Ask anyone who has lived through it, or is in the midst of it now, and they will agree-high school is a place where young people get stuck with labels. Part of the high school experience is being categorized by your peers, figured out, pigeon-holed and labeled so that everyone knows who you are and what you are supposedly about. It's part of how young people begin to make sense of the world, how they learn to navigate the various characters, motives, assumptions and worldviews they will run across in their lives.

The labels may change over time. Yesterday's hippies, hep-cats, loners and muscle-bound jocks are the goths, drama-geeks, emo's and... well… muscle-bound jocks of today (for some reason jocks tend to last the ages.) Many of us can remember the stress involved in being labeled like this. Being fixed with the right, or wrong, label opened or closed whole networks of social relationships. Preppies don't usually hang out with gangsta kids. Cheerleaders don't often date computer nerds. Your whole educational experience, your potential for success and sense of identity, can be shaped, for better or worse, by the labels people attach to you in high school.

One of the signs of adult maturity, however, is the realization that people are bigger than the labels that get attached to them. One of my favourite TV shows of the new season has been The Reunion. It's a show that follows a group of adult characters, all former classmates, as they rekindle relationships following a class reunion. We watch with hilarity as barriers break down and assumptions are challenged. The stud jock reaches out and connects with the suicidal nerd, finding they have more in common than first suspected. The bright-eyed idealist is challenged and drawn to the down-in-the-mouth punk, and they find that together they make a great team. Part of the joy of watching The Reunion is to see people getting past their assumptions and realizing that each of them is bigger and more complex than the label they carried from high school.

In spiritual terms, recognizing that people are bigger than the labels they carry requires trying to see people the way God sees them. I am concerned and saddened by the amount of labeling that goes on in church circles these days. "We can't have so-and-so serve on the board-he's a fundamentalist."… "I wouldn't trust her to speak - she's a liberal." This kind of minimalist and pejorative labeling in the church is a bad example for young people and betrays the vastness of God's creation and God's care for His people.

Brian McLaren, a leading voice in the Emerging Church movement, claims that if he were to try to label himself and the vastness of his character and belief as a Christian, the list of labels would be a long one indeed. The subtitle to his book A Generous Orthodoxy reads, "Why I am a missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, fundamentalist/calvinist, anabaptist/anglican, methodist, catholic, green, incarnational, depressed-yet-hopeful, emergent and unfinished Christian."

Labels are human constructs, ways by which broken and flawed, underdeveloped and immature people try to minimize the world and make sense of it. The God we worship sees us in our entirety, in all our vastness of character, thought, belief, emotion, doubt and development. God sees the individual behind the label. He knows us inside and out. He made us and is always in the process of remaking us.

While we can never know a person the way God does, we who seek to be spiritually mature need to, at the very least, be more careful about the labels we use. We need to look beyond labels and try to see people the way God does. If we do, I believe the church will be a much more generous, Christ-like and attractive thing to be a part of. As it is now, sadly, the church far too closely resembles the immaturity of your local high school.