I was thinking too small

This could not have been orchestrated.

The setting was a 5th-6th grade event at Horizon Christian Fellowship on Friday night. We took a handful of kids down, and I drove two. One was a ministry regular, the other a friend he invited. Three hours later, the inviter and I were engaged with the invitee in a deep discussion about sin, forgiveness, and eternal life.

Experiences like these a real shot in the arm. I had lamented to a co-worker a couple of weeks ago that much of the work in ministry has little to do with the gospel. You do a lot of arranging, organizing, troubleshooting, and envisioning - and you hope that work is facilitating the spread of the gospel, but a lot of it is labor without any apparent fruit.

And then...bam! The opportunity to articulate the heart of God's purpose falls in your lap, and you balance the euphoria with wondering why that can't always happen.

The answer is complicated, but the crux of it is that we minister to individuals. Each brings his or her own set of preconceptions and experiences and family backgrounds and level of emotional maturity and myriad other factors that can affect spiritual interest and readiness. The ideal is that a person who is at the point of spiritual seeking will just then encounter the church. The reality is that churches and ministries contain lots of people who for various reasons are spiritually disinterested, unmotivated, or turned off.

So what is the job of a ministry like ours - or a church in general, for that matter? Is the mission to key in on those who are "ripe", so to speak, and to get them across the finish line, as many as possible? Or is it to walk alongside a kid until and after he or she is ready - if ever?

The mistake, I think, is in thinking that's an either/or question. But if we are - if I am - not careful, ministries can become focused on one to the exclusion of the other. I was guilty of this Friday night - I was thinking too small. In my mind, we were attending an "outreach", and I'd been to enough to know to keep my expectations low. Outreach = high on fun, lots of non-Christians, some soft references to Jesus and a closing prayer. My own expectations limited God - until he came roaring through to remind me that so much of what we want to engineer isn't really in our control anyhow.

So where's the balance? I'm not sure there is one. Just when we think we've created the "ideal" environment, and controlled for all the factors, the unexpected happens to throw the balance off. But these thoughts stand out:

We need to cast a wide net. The gospel message doesn't need to be made relevant - it is relevant, by nature, and therefore people outside the churched community are just as ready for it as people on the inside.

We need to be longsuffering with our kids' growth. I am really amused reading the marketing materials that come from publishers of Christian Ed materials. "Your kids will grow spiritually" or "Your kids' lives will change as they learn the word of God"...how in the world can they promise that? We can prepare the soil, we can plant seeds and water, but only God makes it grow. It's unwise to map out the end product of our input as if spiritual growth was a process of A+B=C, and similarly, to demand that kids mature spiritually according to our timetable.

We need to reconsider how we gauge success. What constitutes spiritual growth? What are our own assumptions and biases about what undergirds spiritual formation? Are we satisfied with "right answers" regardless of whether those answers are evidenced in a child's life?

Are we providing enough and the right opportunities for our kids to use their Christianity? Do we bring them into enough contact with the non-Christian and non-affluent world? Have we too narrowly prescribed the outlets available to them? Do we know how to capitalize on teachable moments?

"Expect great things from God! Attempt great things for God!" -- William Carey, missionary to India and Father of Modern Missions