The Guys from "The Sandlot" in Youth Group

Sometimes, characters in movies remind me of people I have encountered in church. Let’s do The Sandlot…

Smalls

This dude is homeschooled and rolls in every Wednesday night with his hair parted on the side and slicked down. Polo shirt, always tucked in. Gets emotional during praise and worship and cries a lot. His parents are very strange: dad has one of those beards without a mustache, and mom has hair down to her knees. The family lives inside the city limits, but owns a bunch of chickens, anyway.

Benny

The coolest guy in youth group, sort of. He is handsome and kind, but also spiritually aloof. He talks a lot about his Calling and being Set Apart, but doesn’t seem to know what those things mean. Most of the girls would love to date him, but he says that he can’t date until he gets to college, because he has to stay Focused. He only interacts with other boys when he thinks he needs to minister or disciple someone. When he is 18, a couple of the younger youth group kids will spot him outside the gym during the basketball game at school. He is standing in the parking lot in his leather jacket, smoking and staring into the night. No one ever asks him about it. He graduates a few months later, goes off to college, and disappears.

Bertram

Probably should have been on a watchlist since the sixth grade or so. For whatever reason, puberty didn’t quite take. He is always angry, and his jokes sometimes end in disturbing violence or sexual acts. Benny tried to mentor him for a while, and that didn’t take, either. Youth Pastor Trey got Bertram’s parents to put some kind of adult content blocker on his cell phone, and the phone exploded.

Ham

Youth group might have saved his whole adolescence. Deeply sensitive about his body, Ham found high school to be utterly exhausting, as he always had to be one step ahead of the other kids, always making jokes about himself before someone else could.

In youth group, people hugged him. He didn’t always understand the sermons, but he signed the pledge cards and wore the bracelets and did the performative fasts. He never missed a service project.

Now he’s 21 and slogging through community college. Every Wednesday night, he’s back in youth group, running the sound board in the back. He is Pastor Trey’s right-hand man; they drive the church vans and are in an accountability group together. And Ham is forever looking for the 15 year old version of himself, so he can give that kid a side hug.

Timmy and Tommy

This is what you get when you have a 38 year old youth pastor. His kids are just kind of always there.

Yeah, these guys are a package deal. And no, Tommy’s not old enough to be in youth group, but what else is he going to do? Both of his parents and his older brother are already there.

Squints

I mean, he kinda needs to be slapped in the face medium hard, except he’s the senior pastor’s son, so it’s not going to happen until life does it when he’s 24.

There are different kinds of pastor’s kids, and Squints is definitely the Absalom strain: charismatic, but lacking guardrails. He thinks the kingdom belongs to him, and has no fear of anything, especially Youth Pastor Trey. He calls all the adults by their first name, and it’s weird.

He’s not a bad guy; he just needs to settle down.

DeNunez

If there’s such a thing as a youth group Scene Kid, it’s DeNunez. He is at every Christian concert, he has friends in every youth group in town, and he goes to like five different youth camps every summer. My guy just excels at being a Christian kid. He works at Chick fil-A and the franchise owner loves him like a son; DeNunez got the man to sponsor the youth group’s next mission trip.

He will manage that Chick fil-A, marry, and have four kids. He will never leave this town.

Yeah Yeah

He plays guitar in the praise band, and will be okay for a couple of years. Then, he will get really into the idea that Christians are being persecuted for their faith in America. He will get on the mic one Wednesday night and go off script, talking about how his fellow teens aren’t Counting the Cost, and Pastor Trey will cut him off.

You will always wonder if that was the moment that things changed.

By his senior year, he is putting stickers for secular bands on his guitar. Then, he starts dating a girl who isn’t a believer. Halfway through his first semester of college, he will be posting atheist memes on Facebook.

BONUS: Wendy

First of all, let’s dispense with the notion that she was ever with Squints. Of course that’s the story that he’s telling, because they held hands once during See You at the Pole, and she’s never refuted it, because she has never spoken to him and doesn’t know his name.

Wendy is a cheerleader at the big high school across town, the one where there’s like ten thousand kids in every senior class, and you can’t be on a sports team or cheer unless you have perfect genetics. Well, she does, and she is out of the league of every guy in this church. She comes to youth group once a month, because her mother makes her, and she sits in the back. Wendy is somehow above being a teenager, if that makes sense. She has a boyfriend in college who looks like Jensen Ackles, and it would be great if he was a jerk and you could hate him, but OF COURSE he’s a really nice guy, he helped your cousin move a couple of years ago and he was funny and cool. Being a teenager blows.

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