When God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, the setting was a beautiful outdoor location on top of a mountain. When Jesus delivered His Sermon on the Mount, He chose a beautiful outdoor mountainside location where He taught the people. Throughout His ministry, Jesus taught about the Kingdom of God by filling His parables with illustrations drawn from nature, such as the sower and the seed, the weeds among the wheat, and the wolves among the sheep.
In the centuries since, some of the most important and transformative moments in Christian history have happened in the great outdoors. The Desert Fathers left the big cities of Israel for the barren deserts of Judea where they sought to fight temptation and punish the flesh. The Celtic monks of Ireland fled to remote island sanctuaries where their prayers were serenaded by the sounds of crashing waves. Luther decided to enter a monastery after a close brush with a lightning bolt. Wesley experienced a warming of the heart after nearly losing his life at sea.
Even earlier generations of Americans drew inspiration from the natural world. “America the Beautiful” was inspired by the Great Plains’ amber waves of grain and Pikes Peak’s purple mountain majesty. The time Henry David Thoreau spent living alone near a pond in Massachusetts led him to write Walden, a powerful memoir about the valuable lessons to be learned about life in the classroom of nature.
Things Are Different Today
We’re technologically advanced citizens of the 21st century who are understandably proud of our speedy computers and high-definition entertainment devices. Our experiences with nature are rare and fleeting, most of them forced on us as we rush from our air-conditioned homes to our air-conditioned cars to our air-conditioned offices and churches.
For some of us who grew up spending a greater portion of our time outdoors, the change has been so gradual that it has been almost imperceptible. Meanwhile, our kids don’t know any different. Many of them never have experienced nature in all its wildness and fury. For them, recreation means consuming bits and bytes, and life is lived out in a series of human-made (and often depressingly sterile) environments. Even their increasingly rare ventures out into the God-created world bring them relatively little unmediated contact with nature. For them, the brilliant color images on the flip-down screens in the family SUV are more entertaining than the occasional tree only partly visible through the tinted windows.
“I like to play indoors ’cause that’s where all the outlets are,” said one fourth grader from San Diego, who is just one of the many people quoted in a new book that coins an intriguing title for the malady many of us experience: “nature-deficit disorder.”
Author Richard Louv, a member of the advisory board for Parents magazine, says he wasn’t trying to invent a new medical diagnosis. Rather, he was trying to sound a warning about a growing but largely unnoticed trend that he believes has disastrous implications for all of us, especially young people. “The boundaries of children’s lives are growing ever tighter,” says Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Algonquin).
A July story in USA Today agreed: “The fundamental nature of childhood has changed in a single generation. The unstructured outdoor childhood has all but vanished. Today, childhood is spent mostly indoors.”
There are a number of reasons for our widespread retreat from nature. One is technological. Electric lights allow us to conquer the darkness of nighttime, and heating and air conditioning allow us to create indoor environments that maintain a constant temperature not impacted by nature’s changing moods.
Other reasons are cultural. Today everything from neighborhood covenants and government regulations make it more difficult for children to climb trees or ride bikes. Many parents are fearful about the bugs, traffic or sexual predators their kids might encounter “out there.”
There also can be theological (and unfortunately political) reasons some of us may value nature less than we should. Sure, our Bibles tell us that God created the cosmos (
Frankly, adults have their own selfish reasons for not encouraging kids to spend more time in God’s creation. For some of us, it’s just plain easier to get them to quiet down and behave if we pacify them with a video or DVD. It’s a trade-off: rug burns vs. grass stains. After all, don’t the kids get as much exercise walking with us in the mall as they would playing in the park?
The consequences are disastrous, says Louv. He argues that nature-deficit disorder contributes to poor health, including obesity and respiratory diseases linked to indoor air pollution, as well as a stunted conception of the mystery and beauty of life. (Louv also cites studies that link nature-deficit disorder to attention-deficit disorder, a lack of creativity and independent thinking, and a stunted mental condition he calls “cultural autism.”)
So, what’s a caring youth worker to do? Step one involves unplugging yourself from your various contraptions and stepping out into God’s creation. Step two involves finding creative strategies for engaging your kids with nature.
The first step is something you’ll have to do on your own, but the second step is something the good folks at the Christian Camp and Conference Association can help you with. The CCCA (formerly Christian Camping International) is a Colorado Springs-based organization that serves more than 1,000 camps, conference centers and retreat centers throughout the United States. The organization’s Web site features a user-friendly directory of member facilities. The association also produces a range of resources to help people benefit from a Christian camp or conference experience.
One publication in the association’s Focus Series is titled “Using the Outdoor Setting to Communicate Spiritual Truths.” Author Sterling Edwards argues that nature can be “God’s classroom,” supporting his argument with four solid reasons:
1) Kids who venture out of doors for camping or outdoor education programs are removed from the stress and demands of life and therefore more teachable.
2) The created world is “bursting with natural object lessons and illustrations.”
3) The quiet places one can find in nature make it possible to listen to God’s still, small voice—an activity often drowned out by noise and chaos in the “normal” world.
4) The staff and counselors at camps are trained to help kids make the deeper connections between nature and God’s love for them.
Take a look around the room where you and your kids spend most of your time together during your meetings or gatherings. If your place is like most youth rooms in other churches, it’s a drab and dingy room located in the church basement. It may not even have a window to the outside world. The walls, ceilings and floors are covered with human-made paints and fabrics. The chairs, tables and audiovisual equipment feature sleek plastic and metallic surfaces that look sterile and slick. Even spiritual giants such as Moses or Luther might’ve had a hard time experiencing a spiritual transformation in a room so devoid of any reminder of God’s grandeur. Think how hard it might be for your kids to make contact with the Creator of the Cosmos in such a non-creative environment.
I’d like to say a few more things along these lines, but I have to go pack. I’m spending the weekend with kids and grandkids at a family camp operated here in Colorado by Young Life. I probably won’t get much sleep during the next few nights, but I know that along with a few nicks, scratches, bug bites and bruises, I’ll bring home a renewed sense of God’s mighty power and creative genius. Such a sense will keep me going as I return to a world of neon, Freon and virtuality.
