Renovatus
Ren-o-vâ´-tus [n. Latin] the state of having been restored,
refreshed, revived, renewed, or renovated [pp. of renovare;
re-, again, and novare, to make new, from novus, new].

Early church fathers identified seven deadly sins that have a stealth effect in the life of the believer. These sins crept in and became enmeshed into the fabric of one’s character, causing people to rationalize, justify, and even harmonize their actions with biblical support. Of the seven, the least that we would expect youth workers to fall victim to is sloth. Let’s face it: the nature of our work doesn’t allow us to be lazy.

Youth ministry workers work so hard that they have to fight to get time alone with God. We plan, organize, study, meet, counsel, discipline, hang with, teach, write, create, train, nurture, program, fundraise, lead, mentor, and feel guilty if we take too long of a break in the bathroom. We read Proverbs 6 where it admonishes the sluggard to consider the ant. The ant labors hard planning, preparing, and gathering food. Deep down we think, “Ha! Planning and preparing; I like to see that ant pull off a junior high winter retreat.”

Sloth and youth ministry just don’t go together. Youth ministry is hard, laborious work. But some youth workers still manage to be lazy. I had a conversation with a youth pastor who bemoaned how overworked he was. True, he’s in charge of a ministry to about 100 senior high students. But he has a full-time, paid administrator; a full-time worship and program director; and two full-time interns. The junior high ministry has its own youth pastor, administrator, worship and program director, and interns. So, yes, sloth can happen in youth ministry, but this example is the exception to the rule. For most of us, youth ministry keeps us too busy to be lazy. That’s where we let our guard down and become susceptible to what the early desert father Evagrius describes and one of the deadliest of the seven.

We have been conditioned to buy into a “protestant Christian work ethic” that says that business and productivity are virtues that combat laziness. The early church fathers; Cassian, Gregory the Great, Evagrius, and Aquinas didn’t have this ideology birthed out of modernity. They saw sloth, or acedia as they called it, as a sin of waste. Like gluttony, sloth was the mismanagement of one’s time away from a passionate pursuit of God to follow a more comfortable, complacent life. They would tell us today that busy people can be among those affected most by sloth. As a matter of fact Evagrius believed that this was the sin that most affected those in ministry.

Evagrius noticed that about midday, when monks were required to focus diligently on spiritual work, they became distracted. He noticed that this began with daydreaming of other things. He writes in The Praktikos that this gave rise to a discontentment with their work. They would desire an easier agenda or a place where their needs could be more easily met. Soon that monk would begin to rationalize that his agenda conformed to God’s agenda and that those around him were not pleasing to God. Boredom, complacency, cowardice, and irresponsibility all became a part of the sin of sloth. Aquinas believed that sloth was anything that drew people away from good deeds. He understood that this  started as a sluggishness of mind, where one is drawn away from God to embrace lesser things. Evagrius believed that sloth was combated not by a diligent Christian work ethic but rather by an increased passion for God. Given this definition, sloth may have crept into the soul of many youth workers, in the following ways:

#1. Holding to an agenda different from God’s. Twenty-first century youth ministry has become result-driven, meaning we measure success in quantifiable, tangible terms. We’ve rationalized that God’s primary agenda is the Great Commission and that our ministries are on that agenda. In reality we believe that the bigger, or flashier, or more resourced ministry is the more effective, God-driven one. We make the Great Commission harmonize to our success ideations. In actuality, the Great Commission isn’t even the heart of  God’s agenda — the Great Commandment is. God is less about the agenda that we bring kids in than about the agenda that we love God passionately with our hearts, souls and minds. We are to be people marked by our love for God. Loving like the Great Commandment requires diligent, hard work.

#2. Afraid to call sin, “sin.” The early church fathers believed that cowardice was a form of sloth. They saw the tolerance of sin, be it in one’s personal life or in the life of community, a gross representation of spiritual laziness. This is illustrated in Christ’s admonition to the Church of Laodicea in Revelation 3. This church had a dynamic ministry, but they had become spiritually lazy. They replaced their passion for God with comfort and as a result became spiritually useless. Christ’s words to this church is that he desires them to be useful, either hot or cold rather than the slothful lukewarm body that they had become. People in this church saw themselves as successful because they were lacking nothing. They had created a climate that was self-serving, trusting in the tangible things that made them comfortable, rather than a reckless abandon to embrace God and stand in the gap against sin. The sin that they tolerated was internal. This church mirrors the mega-church of America. We have become spiritually lukewarm, caught in the web of doing what we do and thinking that we’re in “the zone.” Jesus’ view of spiritual laziness that tolerates sin and rests in a reputation of success is unconscionable. His judgment on this deadly sin is harsh, as he says that he will “spit them out of his mouth” (v16).

#3. Unwilling to strive for excellence. I shudder at opening this can of worms, because the idea of excellence is so subjective. Often excellence is equated with perfection, or at least near perfection. It’s also viewed as synonymous with hard work and positive results. The excellence that I’m thinking of is one that creates constant tension. It’s best  illustrated in loving God with our minds. Many of us like churches that tell us what to think rather than forcing us to engage in reasoning with God. We’ve come to lazily place faith in the things that we know rather than things unseen. We’re afraid of the hard work of engaging our minds — so we pull kids from public schools and tell them what to think. We isolate ourselves from community involvement and critical issues because we’d rather stay in the culture we know. Some churches even discourage their leadership from seeking seminary educations because “they aren’t practical.” As a result we raise up generations of leaders who are spiritually fat and lazy, perpetuating the comfortable stuff they know rather than falling on their faces before God and trusting despite what they don’t know.

Sloth may be more alive in the hearts of busy, productive youth workers than we expected. This deadly sin will embitter one’s soul, breeding a complacency that robs the believer of experiencing the joy and vitality of the Christian life.

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STEVE GERALI is Director of the Youth Ministry Undergraduate Degree Program at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California. In addition to over 25 years of youth ministry experience, Dr. Gerali is a clinical counselor, author, speaker, and educator.