Why Your Church Needs A Bod Squad!
Today’s teen girls are looking to many mediums to pattern their sense of self, but none more consistently than that of magazines such as Teen People, YM, Teen, and Seventeen. Surveys reveal startling trends:
• 66% of teenagers read magazines regularly
• 77% of girls ages 11-18 read fashion and beauty magazines
• 53% of teens placed magazines behind TV (at 54%) as the medium they paid closest attention to
• 32% of teen girls “always stick to” their favorite teen magazine
Christian teens are not excluded from this transfixed demographic. Exactly what are they reading? Well, many have horoscope readings and other articles which reflect cosmic humanism and new age philosophy. One article featured a college girl who was so proud of herself for posing nude for Playboy magazine. Here are some other article titles: “Why We Use Guys” (Seventeen, December 2002); “Cast a Love Spell: A Real Teen Age Witch Shows You How” (Seventeen, November 2002); and “Complete Guide To Kissing Bliss” (Twist, October 2002).
Most women or teen girls who read fashion magazines report feeling depressed about their looks or weight afterward. One Harvard survey, in searching for the impact of today’s fashion and beauty-saturated media culture, found that 2/3rds of underweight twelve year olds consider themselves to be fat.
Ask yourself this question. Shouldn’t there be an alternative?
To press the issue of avoiding fashion altogether with these teens is relatively fruitless and not often in line with scripture. Beauty is one of God’s greatest expressions. It seems only fitting that those created in His image would strive to express themselves in beauty.
The catch is learning to express beauty modestly. That means putting those nasty teen magazines aside, but what can they be replaced with? That’s a question that youth pastors, parents and churches need to answer with relevancy. Here’s an idea: Assign some trendy and godly twenty-something women to be your church’s “Bod Squad.” Have them host an annual fashion show that showcases modest fashion items and warns against the season’s newest immodest trends. Try having a special Bible study on beauty and God’s truth about it. (Secret Keeper Power Pak is a great 30-day challenge and it has a leader’s guide in its appendix.) But most of all, make sure these young women on the Bod Squad invest time into your teens so when one of them is presenting herself unacceptably, she can be lovingly and effectively approached.
Fashion may not be the top issue on your mind, but it is one of the top issues on teen girls’ minds. Hitting it with God’s truth is one of those places where the rubber meets the road in youth ministry relevancy.
