Bump, set, spike. The game was over. As I thanked her for the invitation, she asked me a question. Her parents couldn’t make it, and she was wondering if I could take her home. I panicked! The warning signs began flashing in my mind. I knew it wasn’t a good situation.
In a perfect ministry, in a perfect world, a female volunteer would have been at the game supporting her, but the reality was I didn’t work in a perfect ministry; I work in a small church. The part-time secretary leaves by 3 p.m. most days, which is when school gets out, making it impossible for youth to visit me at the office. My volunteers also have full-time jobs with families of their own. Therefore, if I wanted to uphold the golden rule when ministering to the opposite sex—never meet in private, one-on-one—then I knew I should decline and hope she’d be able to find another ride home. Right?
Scripture provides us with a muddy picture for these situations. We have Jesus, who was willing to minister in less than ideal circumstances, compared to David, a man after God’s own heart (
Messy Spirituality, a book by Michael Yaconelli, focuses on spirituality, but change the second word to “ministry,” and it describes perfectly the context of youth ministry with the opposite sex, especially in a small church with a small staff. We often find ourselves in messy situations, places in which we know in an ideal ministry we wouldn’t find ourselves.
I’m not trying to justify these situations or say it’s OK to throw our ethics out the window because Jesus ministered to everyone and we need to do the same. On the contrary, the opposite is true. The fact is we are going to encounter situations that test our ethics all the time, and we have to be ready so we can minister like Jesus and not start down a path of destruction like David.
If we do not have our standards set, then it’s going to lead to a bad situation sooner or later. After all, if we ever find ourselves desiring to meet one-on-one with the opposite sex, that should be our first warning sign of less than honorable intentions.
After weighing my options, I decided to take a risk and agreed to take her home. I asked her to call her parents and let them know I would be bringing her and an estimated time of arrival, making sure it was OK with them. By calling her parents and informing them of the situation, I widened the circle of accountability.
As we were driving, I decided to widen the accountability circle further. I knew the girl loved talking with my wife so I called her on my cell phone, placed it on speaker phone, and all three of us talked together on the way to the girl’s house. Is it possible to minister with the opposite sex? Yes, but we have to be creative and watchful. Whether it’s meeting in a public place, like a coffee shop, or using a cell phone to widen accountability, it’s imperative we find ways to uphold the sacred trust our youth, parents and God places in us.
