About Teens With Wisdom Societies

TWW Societies are just beginning to organize. By design of the author, they organize around the nineteen Strong Wills that the teen characters developed within the novel Teens Fight Adult Corruption. (Interested persons must read the novel to understand the purpose and concepts of TWW Societies.) Here is a suggested agenda for the meetings...

  • Fellowship--15 minutes
    (Teens need plenty of casual time together.)
  • Reading of The Strong Wills--10 minutes (Reading The Strong Wills weekly is the only way to keep its principles on the minds of teens.)
  • Discussion of matters of concern to teen members--as much time as is needed. (Don't hurry this part of the meeting because there is a certain amount of talk time that must be expended. If the talk-time amount is not achieved, teens feel that they have not talked things through and haven't been heard. The amount of talk time necessary is different for every teen and for every situation he or she faces. Therefore teen leaders or adult leaders must be sensitive and discerning.)
  • Prayer for the needs expressed in the meeting--5 minutes or more
  • Refreshments and recreation--as much time as is possible and practical (Remember: Recreational fun is listed in Relief as one of the six vital needs of teens. TWW Societies must provide for that vital need.)

During the discussion time:

Teens are to solve their problems by using their nineteen principles of The Strong Wills. If leaders don't guide them into doing that, they are making a giant mistake: They are failing to give teens the principles that will guide them throughout their lives.

Leaders, your thoughts are not enough for them! They need foundational principles. That's because you won't be there to give them your support in their crises, temptations, and crucial times of decision making. And if you haven't planted the nineteen principles deep within their thinking processes, their moral and spiritual compass may be inadequate for keeping them on the right path.
TWW Societies are designed within Teens Fight Adult Corruption to be teen organized and led. However, it is perfectly fine for adults to organize and provide low-profile guidance for the societies.

From the very beginning, leaders must decide the scope
of their group while remembering this: Sin is contagious!

Since sin is contagious, you'll want to be careful not to mix in kids who are still doing wrong (and are dysfunctionally proud of what they should be ashamed of) with kids who are trying to change for the better.
The wrong crowd is enemy #1, and the wrong crowd can pull weak or teetering teens deep into sin. One society unhappily had to come to terms with the fact that their group was serving only to introduce the wrong crowd (from various school districts) to each other--kids who wouldn't have met without the society. Those kids exchanged phone numbers and pager numbers and began to contact each other apart from the society meetings...and they did wrong together.
What's even worse, wrong-crowd guys began to date the girls in the society who had great potential toward improvement. The boys wanted to have sex with them. The frustrated and disappointed leaders found it impossible to compete with the wrong crowd, the contagiousness of sin, and raging hormones. They disbanded their group. The following is good advice for them and others:

Read these options and think of other options:

  • Be sure the TWW Society's core kids are teens who are committed to doing well, strong-willed, and confrontive. They'll have to apply huge amounts of positive peer pressure in order to protect their society from kids who want to pollute it with their stinking thinking. Within TWW Societies it must be out of style to do wrong and in style to do right. If you haven't achieved that environment, your society is in danger of serving as a dating service for wrong-crowd kids.
  • Wrong-crowd kids can have their own society. This group would be set up by them to recover their own. That way fewer weak kids or teetering teens are placed at risk.
  • Responsible, achieving teens can have their own society. A group like this naturally filters out bad influences. Bad influences don't fit, and they drift away on their own.
  • A society can be organized within a church or Christian school, or among kids who are home schooled. In those settings there is more supervision and more control over participants.

Essential Note:

Please understand that we are not against wrong-crowd kids. We are writing this way because experience has shown us that wrong-crowd kids who are not committed to change are liabilities to those who are committed to change. In fact, treatment centers say that wrong-crowd kids pollute the therapeutic community--render it ineffective and counterproductive.
This basic understanding is vital: You can't win every kid. And you must not put in harm's way all the teens who want to change for the sake of those who remain defiant of family, country, and God. They will exhaust you, frustrate your purpose, lead your good kids astray, mock your tears, and blame you for not liking what they've done. You'll listen to our voice of experience, or you will learn for yourselves...and get deeply injured and see some of your best kids sucked into the sewer.

Warnings:

  • One more time, be careful because sin is contagious.
  • Wild guys and gals are attractive to Christian teens who are going through the natural biological passage of wanting to break away from parents to be their own persons. Wildness represents freedom from parental constraints, and Christian teens are very susceptible to it.
  • Teens who have been raised to be loving, caring, and giving tend to subconsciously search for takers. That's because selfish people absorb loving, caring, and giving like sponges. Teens who have been raised to be loving, caring, and giving also subconsciously tend to search for kids who need counseling and support, and too many of them end up marrying their "counselees." Once they are married, they are not seen as counselors. They are seen as nags, and things degenerate from there. Warn loving, caring, and giving teens of this grave hazard: Dysfunctional teens make dysfunctional marriage partners. Almost without exception, it's only equals who can weave the golden threads of marriage and become united as one. Teach teens to marry other givers and together they can minister to takers. Teach them that home plate has to be intact, or home runs can't be celebrated.