they start.

SUCKED INTO THE VANITY FAIR
In his classic allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan describes in vivid detail the village of Vanity Fair. Bunyan’s colorful prose takes us down a loud and rowdy street where everything is for sale: “Houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures; and delights of all sorts….And moreover, at this fair there is at all times to be seen jugglings, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind.” (Actually, it sounds a little bit like an area near the food court in the King of Prussia Mall!)

Bunyan wants us to understand that for pilgrims Vanity Fair is a place of grave danger. Like those Jesus warned against in Mark 4:18-19, its seductions are real, its pleasures enticing and its consequences severe. The main character, Christian, barely makes it out of the place alive. While these 18th century images may seem quaint, they paint a vivid picture of the road our students travel on a daily basis — alongside those who are trying to sell them virtually anything.

If we’re serious about helping our students make Jesus Christ Lord of their lives in a real-world way, we have to challenge them to consider the images and ideas that shape their understanding of “the good life.” We have to help them see the scandal of taking God-sized dreams and longings and shrinking them down to the size of a shopping mall.

In practical terms, that means as youthworkers we need to help our kids reflect on three big questions:
• What do you consume? How do you spend your money? How do you spend your time?

• Why do you consume it? What are your motivations in making that purchase? How do you define “the good life”?

• How can you be a consumer without being consumed? How do we help our students understand that life consists of more than “stuff”?

BIG QUESTION #1: WHAT DO YOU CONSUME?
Part of the problem is that we don’t like talking about this stuff. It sounds starchy and legalistic. But think of it as installing a speed bump on the road to Vanity Fair. It’s not going to stop all the traffic, but it might get some of the kids to slow down. Here are some suggestions to get the discussion going.

• A spending inventory. Ask your students to record every purchase they make for a week. Then, the following week, give them some time to look at and discuss the patterns. You might provide a chart for them that allows them to record expenses by categories (for instance, movies, clothing, snacks, music, dates, magazines, make-up, sports, giving to others and so on).

• A closet inventory. Or, you could have them score their closet, a simple exercise that assigns point values for various items of clothing (for example, sweater = 5 points, t-shirt = 3 points, pants or slacks = 6 points, shoes = 7 points). Then, in the following week, each student anonymously turns in their point total so that you can calculate an average score. The scores don’t really matter. It’s a subtle way of helping kids become aware of all the stuff they have.

• A life inventory or a viewing inventory. Provide a chart that helps them break down how they spend their time over the course of the week. Or ask them to tally what they view, again divided by category (such as theater, Internet, DVD, iPod and that old-fashioned medium, television). They should record not only which media they used, but what they viewed and how much time they spent viewing it.

BIG QUESTION #2: WHY DO YOU CONSUME IT?
Our students make a lot of choices without even realizing they’ve made them. They are buying and consuming because they are immersed in a culture of buying and consuming. And any way we can interrupt and disrupt those impulses is going to help them be more godly consumers. As Paul taught in 2 Corinthians 10:2-5, we’re talking here about “taking every thought captive.”

Behavioral psychologists use the phrase social norming to describe the way that adolescent behavior is often shaped by what teenagers perceive to be the normal behavior of their peers.

Here’s how it works. If most teenagers think their peers are getting high, having sex, cheating in school or buying a certain brand of clothing, they will be more likely to make those same choices. This, obviously, produces something of a snowball effect. As perceptions are developed, behaviors adjust, and as behaviors adjust, perceptions develop.

This helps us to understand, for example, why all of the girls in the high school group wear their shirts just short enough to expose the “Britney Belly,” or why all of a sudden it became cool to wear your pants hanging down over your butt, or why all the “alternative” kids are alternative in precisely the same way.

In her book, Branded (Perseus, 2003), Alissa Quart talks about Shelly, a high school student clad entirely in Abercrombie Fitch. Shelly says, “When there’s a party, people look through each other’s stuff and check out how much it cost. At my school, you can only justify not having money by being good at something else.”

That’s social norming. Whether what Shelly says is true or not, it doesn’t matter. She perceives it to be. And that impacts her behavior. As she responds to those perceptions, she begins to create the reality she perceives.

The trick is to “norm” positive behavior and move kids away from their obsession with brands. Here’s a start:

• Abercrombie’s Day Off.  This would be a day when all your students agree not to wear clothing that has the Abercrombie brand. If done consistently and with the conscious intent of stating We don’t need to have Abercrombie stitched on our bodies to be human, it begins to lay the foundation for a new norm, at least for the students in your group.

Much of our students’ definition of “the good life” is shaped by what they see in magazines, online, in movies and on television.

Quart quotes Lenita from Brooklyn who explains, “You know what you’re supposed to be wearing. You see it on TV. They advertise on the buses: Levi’s, FuBu. You’ve got to wear that gear to be in the in-crowd.”

The subtle propaganda to which our students are exposed on a daily basis is unrelenting and overwhelming. The only defense is to arm them with a healthy dose of savvy and marketplace cynicism. We need to push our students to look behind and beyond the images. Here are some ways to do it.

• Product Walk-Through. Part of the battle here is simply making students aware of the silent bombardment of advertising they face everyday. Quart tells about Nick Slater, who as a 17-year-old senior at Denver’s Cherry Creek High School, did a walk-through of his campus. He found this :

– Thirty-four soda machines, all displaying ads.
– Ad-plastered billboards circle his school’s baseball and football fields.
– There were textbooks that use MMs in their examples.
– His cafeteria had both Domino’s and Blimpie’s outlets.
– The paper covers available for protecting his books were from corporate sponsors as well, such as Clinique; part of the free cover is a coupon for the company’s powders and blushes.

• Correct the Ad. Have students go through magazines or watch television commercials and discuss the ads. What do the advertisements promise? What can they deliver?

Encourage students to watch for not just what the ad is selling, but for what the ad is saying to get kids to buy what they’re selling, such as self-esteem, sex, friendship or success. (A great resource for this with downloadable examples is the Adbuster web site: www.adbusters.org/home/. The site has an obvious political agenda, but it also offers
some wonderful strategies for demythologizing the ads our students see.

• If Ads Could Talk. Make copies of some of the ads in Seventeen, Cosmo, People and Teen People. Then, either with stickers from a camera store or from your own
photography software, paste blank talk bubbles onto the people in the ads. Then, let your students play around with what the folks in the ad might really be saying.

• Guess the Product. Turn it around and show students only the portion of an ad making the promise, and then let the students guess what the actual product is. For example,
one print ad shows a basketball player finishing off the dunk shot, and then helpfully suggests, Lose the carbs. Not the taste. That’s right; it’s an ad for Michelob, because we all
know how alcohol enhances athletic performance. (Just ask Mickey Mantle.)

BIG QUESTION #3: HOW CAN YOU BE A CONSUMER WITHOUT BEING CONSUMED?
Part of our task is helping students find their way through and around Vanity Fair. But beyond that, part of our task is helping them imagine a better destination. There are several excellent books and curricula to help your re-forge your students’ notions about “the good life” and what it means to be godly consumers. Some of the resources below are out of print, but at the time this article was being prepared, there were several used copies available through Amazon and similar Web sites.

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How to Be a World Class Christian by Paul Borthwick (Send the Light, 1999)

101 Ways to Simplify Your Life: Practical Steps for Restoring Sanity to Your World by Paul Borthwick (Victor, 1992)

Money Talks by Todd Temple (Zondervan, 2003)

How to Rearrange the World: Actually, Just Some Great Ideas Teens Can Use to Help Fix the Planet and Its People by Todd Temple (Thomas Nelson, 1992)

How to Become a Teenage Millionaire by Todd Temple and Steve Bjorkman (Thomas Nelson, Feb 1991)

Money: How to Make It, Spend It, and Keep Lots of It by Todd Temple (Broadman and Holman, 1998)

Money Matters Workbook for Teens (Ages 15-18) by Larry Burkett and Todd Temple (Moody Press, 1998)

The Justice Mission by Jim Hancock (Zondervan/Youth Specialties, 2003)

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Duffy Robbins is a professor of youth ministry at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania.