If you are reading this, then chances are I am deeply grateful to you.
If you are reading this, then likely you are one of the relatively few who have looked adolescence in the eye — a time that most of us resent Facebook for not letting us forget — and agreed to help the next generation through it.
You have agreed to be involved in youth group ministry, but not just that. You have chosen to go straight to the lightning round: working with a group that is changing so fast that they cannot keep up with everything themselves, much less allow you to do so.
If you are reading this, then you don’t believe everything you read. You don’t believe in throw-away generations. You don’t believe teens are stuck being overfed, overindulged and over stimulated. You don’t believe that their 1-minute-and-8-second attention spans will stunt their intellectual and spiritual development. You see something else.
Yes, you see your share of pimples and angst. You hear sentences that end in “right,” although it’s unnecessary: “I know, right?” You likely have soda as a permanent budget category, have had in-depth discussions about Taylor Swift and know every roller coaster within four hours of your home like the back of your hand.
If you are reading this, that is part of the reason I am so grateful to you. But just part.
You remember what far too many of us forget: that God just loves the underdog, that He loves using the one people have written off to do the very thing the others couldn’t. You have learned the Pharisees weren’t the only ones to miss God because the wrapping didn’t look right. We can do the same. You have learned that one of the most godly things that can be done is to offer your hand and heart to the group to which God points you and just go for it.
The problem Jesus ran into most with the Pharisees was that He didn’t look the part. They had an idea about how the Messiah would look when He arrived. He would be strong, powerful, impossible to miss. He would have looked a lot like an Old Testament king, the first human king of Israel, King Saul. You can just picture Him, good looking, tall, strong, self-assured.
Basically, He looked “right.”
Jesus wasn’t that way at all. The Pharisees should have seen this coming a mile away, but they didn’t heed their own Scriptures. They were told His appearance wouldn’t be anything special. Not regal. Normal.
They knew those words, but they didn’t believe them.
So most of the group that was self-tasked with the job of keeping a lookout for God didn’t even recognize Him when they were looking at His face.
We run the same risk today.
We have Scriptures that tell us God uses the weak to shame the strong. We know Paul told Timothy to not let anyone look down on him because of his youth. We see the gang of unlikely candidates that Jesus chose for the most critical task humanity has faced. Old and New Testaments show us God just doesn’t do things the way we expect. We can get caught up in the way we think it should go, the way we would do it.
If you are reading this, you haven’t done that. You see promise and depth where others see little of either. I would like to count myself in your company, at least to a certain degree. I am one of the pastors of a church where the majority of its leaders are under 25 years old, and I am just in my late 30s myself. So, as a church, we are accustomed to seeing God do amazing things through unlikely people.
My church (New Life Christian Fellowship) and the community that surrounds Virginia Tech walked through the largest university shooting in United States history almost three years ago. NLCF has hundreds of Virginia Tech students, graduates and faculty who attend. Three of those who were killed had attended. Literally hundreds had friends, professors, resident advisors, boyfriends, girlfriends … who were among the dead and wounded.
The bulk of the leaders who walked our church through that horror, the majority of the leaders who led their small groups so wonderfully, were students in their late teens and early 20s. The first evening after the shootings, students who were still unsure whether their friends (or friends of friends) were safe, were meeting, praying and preparing to walk their individual groups into a nightmare.
During the next several months, they displayed a grace, poise and faith that most onlookers would have assumed they were too young to possess; but those onlookers were wrong. They were looking at the outside and missed the powerful move of the Holy Spirit that was at work on the inside.
If you are reading this, you haven’t done that. Yes, your job is very hard. One day you can help someone build a wall to strengthen their heart only to find out the next day they tore the wall down. The next, they moved the rubble around; and weeks later come to you in tears asking you to help them build it again.
So, you do.
In Should We Fire God?, I wrote a great deal about how emerging generations are challenged to even greater degrees to reconcile the love of God with a world that seems to be coming increasingly unglued. Tragedy can seem to be so much more apparent than beauty. The youth you work with have seen dead bodies floating down the streets of New Orleans. When you talk to them about the goodness of God, those images are likely in the back of their mind — the challenge of all that has scared many people away from youth ministry.
Not you. You have raised up a generation of leaders. Some of them came to Virginia Tech. Some of them came to NLCF and walked with us through a literal hell. They did it with courage, grace and faith. That is why I am deeply grateful to you.
“Let us not grow weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (
Should We Fire God? releases on April 8, 2010, (Hachette FaithWords) and addresses how to maintain faith in spite of calamity.
