When I grow up

when I grow up
I wanna be famous
I wanna be a star
I wanna be in movies

These lyrics have been going through my head over the last couple of weeks.

First of all let me apologise. These are lyrics from a “Pussycat dolls” song that is being played on the radio at the moment and does not represent my choice of listening. The song was playing when I hopped in my van to pick up groceries for cooking on SU’s Performing Arts Camp this last school holidays.

I was thinking about a couple of things at the time, firstly about the teenagers that I was cooking for on the camp and secondly, about preparing a talk for SU’s Transform conference that is on the 9th of August. That is my reasoning for why these lyrics stuck in my head.

My first thought is that these lyrics capture the aspirations of young people. I looked for that in the young people on Performing Arts Camp. Were those their aspirations? I could quickly see that they were not the key aspirations of these teenagers. But, rather than an alternative set of aspirations I could quickly see that these young people were searching for aspirations, they wanted to know what their aspirations should be. Their question was; “What do I want be when I grow up?”

I may have been slow to pick up on this but I know that the people behind the “Pussycat Dolls” were not. This song is not an anthem, or a story but rather input to tell these young people what their aspirations should be. Looking at the wikipedia page on this group you realise this would be the case as they are more a product than a band.

What encouraged me was that Performing Arts Camp (PAC) brought together a team of Christian people from different churches, denominations, ages and backgrounds that were keen to input into these young peoples lives giving them some alternatives to aspirations that are based around accumulating stuff.

The random photo at the beginning of the post is actually me, on an SU camp (I never did a PAC not enough outdoor action for me back then) when I was 16. As well as giving people something to look at in the post, I put it there because I realise that I was like the campers on PAC my question was “what do I want to be when I grow up?” It might be 2 decades ago but some things stay the same. I also put the photo there because PAC is the same age as the photo. A number of the leaders on the program were themselves campers who now want to input into young people encouraging them to set some meaningful aspirations.

This was my camp highlight, people investing time into others because people had invested time into them. I will talk about this at Transform next Saturday but, I will also talk about my concern that advertising is putting lots of time into telling young people what they want to be when they grow up. While leaders like those that went on PAC are becoming rarer.