Jesus Isn't Always Interesting

BOISE, Idaho, Feb. 26

     Thank God for spiritual highs, but there’s a danger in them if we’re not careful.  Youth ministry people, as for many other Christians, have long known and lamented the symptoms of what we might call “PRS”, or Post-Retreat Syndrome.

     PRS feels like a malady when you’re in the middle of it.  Some of my best experiences in college were the semiannual retreats my fellowship would take into the mountains of Virginia to worship, rest, and grow closer to Jesus together; PRS came on those Sunday afternoons when I’d find myself back at the quad, re-entering campus like nothing had changed.  Others have experienced “reverse culture-shock”, another form of PRS, when they’ve visited impoverished majority-world countries on mission trips, only to return to see American extravagance with fresh eyes.  Coming back from Chrysalis, Emmaus, or Winter Camp can have the same effect and make us wonder whether the experience happened at all, or whether it was genuine.

     The good news is that it’s all a normal, healthy part of the Christian life.  As Oswald Chambers was fond of pointing out, Jesus’ first move after his Transfiguration—where his disciples see him more clearly than normal—is to descend into the demon-possessed valley (see Matt. 17, Mark 9, Luke 9).  College students face this when they return to the drudgery of homework after worshipping hard-core for a weekend, and high-school campers face this when they leave church camp refreshed and energized, maybe having given themselves to Christ for the first time or committed to seek social justice in ways they hadn’t thought about before—and then face the difficulties of peer pressure, judgment, and marginalization in a high-school environment that hasn’t changed while they’ve been retreating.

     This isn’t to say that spiritual highs aren’t important.  My own faith development has been seriously strengthened by times of intimate closeness with God in retreat settings: ROCK! 2004 (the Baltimore-Washington version of CONVO) was one; my Chrysalis weekend was another, as was most of seminary.  And now I work in Christian camping, which is a form of parachurch revivalism—so I do hope that the Lord provides refreshing, fulfilling mountaintop experiences to the campers and guests who visit our programs at Lazy F.

     Even so, PRS begs a conversation for those in ministry, namely around this question: given that God does often speak through moments of spiritual high, how do we equip our students or parishioners to practice the Christian life even in seasons when it’s tiresome (it often is), difficult (Jesus says it will be), or uninteresting (let’s be honest)?  “There is no conceivable way,” C. S. Lewis wrote in the Screwtape Letters, “of getting by reason from the proposition ‘I am losing interest in this’ to the proposition ‘This is false’”—but it’s not always obvious to think so.  How do we equip disciples, especially youth, to be ready to meet the everyday, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other discipline of following Jesus when the dry times come?

     Recruiting potential camp counselors at Boise State University last night, I met some young adult Christians who seem well-poised for taking Jesus into the nitty-gritty of daily life, but they acknowledged the difficulty of persevering.  “The ‘point of death’ is easy,” one student said during the Bible study, probably referring to Philippians 2:8 and the grandiose commitments we make to Jesus when we see him most clearly.  “It’s the life thing that’s hard”—that is, giving even the uninteresting aspects of life to Jesus when it’s day-by-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute, or following him through the mundane.

     In the practice of ministry, especially youth ministry, there’s a place for the moments of deep, felt closeness to God—the sunrise hikes to the cross, the altar calls, the commitments to justice.  But we need to be preparing our kids, and ourselves, for when Christian life isn’t as interesting as we might wish it to be.  Discipleship does its best work in the mundane.  Let’s talk about how to take it seriously even after we leave the mountaintop.

     --John Harrell, Program Coordinator

Reflection Questions

•  Have you had a “mountaintop” experience in your own faith development (not everyone has)?  If so, what was it?

•  Take a moment to thank God that God sometimes gifts us with mountaintop experiences!

•  What is your routine of daily spiritual discipline?  Can you commit to reading a little Scripture (5 minutes a day, perhaps) and talking to the Lord a little (again, maybe starting at 5 minutes a day)?

•  Take a moment to thank God for being good, loving, and gracious even when we don’t “feel” God’s presence over long periods of time.  Ask God to help you follow him even when it’s not easy, adventurous, or exciting.

The God of the Geeks

SNOQUALMIE PASS, Wash., Feb. 24

     Geeks were in the news this week.  My weekly intake of the NPR Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me! podcast took place while driving up toward this snow-covered wonderland yesterday—a triple expression of my own nerdiness, since it combined my loves of travel, camp, and NPR all into one.  Would that people with unusual interests always had it so easy.

     Peter Sagal, NPR’s very funny and gifted game show host—and someone whom, as a broadcast major myself, I wouldn’t mind having lunch with someday—was joking about the perceived usefulness of studying art history, a major not known for its post-college earning potential.  Apparently the president had accidentally caused a stir among art history majors for a remark he’d made (he later clarified), and so Sagal was quizzing a listener on the executive misstep.

     It “caused an outcry from art history majors all across the country,” joked Sagal. “They banded together and agreed to not put as much foam as usual on our grande lattés.”

     It was a good joke, one that justifiably got a big laugh from the studio audience.  It speaks to my own experience as an unemployable collegian, too: when I graduated in 2009, most of us journalism students knew, even as our commencement speaker exhorted us to re-make the journalism industry, how hard it was going to be to find jobs in our field during a recession.  I myself never entered it and went to grad school instead.

     But underlying Sagal’s quip is a strange, and quite suburban, assumption that our culture seems to have adopted, often to the detriment of the youth in the pews.  It runs something like this: Success and happiness in life depends upon attaining financial security.  In order to attain it, you’ve got to work in a lucrative field, which requires a good collegiate (or, more and more, a good graduate) degree in that field from a noteworthy school.  As there seem to be fewer rich art historians, poets, philosophers, and painters than I.T. professionals, lawyers, airline pilots, and doctors, we suppose that degrees in the humanities are trivial at best, fiscally irresponsible at worst.

     As a result of that line of thinking, many members of my generation are tempted to enter fields in which they have no passionate interest, or if they do spend their collegiate years studying what they really enjoy, they have to wrestle with the well-intentioned queries of friends and loved ones who want to know “what you’re going to do with your degree”.

     Not that there’s anything wrong with being an I.T. professional, a lawyer, an airline pilot, or a doctor, of course; we should thank the Lord that we have such people pursuing their passions and keeping us, as it were, alive and un-sued.  But when did non-lucrative courses of study—degrees like philosophy, art history, theatre, classics, literature, English, flute performance, and all the rest—stop being intrinsically good, worthwhile ends in their own right?  Have we stopped giving ourselves permission to study things simply because we’re passionate about them, even when it means financial sacrifice, even if it means barista time after college?

     Since these questions speak to the core of what a life worth living looks like, they’re of great consequence for how we minister to the kids in our families, churches, and camps—which pursuits we tell them are Worthwhile (with a capital “W”) in the days after they graduate.  “The study of language, history, and ideas does not appear to be as useful as computer training,” claimed Klassen and Zimmermann’s excellent book, The Passionate Intellect, “but because of the dignity of nature and human nature, they have intrinsic worth, and their patient study honors God’s creation and thus glorifies God.”  Are our kids hearing this from us?

     Jesus put the goal of life as simply to love the Lord with our entire being, and our neighbors as ourselves (Matt. 22:37–40 and parallels), serving the Lord with all of our intellect and passions, everything that makes us “tick” as unique persons created in God’s image (see Gen. 1:26–27).  And we should note that the ideal of “financial security” and “comfortable retirement” appear nowhere in the Lord’s re-telling of the Greatest Commandment.

     To be sure, the Scriptures ask us to take education and wisdom seriously (e.g., Prov. 8, 1 Tim. 4:16), along with the development and stewardship of our talents, resources, and gifts, often including the financial ones (see Matt. 25:14–30, Luke 19:11–27).  What we teach young disciples ought to include those elements as well.  But whenever security, comfort, or access to Western luxury overtake our devotion to Jesus and our diligent expansion of the fascinations and creativities that he has given us (“talents,” in the lingo of Matthew 25), it’s a form of idolatry: remember what the Lord said about the seed choked by thorns, that “the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing” (Matt. 13:22; cf. Mark 4:19, Luke 8:14).

     The church needs to wrestle with this, particularly in how it imagines ministry to youth and children in youth group and at camp, and especially in the ’burbs and the middle class (which, full disclosure, is my own background).  At Lazy F, we try to encourage our staff to “geek out” in their own ways, to live unashamed of their fascinations.  To use real examples from 2013, we had staff with geek-fascinations in group psychology, dance, painting, Justin Bieber’s music, and the ligaments of the human knee, to name a few.  My own fascinations are with airplanes, as anyone on the team can tell you, and road-tripping.  For me, it’s fun to write from Snoqualmie Pass, and it’s fun to listen to NPR, especially when it’s an act of geeky worship to the God who gave me those interests in the first place.  Let’s declare that we’re done with scaring our kids into chasing comfort.  Let’s convey Jesus’ permission to be creative and to explore what fascinates them, whether it’s the poetry of Angelou, the bar exam, the plays of Euripides, the practice of neurosurgery, or the paintings of Van Gogh.  God will provide our financial needs in the long run if we trust God and let ourselves be nerds for God’s glory.  Let the youth geek out.  Long live art history.

    --John Harrell, Program Coordinator

Reflection Questions

•  What’s something that fascinates you so much that you could talk about it for 15 minutes without apologizing, even if everyone else loses interest?  (Could it be a sports team?  A field of study?  An activity?  A person?  Pancakes?)

•  Try this.  Go out on a “geek prayer walk”.  Take a five minute walk—just you and the Lord—and tell God about whatever it is that you geek out about.  Don’t try to sound “holy” or anything: just be yourself and talk about what fascinates you.

•  How can you encourage the kids, teens, and young adults in your life to explore their God-given fascinations—even the ones that might not make them much money?

•  Thank God that God gave you fascinations and passions.  Ask God to give you ways to develop and explore them.

Ft. Flagler: Thoughts from a Grateful Chaperone

KINGSTON, Wash.

            Wednesday was fun, but Thursday, All Saints’ Day, was the more important holiday this week.  Today, as Christians the world over observe All Saints Sunday in worship services, I wish they could meet some of the teenage saints who led at Ft. Flagler this weekend.

             “Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young,” said St. Paul to young Timothy, “but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity” (1 Tim 4:12 nrsv).  The kids of the Tacoma District have been doing just that for the last two days.

            Ft. Flagler, a Tacoma District event stretching back decades, is run and led primarily by teens, with adults advising on the side (I was visiting for Lazy F and as a chaperone).  The youth guide the small groups in spiritual discussion; the youth read the Scriptures and lead their peers in prayer from the stage; the youth do the extremely hard work of testimony—telling stories of how God has worked in their lives, and this in front of scores of people their own age.

            For me, the most powerful moments this weekend were precisely those times of testimony.  One young man spoke of his wrestlings with spiritual doubt, a topic many adults might shy away from in church settings.  Another teen told of experiencing God’s forgiveness through his struggle with drug use.  And one high schooler quietly preached, in the space of about 120 seconds, that even though he had lost someone dear to him to death a few years ago, he still believed God was good—a vitally important sermon in a culture trying to understand how there can be a completely good God when painful things happen.  And this not from a studied theologian, but from a high schooler.  Amen, hallelujah!

            Sure, we adults do have our role to play: as with any kid in any church anywhere, these youth need solid theological nurture over the next several years of their development, lest we tacitly usher them, like we’ve done to so many youth before them, into the crowd of 18-year-olds who flee a church they find irrelevant.  "Direct your children onto the right path," God tells us adults, "and when they are older, they will not leave it" (Proverbs 22:6 nlt).  We adults do have our work cut out for us.

But meantime, God is in the business—as God proved again this weekend—of using kids, teens, the educated, the uneducated, both the articulate and inarticulate, to preach God’s goodness and unconditional love to the world.  That’s why a special-needs youth was able to sing praise songs from the top of the Ft. Flagler ramparts during a group game yesterday, and how in a culture that fears public speaking above anything else, a bunch of teenage girls and guys took turns leading prayer for the 90-odd people assembled.  “A little child,” the Lord said, “will lead them” (Isaiah 11:6 niv).

I know firsthand the power of teen-on-teen mentoring, because it’s part of the reason I became a Christian in the first place.  When we finally do invent a time-machine, I’d love to go back to Meyersdale, Penn., in the winter of 2001, and watch, invisible, as on a weekend trip, a nerdy eighth-grader named John sat under the tutelage not only of people like “Mr. Dave” and “Miss Debby”, our youth leaders, but also of older, Jesus-loving teens, who helped to raise this kid as a disciple.

At times their mentorship looked and sounded like Scripture study and worship, and at other times, like four high schoolers singing “VeggieTales” songs at the top of their lungs from a Hidden Valley ski lift—but no matter.  Those older kids (we were known as “Impact! 412” in those days) taught me volumes about God’s love from the example of their pursuit of Jesus while they were still in high school—and from their willingness to welcome me into Jesus’ family as well.

It’s the same here.  These Flagler kids, the whole Tacoma youth team (“TUMY”), are setting an example, like Paul said—and they’ve got a lot to teach us.  Here’s hoping they’ll find a church ready to listen when the Holy Spirit moves them to speak.

Youth are not the future of the church, as Pastor Dennis reminded us this weekend: they are the church now, with all rights and responsibilities pertaining thereunto.  This All Saints Sunday, as we remember the saints who have gone before us, let’s join in praising a God who uses kids to mentor kids—and who uses the witness of teens to mentor us grown-ups.

My humble thanks to the TUMY Team for letting the Lord use you (and the adults who advised them), and all praise to a God who anoints the young to instruct their elders and their peers—from someone who has experienced the power of a teen’s influence on another kid.

—John Harrell

Program Coordinator

Questions

 

1.  We often think of youth ministry as adults teaching kids—but how might God use someone under 18 to help you in your pursuit of Jesus?

2.  If your church has a “youth room,” where is it physically located in the church (in the front? in the back)?  What might its relative location say to youth about their relative importance in your community of faith?

3.  What are ways that you yourself can advocate for the spiritual needs of young people in your church?  What commitment will you make this week?

Other thoughts and comments are welcome below.

Autumn, Sleep, and Teens

Lazy F Camp, 2012.

QUEEN ANNE, Seattle

          From the stone wall on 7th Avenue West this crisp, blue-sky morning, you can see the Bainbridge Island ferry clear across the Sound as it emerges from the harbor, bound for downtown Seattle, and the streets are filled with the orange of a well-painted fall season.  It’s a helpful reminder of why we’re in ministry.

            “Life,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald, as our colleague Kristen reminded us last week, “starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”  No doubt.  For us at Lazy F, the awesome and extremely fun process of planning for summer 2014 began in August before the 2013 staff even left, and the busyness of our campers’ lives started afresh as the leaves began to turn.

            And they are busy, our campers: youth ministry has known this for a long time.  Here in Seattle, as around the country, teens are bustling with college-level courses, starting their marathon of preparation for the AP exams in the spring.  Surely it’s applaudable: see Proverbs 8 about the virtue of the acquisition of knowledge.  But nowadays, it’s coming at a cost.

            “My kids would be part of the life of the church,” a parent at a church on Seattle’s Eastside told me yesterday, “if it weren’t for the bajillion things that are taking energy out of their lives already.  They’re exhausted.”

            They’re not alone.  A few weeks ago, a Maryland school district proposed delaying the daily high school start-time to 8:15 a.m., fifty minutes later than they currently start, in an effort to secure more sleep for teens (albeit at the cost of moving the middle schools back to 7:45).  Queen Anne teens, who attend Ballard High, start first period at 7:50 a.m.  Across the pond in Bothell, it’s a half-hour earlier, and “zero period” begins as early as 6:20.

            Much of our pattern of early-morning school-starts is an accident of circumstance: parents do need to get to work, and buses do need to serve multiple schools.  But in a culture that prizes intense homework, college-level classes in the high school years (again, a good thing), and leadership in extracurriculars, teen-life often pays the difference in sleep and downtime.

            Maybe there’s a divine message for us in autumn, when the vegetation goes through its cycle of resigning to the need for rest, quiet, and rejuvenation in preparation for the life-filled explosion of spring and summer.  Summertime “dies” into autumn, which yields the “resurrection” of spring, as Our Lord told us: “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies," Jesus said, "it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24 niv).

The universe is an artwork, and the Artist, the triune God who made it, appears to think that rest and refreshment are so important that they’re designed into the very fabric of the world we move through at this time every year.  Too bad, then, that this is the time at which we ask our youth to become more busy.  Isn’t that backwards?

            The ministry need couldn’t be clearer.  If God wants us to rest, and if we’re driving our teens to exhaustion, then maybe the church has a call to balance its ministries of activity and creative bustle for kids (please, let's not do away with broomball and skiing!) with countervailing opportunities to learn the Christian disciplines of quiet, stopping for a moment, sleep—giving them the chance to just “be”, to bask in our Lord’s prevenient grace for them just as they are.

            In camping and youth ministry, at Lazy F and elsewhere, let’s take a cue from this delicious, Christ-designed season of leaves, Pumpkin Spice Lattes, and knit beanies, and ask how we can embrace Jesus’ call to stillness, peace, grace—and ask the Holy Spirit to infuse our ministry design with a dose of the rest that our kids long for.

            John Harrell

            Program Coordinator

Lazy F Camp, 2012

1.  How does your routine encourage stillness and quiet in the Lord’s presence?

2.  Who are the teens in your life?  Ask them how they feel from day to day.  How do they feel about their level of rest?

3.  How does your church invite teens to experience God’s prevenient grace through stillness and peace?  How can you lead by example to help the teens in your life experience God’s peace this autumn?

Rock Concert: Teens, Relationship, and Newton

Any high school student who’s taken physics—when they’re not too groggy from being overworked—will remember that any two objects in the universe exert gravity upon each other.  That’s why planets stay in orbit, feet stay on the ground, and planes don’t stay up forever.  Put differently, it means the Space Needle is attracted to your toothbrush.

The Lord speaks to different people in different ways, I suppose, and often speaks to me through pointing out curiosities in the created order.  Yesterday I was out near our zip line on a prayer-walk and absently started tossing a stone into the air, when it occurred to me that the stone inevitably falls to the ground and tries to get back to the earth.  Toothbrush and Space Needle, stone and planet.

Yeah, Newton figured that out a long time ago, and I’m certainly not new to gravity.  But I’d never really thought about why God would have programmed that quirk into the universe.

Think about it: God could have created a universe in which gravity worked backward—where objects move away from other objects the way magnets are repelled by similar magnets, or the way junior high boys and girls separate at school dances.  (The universe would probably have needed a hard outer shell, but I digress.)  God could have—so why not?

I think it has something to do with God’s nature as being in relationship.  If we believe that God is somehow three Persons while remaining One undivided God, then we know that relationship itself is intrinsic to God’s very character: the Spirit relates with the Son and the Father, the Son relates with the Father and the Spirit, and so on.

And if the Scriptures are right that the created order screams about God’s character (see Ps. 19:1–4, for example), then the fact that all objects, so to speak, desire all other objects, is simply a corroboration of what we already knew about who God is.  And we can take it as a statement from God that relationship is so important, even the universe itself was shaped to reflect it.

Bummer that American teen culture is shaped in exactly the opposite way.  The life of that sleep-deprived high school student, through no fault of her own, has been shaped by society to be antithetical to the fostering of good relationship.  Out of our desire for teens’ security of finance and station later, we tell teens that they need to get into the best colleges—which requires as many extracurricular activities as possible (“It looks good on a college application”), while holding down a 4.0.

I’m not knocking higher education, and I’m certainly not knocking excellence: the Scriptures tell us those are virtues, too (like in Proverbs 8).  But who has time for real, meaningful relationships with family in the midst of that kind of chaos?  Who has time for friends, mentors, romances in a fear-driven, hurry-soaked culture like ours?

This is part of why we do what we do in retreat-and-camping ministry.  Lazy F, and its sister camps in the Northwest, seek to provide a space for teens and children to experience real community and unhurried togetherness in a peaceful environment.  The practice of retreating arises out of a conviction that learning how to be in real relationship together isn’t just Something Nice To Do: it’s at the very core of experiencing the Triune God of the Scriptures, and consequently to building toward renewed kids, renewed churches, and a renewed world.

Join us in standing in awe of the God who is, apparently, not only a physics nerd, but who uses stuff like rocks and dirt to invite us to experience God’s very person.  Can we do anything other than put on our goggles and lab coats and cry “hallelujah”?

            —John Harrell, Program Coordinator          |          program@lazyfcamp.org