reinventing the wheel...

i think a lot about my teenagers.

let me back it up... i've been involved with the youth group at my church for about 3 years now. i've gotten to know a lot of them through my time there and have grown quite fond of them. they've become my younger brothers and sisters. they're hyper like i was. they engage in shenanigans like i did. i see myself in them. and i see my youth group in theirs.

i see the teens who respond to the messages and get down with the worship. the ones who raise their hands in adoration, who are in love with the Christ that we try to share with them. this is the BEST part of ministry. bar none. to see the fruits of our labor flourishing... scratch that. it's the joy of witnessing their realization and revelation of who God is in their lives, and how good He is, this God that we try to share with them.

but i can't deny that there is another side to this coin...

i also see the teens who come because they want to be there to hang out with their friends. i see the teens who come because they're parents make them. i see the teens that come because they wanted to get out of the house. and i see the other teens who go for any other reason than to learn about who God is. and they sit through youth group vacant and uninvolved. some of these teens are the same as the ones i mentioned in the paragraph before.




y'know, when i was in youth group, i was always so enthralled with the messages that it made me go home and tear through my bible.

wait... what?

what i meant to say was that i was completely disconnected on an emotional and spiritual level. i'd gone to church my entire life; and this resulted in me believing what i believed by default and never feeling the need to go any deeper with my spiritual relationship. this is no secret. luckily, all those times sitting through sermons at church and youth group, some crazy ideas got stuck in my head; something about a living God and grace sufficient and a perfect love; and these ideas were so intriguing that i dwelled on them in the back of my mind. i'd already had God in my life by default, so to process everything i'd heard was, for the most part, a matter of taking the time to weigh everything i'd encountered up until that point. i was raised in a good christian household, so to see God's goodness was fairly easy; but i simply can't just bank on the assumption that all of my teenagers will eventually 'come to.' i'd be foolish to make the assumption that they too will easily see God's goodness in their lives.

i mean, do they even want to know God at all? do they even care about His goodness? maybe. but, for the most part, telling them point blank will have little to no effect. the challenge lies in, for lack of a better word, repackaging the gospel in ways that are relevant to people who, more or less, have little to no interest in finding a God they're not sure they need. i'm not talking about changing or bending or stretching the Word. i'm talking about sharing it in such a fashion that this younger generation would care to engage it. ALL of it.

it SOUNDS simple enough, yeah? the visionary work is seemingly done, but how do we execute? I HAVE NO FREAKING CLUE. i truly think about this a lot. i pray about it. i know that this isn't something that is going to happen by my own strength. God is in control and i can dig it. i just need to do my part in trusting Him, and He'll handle the rest.

a couple weeks back i was at youth group. we're currently watching a video series called "nooma" by this cat named rob bell. i wasn't the one intro/outro-ing the videos, so after the video i stepped outside to get some air. lo and behold are 3 of my 4 assigned students (all of the staff is assigned students to keep in touch with through out the week so as to not let them feel neglected. [on a side note, living 40+ minutes away from the youth group, i'm no longer as close as i'd like to be to the teens any more, and my 4 particular students i'm not very close with at all... so there was already an air of awkwardness between us...]) ditching youth group to play a game of skate on the front patio area.

each of them give me a lame excuse of why they're not upstairs. immediately it's my instinct to bring the pain and make them go back upstairs, but for some reason i didn't.

i'd recalled hearing along the way, perhaps at youth group, perhaps at a youth workers conference, that people "won't care about what i know, until they know that i care." it makes sense, right? they feel no desire to connect authority figures (ie, teachers, parents, etc...) because they don't have common ground to stand on. from their perspective, teachers are always cramming information no one cares about down their throat for an hour, and then they move on to the next class and get it all again. parents are coming down on them during times where they're just trying to figure things out, trying to figure out who they really are. i remember feeling all of that during my trouble laden teenage years.

and here i am, a youth worker, who has the most important message that they'll ever hear, and i'm surely classified somewhere on, that spectrum of authority, between teacher and parent. as someone who's on the other side of this proverbial fence now, who's trying to be a good role model for people whose entire world exists within the walls of their respective highschools, i try to think about what it is that would've piqued my attention back then. what would've made me listen? what would have made me think? what would have made me take down my impenetrable walls apathy?

i remember at that moment that it's about a relationship. not just being acquainted. not even to merely 'know' someone; but an actual living and breathing, loving and hating, giving and taking relationship. in that moment on the patio i knew that sending them upstairs would have gotten me no closer to those knuckleheads than i already was. instead i stayed out there with them and got to know them. i asked them questions about the game and let them be the authority for once. i challenged them to be better skaters (by making fun of them...). i'd even told them a hilarious account of me trying to learn how to ride a skateboard. at one point, a student from upstairs came down and told us we were being too loud. it was an oddly familiar feeling that i hadn't experienced in years.

typically at youth group, we end in prayer groups. so i gathered them up and sat them down. i explained to them that if they're going to come to youth group nights, they need to be a part of the youth group. they were pretty perceptive of that. and since i'd been fair enough to let their game continue, i told them that if they'd let me close the night up in a prayer, we could call it even. they were down with that. among their requests were 'to get better at skateboarding so that he'd win next time,' and 'to continue having a good month.' fair enough. i'd given them a schpiel about praying to God about anything, and that we had to do our parts to show Him that we were serious, and they sat and listened. i prayed and then they were off to finish their game.

i'm not saying that i have this ministry thing figured out. i'm not saying that i've converted those boys or even that i've gotten them to start thinking. i will say that building this relationship is going to be the difference between them hearing what i have to say, and them listening to what i have to share with them. and it could be the difference between hearing about their salvation, and knowing their salvation. no amount of revamping and retooling the gospel will ever be more effective than living the life that is saved by grace, boldly and unflinching, in the view of those we're trying to reach.


***disclaimer***

i just re-read this and i realized that i didn't give parents and teachers their propers for the role that they DO play in these teenagers' lives. i know it's not perfect in every situation, but it certainly isn't always broken either. if i wasn't drilled and hammered by my parents when i was younger, i probably wouldn't have the values that i hold today. and if teachers weren't doing their jobs, i wouldn't be sitting here writing dissertation sized blogs.