The Boys Make a Discovery

It started in a moment of boredom. The boys of Summer Camp Group 12 were milling around, hoping for another chance at the archery range, but weighing whether it was worth the wait. A trail leading straight up the mountain beckoned, as trails always do, and four of them eagerly answered the call. What started as a simple hike became an unplanned "mountaintop" experience, the pivotal event of these boys' week at camp. And if we care to notice, there's even something valuable for grown-ups who hope to guide spiritual growth, too.

The first thing the four pioneers noticed was the purity of the air, and the openness of the view once they'd reached the first plateau (you always feel like you've conquered something when you finally stand higher than anyone at the bottom). To their credit, they stayed within range of my voice, so that when it was time to come down, they immediately reappeared over the crest of the hill and made their descent.

As a camp counselor, you get used to hearing about everything a kid tells you "you have to see". I had forgotten how an insect can stop kids dead in their tracks, begging further inspection, or how any path but the most obvious one was of course the one they would choose, or the absolute indispensability of a walking stick to an 11-year-old (I understand that one boy smuggled one home on the bus). So when they told me I "had to climb" to where they'd been, I filed it away under one more marvel of nature that they'd soon forget.

But it turns out there was more than scenic beauty that had struck the boys up there. There were, they said, four trees that laid themselves out as the endpoints of a giant cross if viewed from above. They even saw at that time a cross-shaped cloud formation in the sky. One said he felt clean and pure up there (his words), like all his sins had been washed away - "even the sin of Adam"! Could we, they begged, hike up there as a group for our evening Bible study time?

The choice was mine. I could try to redirect or defer their obvious interest, I could commandeer the situation and try to control where it was heading, or I could come along and see what developed. Knowing it was futile to try to steer them away and barely able to keep up with them, I opted for the third choice. Up the hill we went, this time as a group, and each time we stopped to catch our breath and take in the view, it only fueled our desire to go higher and higher. When we finally reached the top, they were elated - elated at the view, elated that they'd all made it, and excited about the mysterious presence of God that seemed to be there. As I sat off at a distance, my lungs heaving and my legs aching, the boys decided the place demanded a memorial, and began to hunt around for materials to erect a cross. They busily scavenged for wood and rocks. Aside from some minor engineering advice and the muscle to lift rocks too heavy for them, this was their baby. One boy, after some arm-twisting, agreed to give up a length of rope he'd found earlier that day. Another would later haul a small cinder block all the way up the slope to serve as a base for the vertical post. Another built a small fire pit; when it was later pointed out that it wasn't a good idea to encourage fire-building in a forest, he was persuaded to convert it into an altar.

And so the construction process continued over two days, with the boys proudly augmenting their original design and finding materials at the bottom of the hill that ended up at the top. It was agreed that "Holy Mountain" should remain a secret until all the building was done, at which time they would happily share their discovery with the rest of the groups, which they did in a moving hike and ceremony Friday morning.

But an idyllic spot wasn't the only thing they had discovered. For in the process of building something special for God, of going to a place that was special and rich with his spirit, and of dealing with the inevitable conflicts that sprang up around design and construction, their hearts were opened. As the boys worked, I was able to read to them about Moses' ascent up Mount Sinai to meet with God, and how his face became radiant each time he did, so that the Israelites were afraid to approach him. We read about the people of Israel's generosity in giving of their own wealth and materials in order to build Solomon's temple. We read how when, after that temple had been destroyed and the people exiled, on their return they listened to Ezra read the Book of the Law and they wept because they realized their own disobedience. And whenever we climbed the hill, we began by reading Psalm 24:3-4, which says, "Who may climb the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? Only those whose hands and hearts are pure, who do not worship idols and never tell lies."

I was moved that God was meeting these boys, here. If we deviated from the published curriculum, I'm sure that's forgiveable. These 10 and 11-year-olds were prompted to think about grace and presence and holiness in a way I'm convinced no printed workbook could have done. This is not a boast. I write this instead because the experience with them ratified my belief that kids can have thriving relationships with God now, that they can pray meaningfully for themselves and for each other, that they can be excited about the work of God in their lives, and especially, that we ought not believe that true faith cannot blossom until the crises of teenagerhood set in, as if the true Christian life is limited to battling adult-style temptations and restraining mature sin.

It has become fashionable for those of us in children's ministries to say that parents are responsible for the spiritual development of their kids, and that the church just plays a supporting role. But buried in that assertion is a questionable premise - two really: that parents can make spiritual development happen (they can't, any better than churches can), and conversely, that if parents do nothing, there won't be spiritual development. But this is a view of kids that reduces spirituality to something like subject matter. It is pretty true that unless a kid is introduced to the formal study of algebra, he or she won't learn algebra. Nonetheless, they will still interact with concepts like quantity and equality and balance and measurement, and so whether or not the word "algebra" is ever used, a student whose world is rich in concepts dealing with numbers will, in fact, be exposed to algebra.

What a mistake to think that kids' conceptions of God are limited to what we put before them! Kids think about all manner of things, and God is one of them. Even unchurched kids from irreligious families have thoughts about God and a personalized understanding of how he works (a theology). Kids do not come to churches as empty containers, waiting to be filled. They come as multi-dimensional human beings - already spiritual, already social, already cognitive, already moral, already physical. The job must be to come alongside what's already happening and to somehow shape that. But we can't know unless we spend time and observe; and we can't shape unless we have some idea of where we ought to take kids.

The value of camp, of course, is that life is shared for an extended period so that waking and going to sleep, playing, eating, studying, and navigating the normal crises of everyday life are shared. I can learn a lot about a kid by watching him suit up to climb the tree for the zipline or observing her join a game of Red Rover. Could it be that the real "work" of spiritual guidance is to get kids to see themselves, spiritually, for what and who they really are? And that is: loved by God; created for a reason (not by accident); marred by sin yet retaining that spark of the divine; considered worthy to die for; treasured by God and called to holiness; forgiven, cleansed, and set free. These are ideas that our kids can wrap themselves around and stake their lives upon. How do we get that truth inside of them? It does not come from lecturing. It is, rather, the fruit of discovering. Creating environments and experiences where kids just might become eager enough to seek it for themselves is the greatest gift we can give to them.

The boys of Group 12 came down the mountain Friday morning knowing that they may never lay eyes on their handiwork again. But by that time, it wasn't about keeping the find for themselves. I think I'm right in saying that their common desire was that other kids, years into the future, might somehow have a piece of something as neat as they'd experienced. My hope is similar, but a little different: it is that every parent and every youth leader who has been charged with the spiritual growth of kids gets to witness some time when the spirit of God runs ahead in front of you, so fast and so far you can't catch up, and so profoundly that you don't want to.

To the parents of a 6th grader

This week I am going to lay out the best case I can for why, as your son or daughter heads into the brave new world of no-longer-children's ministry, they need to become deeply and meaningfully involved at the junior high level. When kids leave 6th grade, they turn a corner in their church life, so that regardless of their level of participation to this point, their involvement takes on a fresh imperative. My wish is that in two years, we'll be contemplating together how we might keep them involved as they transition to high school ministry.

But first, the task at hand. Your graduating 6th grader needs to stay active in church. There are a lot of reasons this might not happen.

One is the sense of "been there, done that" that sets in around middle school when young teens make it a point to leave childish things (Legos, Pokemon, public hugs from mom or dad) behind. Another is their growing desire to control and direct their own lives, including affiliations. Still another is the surefire way in which our culture conspires against teenagers to indoctrinate them into the apparently very grown-up ethos of "too much to do; too little time." Schools, sports teams, employers who like inexpensive labor, and a society that fears the delinquency that will surely break out if kids have too much free time all do their best to transform 12-year-olds into 22-year-olds who are hooked on adrenaline and dependent on caffeine, who are sleep deprived and irritable, who eat garbage and don't exercise enough - it's a real trap. There is too much to do. But, the pressure this creates to produce and turn inward rather than to engage in some spiritual community where you are invited to serve others and just be is formidable. Yet another reason kids "drop out" is because they genuinely don't know anyone, and who wants to feel out of place when you're 13?

So yes, a lot of reasons may stand between your son or daughter and a church in the next two years. But as it turns out, each of those constitute part of the case for you, as a parent, to ensure your son or daughter's future involvement. Here's why:

Early adolescence - roughly corresponding to 7th and 8th grades - is a time of profound change in kids, second probably only to the first two years of their lives, when they learn - well, everything. Neurologically, the brain is experiencing unprecedented development from birth-2, which makes proper stimulation and nurture essential. But, the brain changes that happen at puberty are no less important, and they are not a myth. It's too easy to look at an adolescent's moodiness or their inflated sense of self or their newfound boldness in challenging authority and chock it up to "hormones". What is happening instead is that they are transitioning into a whole new way of thinking - from concrete-style thought that has trouble handling abstractions, to analytical thinking that can problem-solve and theorize and make good, informed judgments about things.

What happens, though, if the religion they were taught as children - when they thought like children - isn't refreshed, if students don't get a chance to take apart and re-examine and even (gasp!) question what they know to be true? The answer is that religious knowledge stays where it was learned, in childhood. It's kid's stuff. So the first argument for the necessity of your son or daughter's involvement in junior high ministry is cognitive - their minds are ready for and need re-instruction in the faith, now that they're thinking differently.

Abstract thinking also allows us to pursue greater self-knowledge. The ability to see things from others' perspective is a wonderful gift, but in adolescence it gets morphed into a false belief that we are the center of everyone else's world and that they're all watching me! And who am I? The potential for an "identity crisis" grows. Not every adolescent faces full-scale crisis. But all of them have to answer the questions for themselves, of who I am, and what's unique about me, and what are my goals and values. "I" as an entity becomes so important because kids can see what happens to others who are admired or shunned; they want to emulate and appropriate as many of those "winner" qualities as they can.

Identity formation, then, is a second important reason to have your kid immersed in a junior high ministry. You want your kids, as they grapple with questions about who they are to have familiar contact with older Christians who've navigated those waters. Exposure to merely "good role models" isn't the same thing, and it isn't enough! In fact, much of what the culture values in the self-made man or the independent woman is contrary to what we ought to be growing toward: we are dependent beings, made in the image of God, under his authority, experiencing redemption from a fallen nature that is more than we can bear on our own.

And as kids seek out a positive identity, they will certainly look to the crowd to find some affiliation. Adolescent crowds and cliques offer safety against exposure. If I find a group of people who are all different in the way I'm different, or weak where I'm weak, or who dress the way I dress, at least I don't have to answer for myself alone. Socially, you want your adolescent to positively identify with others in their youth group: that's my crowd. That doesn't mean they withdraw from outside activities, but that there exists in their world a group of kids who are being taught to value what is "true...noble...right...pure...lovely...admirable...excellent or praiseworthy" (Phil. 4:8). Everyone is being nudged in the same direction. You want your son or daughter to jump into that current.

There you go - cognitively, personally (as a matter of identity formation), and socially, a 7th grader needs the support that a church youth group can offer. This is the first group of 6th graders who entered our program in 4th grade. Before that, we were just a 5th & 6th grade ministry. It has been a privilege to watch them grow up over three years' time. Sixth grade parents, thanks for your support of our program. I hope your family continues to place a priority on the spiritual development of your sons and daughters.

"What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?" Mark 8:36

Into a Holding Pattern

This is the end - for now - of weekly updates on this blog. I'll still write from time to time, but (for now) it won't be every single week. It's not that I'm out of ideas, but I need to turn my attention to a few other writing projects that are waiting in the wings, as well as focus a greater share of my attention on this summer's Kids Games.

This blog has met the fate of almost every blog (or website, or Facebook page) out there - you hit a point where you just can't keep updating it as frequently as you intended to, or want to. The archives are still here - plenty of stuff to chew on. Thanks for the many supportive comments that have been sent about this blog. As I said last week, it's worth it if only for my own sake, to crystallize my thinking and to communicate to you that we're serious about kids' spiritual development and wellness.

This blog turns 100

This is the 100th entry I've written for this blog. I launched Hitting Home in January 2007 along with our weekly e-newsletter as part of a better effort to get ministry information into the hands of parents. We've always known that take-home pages stand a small chance of making it into the hands of parents, and that it was long overdue that we moved our announcements into the digital age.

Initially I wanted to have a blog for "whatever" - whatever needed to be communicated that couldn't be adequately communicated on a flier or as part of a 10-second "Hello and how are you?" conversation during a weekend at church. But it soon occurred to me that promotional announcements have their place - it is in newsletters. Since then, I have tried not to use this blog merely to promote upcoming events. If people were going to click on my site, I wanted to respect their time and give them some "meat" to chew on.

Hopefully I've succeeded. I've long since stopped checking the number of page hits each week and precisely where they came from. Honestly, writing this blog is good for me even if no one reads it at all. It forces me to crystallize my thinking. It reminds me of what we stand for. It hones my method. It is occasionally a space for me to vent, though I try to keep the time-on-soapbox to a minimum. It brings me back to larger themes and visions, which are easy to discard when faced with the pragmatics of running a program from week to week. Most of all, it gives me a chance to communicate on topics of importance to parents.

I'm often asked whether I write everything appears on this blog. I do, except where otherwise noted. When I reprint material, I post a link to its original source. My ideas come from all around me - sometimes things I read (trends in religion or youth culture or parenting), sometimes just things I hear or impressions I've gathered. As to how much time it takes, if I'm focused, I can work through a piece in about an hour and a half. But, I have to be in the right mindset, and there's no telling when that will be. Yes, I have pulled over to the side of the road and jotted whole paragraphs on the back of an old envelope. It's not a matter of setting aside a couple of hours every Friday at 2:00 to be at my computer. Some people can write that way; I can't.

What you find in writing idea pieces is that you often return to recurring themes. The subject is just the gateway. For instance, in only one article, I cannot establish everything about the importance of involved parenting in spiritual nurture. But by revisiting the idea from time to time as new events unfold or new insights pop into my brain, it allows me to reframe the topic in new ways.

And so over time some distinct threads have emerged that regular readers of this blog will recognize. I hesitate somewhat to distill these because I don't want the blog to become a caricature of itself. Nor have I written by rotating among subjects; I simply address whatever's on the top of my mind, and that's how I've steadily had more than a dozen potential topics floating around my head without any conception of which will get written, or in what order.

Still, the benefits of summarizing are that someone wanting a clear sense of the message of Hitting Home might look here without having to read too much. One theme is that parents matter. They are the most willing, consistent, and persistent influences in a child's life, and they should learn how to exercise that influence, but be aware that it looks different in a teenager's life than in a child's.

Another recurring theme is the necessity and rightness of holding kids to high moral standards. When we beat ourselves up over our own moral failings and figure that we can't expect them to do what we didn't do, we A) miss the point, and B) almost certainly ensure that kids will slouch to the low expectations we've put out there. Pessimism is not good leadership, and we should never communicate, overtly or by implication, to kids that we expect they cannot behave morally.

Still another important idea for me is the importance of building the right context for your kid's life, a context that above all supports their spiritual growth and develops their character. This context includes non-negotiable weekly church attendance, exposes and acquaints kids to other Christian adults besides their parents, and strives to identify and cultivate relationships for kids in the Greater Christian Community, beyond the walls of the church. Good parents are diligent about this, and realistic about the fact that their own long association with a church or even Christian schooling is no guarantee that their child will develop some Christian friendships, so they are intentional in making that happen.

A fourth recurring theme is the importance of keeping spiritual growth and development at the fore, and avoiding the trap of driving kids to achieve hollow outward success. I've decided that if I could distribute one bumper sticker to every parent I know, it would read, "What good is it for your child to gain the whole world, yet lose or forfeit their soul?" I believe this is mostly unintentional, but the result of misplaced priorities. The longer we are involved with a church, the more important it becomes to keep an eye on this, because the newest and most exciting thing robs our attention. What's needed is to clean out - get rid of the excess, strip back to simplicity, refocus on what's important.

A fifth theme is the absolute necessity for churches to get their act together when it comes to the discipleship of kids. The inadequacy of church curriculum is truly sad. If any group of people should be interested and in tune with what science can tell us about how people learn, it ought to be churches. We - if we believe the message we preach - absolutely have the most to lose from bad teaching. Yet too-simple, teacher-focused, presentation-based lessons abound, and the result is ineffective discipleship. When was the last time your son or daughter came home really excited about something they'd learned in church, or were prompted there to really think about something? Exactly. By tying up every loose end for kids, answering every question, and packaging it with a nice bow we might think we're delivering them failsafe Truth. But the facts on the ground say otherwise.

Finally, a function of this blog has been to try to give you insight into what's going on in the minds of kids, based on what I hear and observe in our class and my interactions with them throughout the week. This relates to kid discipleship in that we can't hope to teach them effectively if we have no idea what they're thinking about. Kids - and by that I mean elementary-aged kids - have surprisingly deep thoughts and conversations with each other. While some of their battles may seem petty, it doesn't take much to realize that the seeds of future self-concept and industry and intimacy are being laid now. Their self-awareness is high, generally. We have such a chance to set the course of their development; but we have to take the time, and we have to listen.

If nothing else, I've wanted this blog to let you know that someone is thinking about your kid's spiritual development, and to invite you to do the same. An incomplete adult is a sad adult who will search - often fruitlessly - to supplement what's missing. If we can supply in their proper time the nurture, support, and skills that kids need, that's always a great investment.

Mom According to the Kids

There's a survey going around Facebook right now called "Mom According to the Kids" that's pretty funny. Moms interview their (usually young) children and record their answers to questions like, "How old is mom?" "What is her favorite thing to do?" and "What does your mom like most about your dad?" But not surprisingly, the answers tell us more about the child than they do about the parent.

What they tell us is that children, even young children, have an understanding of how the world works that they piece together through observation, speculation, and drawing conclusions, even if they're tenuous. How else would my three-year-old niece "know" that her mom's favorite food is ice cream, or that clapping makes mom happy, or that mom is really good at "doing calendars"? More precisely, who told her these things?

Chances are that she was told none of these things, and that fact has huge implications for us in education, particularly religious education, where our goal is to impart a version of the world and of life that has God as its source and its center. Only it turns out "impart" is a rotten word that reflects misunderstanding of what's really happening in a child's mind most of the time, so let's discard it. Rather, our job is to, first, recognize and understand the process of learning that's already occurring in a young mind, and, second, to attempt to shape and influence what's already going on.

A few years ago in a social studies classroom I had a young boy tell me he'd always thought Vietnam was in South America. Now, how did that get in his brain? The same way my niece "knew" that her mom had a bottle as a baby. Young brains (and old brains) are constantly making connections and drawing inferences, sometimes by our invitation, but usually not. If humans didn't do this, we wouldn't survive. We need a workable model of the world in order to function. As we get older, this understanding usually improves - that's wisdom. But we're constantly learning, fitting in new information to the understanding we already have, discarding old conclusions that no longer make sense.

Experts in moral development tell us the way to morally influence someone is not by first speaking (lecturing), but by first listening. Only when we understand the way someone is thinking about a moral issue can we step into the process and, by approximations, move them to a place of different thinking.

And yes, kids think about God. They draw conclusions - sometimes humorous - about what he looks like, where he lives, what he does, what he thinks of them, and why he acts. They develop expectations of what God will do, and ought to do. Our job - as parents, religious educators, and other caring adults - is certainly to give them a correct understanding of the world. But there again, "give" is a misnomer - it really doesn't work that way. Instead, we steer, we guide, we ask clarifying questions, we invite them to consider new information, we cause them to reflect - and understanding emerges.

This is not relativism, an attitude of "whatever you think is your truth" - it's the opposite! But if we think we will implant or transfer understanding directly into young minds, we've got another thing coming. You don't educate a young brain as you would program a computer. Great discipleship - and here I'm talking about the informal type, that arises unplanned in the course of life - begins by bringing forth the understanding (or misunderstanding) that's already there. This, I think, is why traditional courses in discipleship usually fail. Paper-and-pencil workbooks can contain "truth", but the truth fails to connect with where the student is at. And if discipleship fails at the earliest stages, people will never progress to later stages, when didactic methods (systematic approaches like reading books or listening to lectures) are more likely to be effective.

So what's the message? If you want to teach and want to influence, listen. You must listen, and do it in such a way as to draw out honest perceptions, assumptions, and conclusions. Get to know the values that drive your child's thinking. And remember that spiritual development is a lifelong process. And then join Facebook and complete "Mom According to the Kids". It's pretty hilarious.

The Lousiness of Short-Term Indicators

Imagine you went to the doctor but no tests were performed. He didn't listen to your heart, didn't check your cholesterol, didn't order any bloodwork, and didn't ask any questions beyond "How are you feeling today?" And if you answered "ok", he sent you home?

He'd be doing a bit better if he treated whatever symptoms you had - a headache, a cough - by writing a prescription. But even that would make most of us feel cheated. When we go to the doctor, we want to find out what's wrong, so that the root of the problem can be uncovered and dealt with. "How are you feeling today?" is merely the gateway to deeper understanding.

Now, let's review what happened in the stock market last week, and then draw a parallel to parenting. The Dow Jones was down 7 points Monday, then shot up 270 points over the next two days, retreated 85 points on Thursday, before falling Friday 122 points. The key question is: is the economy doing better? And the answer is, you can't make a sane estimation of the stability of the economy by glancing at the Dow Jones one day. You can't really judge the health of something with a snapshot. Snapshots and indicators are reactive. And so it is with a kid, that you can't and shouldn't trust short-term, immediate indicators which give only a snapshot but do little to tell us what's really going on.

Consider as a somewhat absurd example height, something I obsessed over when I was in elementary school (because I didn't have any). It's obvious to adults, though it's not obvious to kids: how tall you are really doesn't matter, and there's not a single thing you can do about it anyhow. But it's a daily worry for kids who think they are either too short (always in the front row of the class picture) or too tall. We tell kids this doesn't matter because "It's what's on the inside that counts". But then we betray that by applying external measurements to our kids to determine "how they're doing".

Here are some of the measuring sticks applied against kids that you should be very wary of trusting:

Grades. Giving grades drove me out of public school teaching. What do they mean? If a kid brings home a D, we immediately assume "they need to work harder". But that, in turn, assumes that more concentration and more repetition is the answer. Yet if a kid genuinely doesn't understand, or in the case of math or science misunderstands the process required, then repetition is only going to perfect misunderstanding. A low grade can reflect a need to buckle down, but it can also be the result of boredom, poor teaching, distraction, poor eyesight, preoccupation with physical safety or home life, hunger, low intelligence, homework not turned in… Yet despite the myriad factors that are at play, one letter on a report card is supposed to mean something?

Happiness/Contentment. How many times have you heard parents say, "I just want him to be happy." But…really? How far will a parent go to keep a kid "happy"? And what is happiness? Is it a perpetual smile on the face? Some kids, once they reach adolescence, would be happy to never eat another family meal or go on another family trip. Or ever go to church. And some parents will respond in such a way as to give them just that, so as not to have to deal with the hassle that comes from insisting on anything. Happiness is a wickedly elusive goal, and what makes us happy today might bore us tomorrow and might harm us in the long-term. Therefore, whether a kid is "happy" is relatively meaningless. Happiness is not wellness.

This doesn't mean we condemn them to misery or ignore long-term sadness, which could be an indication of depression or other real need. It's just that a happy exterior may be the coping mechanism kids adopt that keeps us from seeing what's really the matter. The only way to really tell what someone is feeling is to ask them, and that assumes that you've established yourself as a safe, non-judgmental sounding board.

Manners. If kids are well-mannered because you want to teach them that other people have worth and the best way to honor them is to wait your turn, not interrupt, say please and thank you, and look someone in the eye when you speak to them, then yes, by all means manners are important. And no, you don't expect a very young child to be able to give you the rationale for good manners. Because mom and dad say so is enough. But ideally they will start to knowingly internalize those as they get older, so that a 10-year-old certainly knows why it's wrong to speak out of turn or to laugh at someone else's misfortune. BUT, if you are teaching manners because it will reflect well on you - "Wow, she did such a great job raising her kids" - that's pride. And kids are not raised to enhance parents' self-esteem. They're not trophies, or challenges to be mastered, or animals to be tamed. So when I see a kid with good manners, I admire the measure of self-control I see, but it tells me little about their spiritual wellness. "Polite" doesn't tell me how a kid is doing.

Irritation factor. Then there are parents who are all too ready to relate the latest thing their kid did that's causing the parent a headache. The problem with this is that irritation is a subjective measure, always from the perspective of the receiver. When I worked in group homes for kids in foster care, we were reminded that it's not against the rules to be irritating. Therefore, as a staff, the only thing you could control was your own reaction to whatever annoying thing they were doing. If you didn't or couldn't, you'd end up provoking an unnecessary confrontation, which usually meant hours spent repairing the damage. The best staff were those who could see annoyances for what they were - sometimes the product of a bad day, sometimes a provocation that would go away if annoyed, sometimes boredom that deserved to be attended to constructively, but never a reflection of the boy's worth. I failed at this many times, letting minor irritations that weren't rules violations get to me. If I find myself set off by kids' actions that are not dangerous nor harmful to them, but merely annoying, that says more about me than it does about them.

When we wonder "how is a kid doing?" that's a question loaded with future implications. What really matters, and what we're really assessing, is "what road are they on?" and "where are they headed?" - things mood and grades and manners tell us little about. A far more robust indicator of kids' wellness is something like the Search Institute's Developmental Assets Framework, because it gives a picture of not only where kids stand across multiple dimensions, it also is a tool for predicting future success and adjustment (and research supports this).

As we look at the wellness of kids, a long-term perspective is the best one to take. Trends, not short-term indicators, are the more relevant phenomena. They keep us from getting hooked on right behaviors and right answers and focus us more on motives and issues of character. What are this kid's values, affections, and beliefs? That will tell us far more about who they are becoming, and therefore "how they're doing today", than a glance at outward appearances.

What's the Story in Your Neighborhood?

This week I was about to write about the troubling implications of a new survey that showed a decline in the number of Americans who identify themselves as Christians and an increase who call themselves non-religious. I was going to write about the challenge that posed for the American Church, and the likely shape of the future if trends continued. But then I read the survey. And it turns out the story reported isn't the full story.

There is a story here, in the fact that 75 percent of Americans call themselves "Christian", when in 1990 the figure was 86%. And in the fact that the number of people with "no religion" has nearly doubled in the last 18 years. It sets a tone reflected by the headlines: "Those With No Religion Fastest-Growing Tradition", "America Becoming Less Christian", and "Americans Becoming Less Religious".

But the unexplored and unexplained phenomenon in the American Religious Identification Survey is the fact that the decline in self-identifying Christians was much smaller from 2001 to 2008 than from 1992 to 2001. In the 2001 survey, self-identified Christians were 76.7 percent of the population, meaning that while the '90s saw a 9.5% decline, the last eight years saw only a .7% drop. Meanwhile, the number of self-identifying "non-religious" people climbed six full percentage points in the '90s (from 8.2% to 14.2%), but less than a percentage point since 2001 (it's now at 15%).

Does this mean we've lately seen a dramatic rise in either the number of Americans walking away from Christianity or from religion altogether? Hardly. If the trends of the '90s had continued, we would expect that by now only 2/3 of the country would call itself Christian, and that fully one-fifth would be irreligious. But that's not the picture at all.

The question, of course, is so what? Does a picture like this change the mandate of the Church at all? And the answer is, not really. Tactically these national snapshots inform the work of the church some, and the survey validates long-suspected trends that speak to the future of mainline denominations (which are losing members), the Catholic church (whose concentration has shifted from the Northeast to the American Southwest), and evangelical megachurches (they're popular, attended by more than 8 million people). And it is troubling, of course, that churches are failing to pass on the faith and the value of life in a religious community to later generations. Surveys like this one, which show the church losing ground, are convicting; they're never good news.

Yet in another sense, it doesn't change the work of the church at all. For one thing, it's rather callous for any church to regard its work as "done" the moment someone comes through the door, to adopt an attitude that as long as people self-identify as a kindred believer, we've done our jobs. The work of a church inside its walls is as important as the work outside its walls - in fact, they're two points on the same continuum. The Great Commission implies an ongoing work, not a once-for-all evangelistic invitation.

The second factor that limits the usefulness of the ARIS report at a local level is that it's a broad national snapshot and individual churches cannot, by themselves, reverse national trends. So the answer to the "so what?" question is, indeed, "so what?" Yes it's helpful to know that the public we're reaching out to is less religious than a generation ago, but the numbers aren't even high enough to say that "most" people are non-Christian or anti-religion, because that just isn't true. And even if it were true, courtesy would dictate that you appeal to someone on the basis of their individual need, knowing their personal story and circumstances, and not treat them as a generality constructed out of expectations of what's typical.

The real question - now and always - is: what's the story in your neighborhood? What are the needs of the people there? When they see and visit you, what effect does your Christian spirituality have on them? Does it attract, or repel - if it's even discernable? Is your life a silent testimony to the power of God? Are non-believing friends and neighbors more inclined toward attending a church because of you, or less? These are the relevant questions that ought to guide evangelism and outreach regardless of whether the percentage of Christians in your country is 90 percent or 9 percent.

And in another eight or nine years, when the survey is taken again, the numbers will show what the numbers will show. But do we really want to be in a position where we either threw up our hands or rested on our laurels because national averages showed we were doing our work pretty well or pretty poorly? The ARIS survey should make us neither glow with proud nor panic. It should only wake us up to the fact that we should not take for granted that our neighbor holds a theistic conception of the world. As if we needed reminding of that.

What Iran hopes to learn from Christians

Interest in the Christian faith is growing among scholars and leaders in a most unlikely place: Iran. Anyone at least my age remembers the swift change that came to that country in 1979, when Islamic radicals took over and Americans were taken hostage in the embassy in Tehran. Since then, the dominant image of Iran has been that of a place that's anti-American, anti-modernity, and certainly anti-Christian. But the Revolution, it turns out, is the very reason things are changing.

So says Sasan Tavassoli, an evangelical pastor in Iran (yes, in Iran). It's widely acknowledged within that country that the Revolution failed to deliver, and now Iran is considering its future in the community of nations. Part of this entails dialogue with Christian thinkers. More moderate Shiite clerics and academics are eager to learn from Christians, and as it turns out, one of their questions is a common theme on this blog: how do we pass the faith on to the next generation?

We Westerners are perhaps guilty of painting all of Islam with a broad brush, imagining that every young Muslim is schooled in a madrassah and taught to hate Western culture. But this is not so, and Tavassoli describes Iranians as descendants of the proud Persian tradition of tolerance for foreign religions (King Cyrus, who issued the decree allowing the Jews to return to Jerusalem from exile, was Persian). So while Iran is certainly not multi-religious (being 98% Muslim), it is by no means a Saudi Arabia or a Somalia.

Another way of looking at this is that Iran could continue down a road of repression and strict observance of shari'a law, but it is in fact moving away. Tavassoli declares that this was never what the people supported in the first place, that the Islamic fundamentalists hijacked the 1979 revolution, and that Iran has been alarmed by the prediction of global conflict based on culture made at the turn of this century, desiring instead to position itself more moderately.

You may or may not buy Tavassoli's appraisal of Iran's political self-concept, but let's focus on the fact that we American Christians share at least one thing with Shiite Muslims in Iran: we're both concerned with propagating our faith in the midst of environments that value tolerance, free expression of ideas, and specifically do not value coercion or indoctrination in religious matters. They, like we, believe one's path to God must be freely chosen, not compelled. So how do you make kids choose right (if that isn't an oxymoron)?

To me, this is an issue of faith, of believing that God is bigger than seemingly hopeless circumstances; of recognizing that even during the last 30 years of an Islamic state in Iran, Muslims have been coming to Christ and that these conversions have been not the work of human evangelization, but as the result of dreams and visions. Tavassoli reports that one such dream, of the Virgin Mary asking for help, caused a government official to make an unsolicited offer of financial assistance to a Presbyterian church. It is recognizing that God works even through unintended consequences, such as when a Muslim writer is commissioned to do a Farsi translation of the New Testament and then has the chance to report to high government officials that in the course of his project, he had come to recognize many of his own misconceptions about Christianity.

It is because of the success and potency of the gospel in settings where the odds are stacked against it that we, in America, can take heart. I'll not deny that obstacles and threats to the free expression of religion exist in this country. But honesty demands that we acknowledge we are much freer than most and that most American Christians cannot claim to have experienced oppression or persecution that is really anything beyond scorn. If Jesus can break through a revolution led by Muslim extremists and preserve a remnant and a toehold in the middle of the Islamic world, should we have any reason to doubt that he will overcome any domestic threat here in the land of the free?

I further believe that there are specific reasons the hunger for Christian perspectives is surfacing, and they have to do with the veracity, reality, and uniqueness of Jesus Christ himself. Jesus - the real, actual Jesus attested to in the gospels - is a life that must be reckoned with. And so you have young Muslims wanting answers about the Jesus of the Bible, not just the Jesus of Muslim tradition. You have Muslims yearning to know the assurance of forgiveness. And you have people disillusioned by a revolution that promised them the world, but delivered only more uncertainty.

If we just show people - of all ages, in all cultures - God for who he really is, exemplified by the witness of creation, incarnate in Jesus Christ, I believe that's enough. The baggage that gets in the way is usually cultural - someone knew someone who was a Christian and they didn't like the effect of that. Yet, an intent gaze into the face of the true God is often convicting enough for people to set aside stacks of objections and to focus on what they know to be true.

Let's labor, then, to give kids this truth. Bring it to them in song, in spirit, in our teaching, our counsel, our own values. Let's so value God and the things of God that the inestimable worth of Jesus Christ is the unmistakable flavor of our zeal. A zealous desire for something less tends to yield that something less. But there is an incredible sufficiency in knowing Christ that transcends political or economic or cultural objectives. Iran is waking up to this, knowing that they were sold short on a revolution. To be sure, the country is anything but "open" as the word is normally used in Christian circles. But when the leaders of a nation that only one generation ago staked its future on the promise of Islam are rethinking that orientation, that's a huge open door for building faith - theirs and ours.

Affirm Them, Now!

Here's the drill: Whatever you're doing (apparently, reading this), set it aside for a moment, go to your son or daughter, and speak a word of encouragement or affirmation. They need it, they're looking for it, and you're the best supplier of it. You yourself need a word of encouragement, and that's why you look forward to that time of the day when you can vent or debrief with your spouse, or get on the phone or sit over coffee with a trusted friend and hear, in not so many words: you're ok. So go affirm your child, and I'll be waiting here when you come back.

If that was at all difficult, let me suggest you pick up either David Stahl's Words Kids Need to Hear or The Five Love Languages of Children by Gary Chapman and Ross Campbell. The first book contains a couple of chapters on why encouraging words are necessary and specifically which encouraging words benefit kids (although the book isn't all about how to give praise), while Love Languages identifies words of affirmation as one of the five ways in which kids can feel loved.

These are times of high anxiety in our nation, but preteen and early teen years are always times of high anxiety when kids run up against the belief that they're not good enough. The message is rarely that blatant, but even the subtle forms are deadly: you should be more... you should have what I have... you obviously can't... you don't belong...

As kids fight through the wilderness of identity formation, they need lots of encouragement in the form of affirmation. What is it? For starters, affirmation is not praise. Praise is usually tied to performance: a good game played, a high grade achieved, an award garnered, a talent displayed. Praise is healthy and appropriate, but affirmation is altogether something different. Affirmation - well, affirms. It states what is. In a mirror-mirror-on-the-wall culture, affirmation is the antidote to narcissism. Far from engendering an exagerrated sense of one's importance (praise can do that), affirmation grounds us in what is true.

Secondly, there are many places we can draw information from about who we are and why we matter. Adolescents operate from an egocentric perspective and they assume everyone is thinking about and noticing them as much as they're noticing themselves. Life is lived in the fishbowl, so presentation is all-important. But, is the feedback we're receiving from those we encounter accurately perceived? Is it accurate at all?

Affirmation serves as the healthy counterweight to negative messages about self picked up in the culture: you don't look right... you really should be able to... you'll never... people don't like you... It can be exhausting to constantly refute that! But, there are a few good reasons why words of affirmation should rightly come from parents primarily.

Parents have the longest-standing relationship of anyone with their child, and by extension, they should be the ones who know their child the best. And, it is likely that apart from other family members (like siblings), they are the only ones who have a close relationship with the child who will still have a close relationship with them in ten years. Even best friends come and go. So during the time that your son or daughter is forging an identity, guess who the two long-term constants are in their life? Mom and Dad. What better messengers for truth? And, truth, safety, consolation - all of these are part of what makes home, home. We go home to escape the part of the world that demands our performance and that rewards our efforts to transcend who we really are. At home we can just be. And the message of affirmation is: who you are is ok.

If kids don't get that message from parents, either because the parent confuses praise with affirmation and doesn't want to inflate their ego, or because the parent struggles to be positive and find things to affirm, or because parents are just too busy to fill that need, kids will get that affirmation somewhere. Everyone lets down their guard sometime - no one can pose forever. And the "home" to which we return is the place of affirmation and acceptance.

I'm convinced this real self is the one God not only loves, but values. So the implications of affirmation for spiritual development are clear. We must affirm the nonperforming selves of kids if they are ever to believe that God loves that part of them. Otherwise the unbelievable love of God actually becomes that - not believed, while kids cast about for affirmation from the world, which is like hitting a moving target.

Make it a habit this year to offer regular, non-performance-based affirmation to your child. It won't spoil them, really. But starving them of affirmation just might.

Identity = Heart + Head

If A.W. Tozer was correct when he said that the most important thing about someone is what they think about God, then what we think about ourselves in light of that has to be a close second. Closing the gap between what people know is true of Christians in general and what they proudly claim to be true about themselves is a chief task of youth ministry. What's at stake? Surprisingly, much more than just that kids feel good about themselves.

Not that having young people feel good about themselves isn't a worthy goal in itself. We adults have tended to minimize adolescent angst as either A. something we all went through so it's no big deal, B. too dramatic and messy to pay attention to, or C. something we'd rather forget. The adolescent identity struggle is messy, and yes, teenagers tend to make mountains out of mole hills. But the emotional tension and hurt experienced as kids strive to answer the question, "Who am I?" is very real, and if the pain is not attended to there can be short-term danger; if the conflict is not successfully resolved, there can be lifelong ramifications.

We rightly ensure that our infants and preschoolers have the most advantages we can marshall, because intuitively we know that wellness today lays the groundwork for wholeness tomorrow. It's just that identity formation is so - complex, that we often throw in the towel, distressed but not surprised about the choices kids make as they try to find their way.

But we'd better care, or we're going to have a heap of trouble on our hands, individually and collectively. Last week in this space Karen Lucas-Howard wrote about her response to the identity crisis she observed in her own daughters, how despite her best pareting efforts to expose them to only healthy influences, the cultural messages about beauty and significance were seeping in. Karen decided on an affirmative strategy: she wrote a book, designed for moms and daughters to work through together as they grapple with some tough questions about who God says girls really are. By what seems like sheer providence, we discovered Karen and her work late last year, and on March 4 her six-week class "Just Who Do You Think You Are?" will debut at our midweek program. When girls don't know who they are, the price is paid in eating disorders, sexual promiscuity, substance abuse, low self-esteem, and body image issues that plague them well into adulthood.

This is reason enough to care that kids make a successful connection between what they've been taught in church and what they really believe in their hearts. But it goes deeper. I have long been convicted and motivated by the statistic that of kids who are active in church youth groups, fully two-thirds will walk away from the church by the time they are young adults. Now, the Barna Group has established that a majority of American kids who were raised in churches have left the church by the time they're 29. (And this should answer those who weren't worried about the post-high school exodus, who rationalized that "they'll come back when they're older". They're not coming back.) This finding needs to permeate and resonate within the entire church's consciousness - not just serve as an indictment of youth ministries.

When a majority of your church population has said no, I believe it's very hard for the Church to win them back; harder, perhaps than attracting those who have never believed. What is a church going to offer by way of teaching that they don't already know? A caring environment for kids - maybe, but families can stay home and have that. What will be the face of the American church shortly if the vast majority of adult attenders are new believers?

But the implications are broader than the national Church. Christianity Today notes in an editorial this month titled (ironically enough) "Who Do You Think You Are?", that ethnic conflict is flaring in areas of the world that also happen to be highly Christianized: Nigeria, Kenya (80% Christian), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (95%). How can this be? How can it be that "Christianity doesn't make a difference," according to Paul Robinson, a Wheaton College professor who was raised in the DRC? The answer boils down to identity. People have failed to internalize the Christian identity to the point that it trumps ethnic or national or political affiliations.

The implication for churches is huge: those that fail to push congregants across the finish line of fully embracing the Christian identity are failing in their work of discipleship. It shouldn't matter if failure means people are doing violence to each other or to one's self, it is a failure that damages the church's witness in the world and undersells the gospel. Churches (youth programs, especially) must go beyond transmitting a set of morals to young people and step into the much harder work of helping kids and teens develop a rich, thriving spirituality that has interior, interpersonal, and vocational dimensions. That's the point at which Christianity "sticks". And it's from there that we see real change.