I remember as a youth ministry leader seeing one of my high school kids who two weeks earlier “gave his life to Jesus” get busted for bringing acid to school. I asked him, “What happened, bro? What went wrong?” He just shrugged his shoulders and said, “I got bored.” Bored?

God forgive us for all those youth we have lost because we have made the gospel boring.

I am convinced that if we lose kids to the culture of drugs and materialism, of violence and war, it will not be because we didn’t entertain them but because we didn’t dare them. It will not be because we have made the gospel too difficult but because we made it too easy. Kids want to do something heroic with their lives, which is why they play video games and join the Army. You can only sing “Pharaoh, Pharaoh” so many times.

A while back, I did something dangerous: I decided to read the Bible. I fled the Christianity that was suffocating me, the fast faith I had gorged myself on, and found myself to be another over-churched soul starving for God. I simply began to ask, What if God meant the stuff He said? And things have been a mess ever since.
 
Something Daring
I know there are people out there who say, “My life was such a mess. I was drinking, partying, sleeping around; and then I met Jesus, and my whole life came together.” God bless those people. But for me, I had it together. I used to be cool (I was prom king, for heaven’s sake). Then I met Jesus, and He wrecked my life.
 
The more I read the gospel, the more it messed me up, turning everything I believed in, valued and hoped for upside down. I am still recovering from my conversion.

I ended up at Eastern University outside Philadelphia, studying youth ministry and sociology. I had heard one of my college professors say, “Being a Christian is about choosing Jesus and deciding to do something incredibly daring with your life.”

I decided to take Jesus up on the offer. The adventure has taken me from the streets of Calcutta, where I worked with Mother Teresa, to the war zone of Iraq, where I lived through the bombing of Baghdad. Following the footsteps of Jesus, I can’t remember what it feels like to be bored.

Prophetic Imagination
What if youth ministry had a prophetic imagination that did not conform to our culture, which has strayed from the Beatitudes of our Lord and bowed to a market built upon the Seven Deadly Sins? What if youth groups began to sew clothes together as a way of protesting against the groanings of “least-of-these” laborers in sweatshops overseas? What if missionaries were students who went to law school to defend folks who are on death row because they are black or poor? What if Jesus freaks were kids who ate lunch with their janitors?

When I got home from Iraq, a woman came up to me, pointed her finger in my face and said, “How dare you be so careless with your life and put your mother through all that. Jesus should be shaking His finger in your face, saying, ‘How dare you be so reckless.’”

I listened, wondering to myself what Jesus she was talking about. The Jesus who died on a cross and invited His disciples to do the same? The Jesus who taught His disciples that if they wanted to find their lives they should lose them? Most of them did, by the way, which surely made some parents angry. Centuries of Christians have been jailed, beaten and executed for preaching that Jesus.

How was I to tell this lovely lady that Jesus was actually the very source of all this beautiful mess?

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Shane Claiborne is a founding member of The Simple Way, a sought-after speaker and author of ‘The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical‘ (Zondervan).