Nine Things Your Child Needs to Thrive Spiritually, part nine: Spiritual Disciplines

I read recently about A.J. Jacobs, who spent an entire year "living by the Bible" - literally obeying every command in the Old and New Testament - 800, by his count. Jacobs is not a Christian, he's a Jewish agnostic, and an editor at Esquire magazine. He did it, he says, not out of any spiritual interest but in an attempt to "understand a worldview shared by millions of Americans" (the article is here).

While I think Jacobs begins from a fatally flawed premise - that the Christian life is tantamount to ritualistically observing every command in the Bible, even OT ceremonial laws - it's interesting to read what benefits he says he gained from the experience. And it makes you wonder, if a disciplined life could do this for a man of no faith, what could it do for a believer?

Of prayer, Jacobs says, "It's sort of like moral weight training: You're forced to think about other people. And it trains your mind to be less selfish and to be more thoughtful, so in that sense I got really into it...I became an extreme thanker. I was thanking the elevator for coming on time."

On the virtues of moral restraint: "We talk a lot in this country about freedom of choice, but here I was experiencing some of the benefits of freedom from choice...Because the Bible will tell you, should I give 10 percent to the needy? Yes. Should I read this magazine about Lindsay Lohan? No. Should I lie to make things easier with my wife? No. So it was almost a lovely, paradoxically liberating feeling to have freedom from choice."

I am horribly undisciplined. While I accomplish a lot in a week, it comes in spurts. As I write this, my workweek is long since over, but this post, which has been swirling around in my brain the last several days, is just now taking shape on paper. If not for the desire to get the newsletter out on time, who knows how long I'd put it off? I love being disciplined when I can pull it off. It's amazing how much you can get done when you have a schedule and stick to it. But somehow, my laziness and lack of attention and obsessiveness get the better of me and my plans for a streamlined-life-of-Mark lay in a heap.

Part of this is a function of the multiple "circles" we all operate in nowadays. How many do you have? A work circle? A family circle? A friends circle? A recreational sports circle? A hobby circle? A part-time or vocational circle? Each has its own sets of demands and relationships which, while infusing our lives with meaning and value, are at the same time sucking that life out of us. And the internet (and free cell phone minutes after 9:00) haven't helped things. I can virtually (and actually) be in touch with my family every day. I can keep in touch with friends and happenings on the other side of the country. I can read my hometown newspaper. And every time I reach out in these ways, I become more fractured, fragmented, dividing my mind and attention, racing to keep up. Who am I? A son? A pastor? A student? A teacher? Thank God I'm all of those - but sometimes I just want to slow down and be me.

In the same way, our kids live fragmented, hurried lives. Want some numbers? A 2005 study found kids ages 8-18 spent an average of 6.5 hours a day consuming media. About half of that is spent with television. (The study, by the Kaiser Family Foundation, is here. Also see this story on the amount of time some parents spend playing video games with their kids.) The news isn't all bad - the study also found nearly half pick up a book in a typical day and about a third read a newspaper. And, we know that of the half who go online every day, many are logging on to websites and reading to satisfy their curiosity, which isn't a bad thing at all. But the point is, our kids, like us, are pulled in many different directions, and at a frenetic pace.

The value of spiritual discipline is that it slows us down just enough to begin to perceive some definition in the blur of life. For instance, the practice of reflection is itself a spiritual discipline; it also happens to be critical to thought and brain development: kids need to have time to think about their thinking in order to develop a useful, workable model of how the world works. Otherwise, life's just a blur. No apparent cause and effect - things just happen. Any parent knows that a young brain has a poor conception of time - "next week" to a 3-year-old could just as well mean next month or next year, because their brains haven't developed the sophistication to understand relative time (tomorrow vs. next Wednesday). Until they gain this ability, they won't easily wrap their minds around the concept of "eternity", which in turn affects their appreciation of "eternal life", eternal forgiveness, the eternal nature of God, etc. So certainly as we age, we naturally develop the ability to comprehend God at greater and greater depths. But can we actually aid kids in developing the ability, younger? I think we can. When we introduce spiritual discipline into kids' lives, we are helping them organize their thinking about God. We're also creating a space for spiritual interaction. Kids need to know that God sometimes speaks in the still, small voice, and how to wait for that.

In his classic Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster identifies twelve disciplines. Notice how many require us to deliberately resist the pace of life we're accustomed to:

• meditation
• prayer
• fasting
• study
• simplicity
• solitude
• submission
• service
• confession
• worship
• guidance
• celebration

The American evangelical church has been somewhat wary of spiritual disciplines. They're regarded as "religion" or "ritual" or "works", or we want to leave "room for the Spirit to move" so beyond telling new believers that they should go to church, read their Bible and pray, we don't do much to specifically instruct people on how to have a spiritual life. That caution is not unwarranted - many of us can tell stories about growing up in ritualistic churches that were, for us, lifeless. But we've probably gone too far in denying the power of corporate and individual rituals in enabling us to commune with God. As long as kids don't hear us to say that these practices create grace, we're on solid ground. Ritual brings comfort and regularity to kids' spiritual lives, and they need that. The how can never replace the what: kids should understand that the acts of worshiping, praying, celebrating, studying, and so on, are what matter; how they're conducted is of secondary importance.

But we can't leave the development of a spiritual life to chance. It's a wonderful thing when a life takes off spiritually, fueled by curiosity and zeal for God - the "spiritual high" times. Have we all been there? But what about the drier times? We've all been there. It's then that communion with God actually involves work, and knowing what to do when your will says no can help you outlast spiritual drought. Disciplines give kids the tools to be fighters, rather than victims, in a modern world that's too busy or apathetic for God.

Nine Things Your Child Needs to Thrive Spiritually, part eight: A Significant Relationship with an Older, Non-Parental Christian

Helping a teenager stay on balance spiritually is like holding a tabletop and trying to balance a marble at the middle. The slightest upset in the balance and the marble begins to roll. You tilt the table the other direction - but a bit too far, and the marble rolls past center, requiring another quick adjustment before the marble escapes off the edge.

If you have a pre-teen living in your house, get ready to grab hold of the table.

Adolescence brings a whirlwind of sudden change, biological and emotional, that can't help but have spiritual ramifications. In one sense, this is exciting - teenagers feel more deeply, and so the exhilaration of a summer camp or mission trip or some other "mountaintop experience" can spur them on to a deeper level of spiritual motivation than they've ever known. But the "me first" self-consciousness that develops can be a hindrance to spiritual life, especially when it comes to serving a God who asks them to deny self (a form of social suicide) and voluntarily accept last place. As a result, the whole commitment thing is elusive. Many teenagers reach a point of decision but as the winds of everyday life shift, the resolve doesn't stick, and they join the league of defeated strivers who feel they've failed in following Christ. (Orthey try again - at camps and rallies where a gospel invitation is given, you now see many more "rededicating their lives to Christ", a concept I find nowhere in the Bible, than making first-time decisions.

At the same time, you're holding this tabletop, trying to keep the marble steady, but lacking some of the access you enjoyed when they were younger. In "And Suddenly They're 13", David and Claudia Arp call parenting young teenagers "the art of hugging a cactus". They share less, they're more image-conscious, they want to believe they can make big decisions for themselves. Just when you've stablized the table, the marble seemingly rolls itself! But when your child has a significant relationship with an older Christian other than you, it's as if someone else has taken hold of the other side of the tabletop. A mentoring-type relationship is not only a help to them, it's a help to you.

Let me suggest three elements of a mentoring relationship that I believe are foundational:

1. The mentor is not a parent. I mean this in every sense - that the mentor is not expected to do the parenting; that they are also not a mouthpiece or a puppet for parents; and, that they are in fact not the child's parent, but another trusted adult. Why would you want someone from outside your family stepping in to that role? Isn't that stepping away from your job as the primary discipler of your child? No. As I wrote about last week, I believe partnership implies a relationship where each side plays a distinct role. It is not abdicating responsibility. An older mentor does not take the place of an active parent because they aren't being called upon to do parenting. Rather, they are a balancing and moderating influence in a child's life.

If nothing else, a like-minded mentor can send the message, "Hey, my parents aren't crazy after all - here's another grown up who thinks the way they do." Secondly, that person is a separate set of eyes and ears who has insight into your child's speech and actions away from home. If you want to get a clear picture of who your child really is, solicit honest feedback from any adult who deals with him or her - teachers, coaches, friends' parents, church volunteers. The more information you can gather, the better picture you get of not only their behavior, but their values, character, emotional maturity, social standing, creativity and flexibility - and all of this in turn affects how that kid needs to be discipled.

2. The mentoring relationship is intentional and purposeful. It seems like such a no-brainer, that parents would pull together a team of like-minded adults who are invested in the spiritual well-being of their kid and work together toward that goal. But unfortunately, few kids have mentors who are building into them in any meaningful way, much less spiritually. These relationships don't exist because parents don't seek them. Why? Often I think parents are content just to have adults in their kids' lives who are "positive role models", regardless of whether there's any spiritual component to the relationship. This is a serious error. An adult who only directs your child toward "health and happiness" is not pointing them in the direction of Christ. Of course we want health and happiness for our kids, but only as a means to an end: we should want emotional health, for instance, because lack of emotional growth can drag us down spiritually. But, it also needs to be recognized that God can break through our un-health and work in the midst of our un-happiness. This is a distinctly Christian principle - that suffering is a part of life, that God will use tragedy and sorrow to refine our character, that our momentary happiness is not the gauge of our well-being (in fact, contrast this with Romans 8:18). As much as we want kids to observe healthy adult role models, don't neglect the spiritual aspect of health.

3. Parents and the mentor must communicate. I have rarely had any success working with a kid where I did not have a meaningful relationship with his parents. I knew the parents and they knew me, and we communicated frequently about what we saw. This doesn't mean that the mentor is "used" by the parents to get information that isn't otherwise forthcoming. There is confidentiality in the relationship (with limits), but parents and the student both know that there's an open line of communication among the adults. Often that third party is in a position to influence the student to disclose information that really shouldn't be kept secret. Years ago, I became aware that a student I worked with had impregnated his girlfriend, then paid for her to have an abortion. My role once I found out was not to expose this to his parents, but to counsel him that that was exactly what he needed to do, rather than compound the mistake by trying to keep it a secret. A mentor can serve as a neutral third party, but even then, their role is to get problems out in the open, so that parents and kids resolve things directly, and not through triangulation.

Where does a parent go to find these relationships for their child? That's the $64,000 question. In our own ministry, we try to match up kids and leaders at an 8-to-1 ratio. That's clearly even too many for a leader to be deeply involved with all of them. Can another parent fill this role? Possibly, but one thing a mentoring relationship requires is lots of time, and what parent has an abundance of time to spare? We have a preconceived notion that a mentor is young, early 20s, single, "cooler" than the parents - but this severely limits the pool and it doesn't have to be the case. I think anyone with a willingness and an ability to relate to kids can be a mentor. The key is whether your kid feels an affinity and a willingness to trust that person. Only once in my life have I been called out of the blue by a parent asking me to mentor her son. More often, those relationships have grown organically through repeated encounters with kids and lots of time.

The best advice I can give to parents seeking a mentor for their son or daughter is to put them in situations where they have regular contact with older Christians and pray that a relationship will be forged. Do this early. Make your child "known" among his or her youth group leaders. Encourage your child's involvement in outside church events. And ask. Most people would be gratified to be asked to fill that role, but aren't going to assert themselves for fear of looking pushy or creepy. But don't ignore this piece - it's worth the investment. And your arms will get tired holding that tabletop alone.

Factor #8: Significant relationship with an older, non-parental Christian
Key Question: Is there another adult besides my spouse and me who is investing in my child, and how openly do I communicate with that person?

Nine Things Your Child Needs to Thrive Spiritually, part seven: A Spiritually Nourishing Home Environment

About a year ago, I found myself wishing we had about ten times as many small group leaders as we did. We had just begun using what are called "experiential games" to teach, and in an experiential game, the follow-up questions are key. You put a child through a game or exercise meant to simulate, say, trust or hopelessness or temptation, and then, while that experience is fresh in their minds, try to make it translate into a Biblical principle that kids will learn from. The right questions, asked in the right way, determine whether the game remains just a game or becomes a teachable moment.

Ah, the right questions, asked the right way. How many of us have learned important life lessons even in moments of defeat and despair, because we fortunately had someone wise alongside us to lead us to the pearls of wisdom that lay in the mess we'd made? That's when it occurred to me - we had all the leaders we needed. They were called parents.

This is when the HomePage, with its accompanying discussion questions, was born. I have long realized that regardless of how flashy or memorable or even dead-on accurate a lesson is, if it isn't rehearsed, it decays. The HomePage was intended to give kids one more chance to "get it", to recall and re-process information they'd been confronted with on a Sunday morning and to make it their own. Part of the purpose of the discussion questions we send home, both on paper and later by way of e-mail, is to make Sunday's lesson "stick". But the larger purpose is to get parents and kids into the habit of talking about God and life, because it is in so doing, I believe, that parents most effectively influence their child's spiritual development. Classroom lessons are a good thing, but they are always an imperfect fit. Only parents are in the unique position of drawing the teachable moments from their children's lives, and modeling the solutions through their own lives.

If home is where the real child comes out, then home is ultimately the best laboratory for life and learning. The parents of kids who thrive spiritually have decidedly not outsourced their child's spiritual development to a church, Christian school, or other religious club. That's not to say they don't use those things, but they employ them in partnership.

And what is partnership? Partnership doesn't mean we do each other's jobs, or that we rotate a week on, a week off. Rather, partnership means that parents and churches recognize that each is uniquely qualified to do what they do best. Church can bring families together, it can design creative teaching lessons, it can organize large events; parents, on the other hand, have presence during the more mundane activities of life, they have more ready access to a child's inner life, they are naturally in tune with their child's learning style and preferences. "Working together" means each entity acts on its strength. When partnership is in full force, there is no danger that one will take over the other's job - because that isn't possible.

So first and foremost, a spiritually nourishing home environment exists as the center of a child's spiritual development. But what actually happens there to foster spiritual growth? I would suggest four things:

1. God is talked about. Last June we survey 115 of our 5th and 6th graders and asked them, "If your parents talked with you about God, would it be strange and unusual, weird but not unusual, unusual but not weird, or normal and not weird at all?" 89 kids said it wouldn't be weird at all, that their families often talked about God. 19 said their parents don't talk with them about God, but they wouldn't mind if they did. Only 6 said either talking about God was uncomfortable in their family or it didn't happen. This is encouraging. It suggests that, at least among the group we surveyed, talking about spiritual things is as natural as talking about school, sports, hobbies, or television. My family almost never talked about God. We went to church all the time, but outside of some early experiences with sickness and death that prompted questions, we just never talked about God. Homes like this lend themselves to an unbalanced view of God: he's a troubleshooter or comforter in mourning, but not intimately involved in day-to-day life.

2. Kids are allowed to ask questions, even express doubt. This really is a matter of the quality of the dialogue you have about God. If you hope to gain insight on what a child thinks so that you can in turn shape that thinking, spiritual conversations must be a dialogue, not a monologue. God isn't threatened by our questions. He remains God. So parents shouldn't be threatened by questions they can't answer, or doubts that surface. "Wasn't it mean for God to let all those people drown in the flood? What about people before Jesus - did they miss out on heaven? Why did the Bible leave out all of those other gospels?" These are serious questions, and the fact that a kid would ask them means they are grappling with how to make God real and personal. Ask yourself: would I rather have my kid be honest about where they're at spiritually, or to just give me the answer I want to hear? Dignify your child by entertaining their honest thoughts in a non-judgmental way. Almost every kid will at some time doubt their own salvation. Nearly all will question whether Jesus is the exclusive road to salvation. When they do, will you respond by squelching the topic, or by empathizing with their struggle?

3. Christ is modeled. You are 24/7 Jesus with skin. Ouch - how's that for pressure?! Fortunately, we are called to be imitators of Christ's character in every way, and that includes humility. Or, as another pastor once said to me, Christians are called to be Christlike, but they are not expected to be "just like Christ", that is, perfect. So, spiritually nourishing parents get that they won't always be perfectly loving, perfectly patient, perfectly forgiving, and they allow for those weaknesses and own up to them to their kids. These parents apologize when necessary. In doing so, they demonstrate that the Christian life isn't a series of impossible rules or the pious pursuit of sainthood. It is the embodiment of Colossians 3:13: "Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you."

4. Godliness is modeled. Godliness - what a great and misunderstood concept. Paul uses the word at least 10 times in his first letter to Timothy. It refers to a deep reverence for God, a respect that runs so deep that the life begins to be necessarily altered. Godliness is not "the rules", and parents who try to make an end-run around it - expecting godly conduct from their kids without going to the work of establishing a spiritual root - sometimes struggle to understand why insisting on proper behavior and good manners isn't enough. Spiritual transformation and behavior modification are not the same thing. Godly conduct is the fruit of an inner work. In your home, is anything "sacred"? Do you observe a Sabbath? Is your own life a picture of the pursuit of God? If your kids were asked to rank the value of God in your life, where would it fall? This is the much tougher work, and it can't be faked. In a spiritually nourishing home, God is special and central and honored.


Factor #7: A Spiritually Nourishing Home Environment
Key Question: Is my child's spiritually development centered around my home, and is my home a spiritually healthy one?

Nine Things Your Child Needs to Thrive Spiritually, part six: A Positive Church Experience

When I was in high school, I often had an exchange with my mom that went like this:

Me: "I think a person can be a Christian even if they don't go to church."

My mom: "That's ridiculous."

It turns out, what was ridiculous was the discussion itself. It was the wrong question.

The question isn't whether a person can be a Christian and thrive spiritually apart from a church; the question is whether the church can thrive without the participation of believers. The answer is an emphatic NO.

When we insist on church attendance for kids, we are demonstrating to them the importance of committing to something bigger than themselves. We are requiring them to abandon consumerist attitudes about church and asking them to give up some of themselves in order to become part of a body. Sometimes people need church; but always the church body needs people.

This notion of "joining" or committing to a church has become watered down in our modern culture of convenience. We treat church like a shopping mall - one-stop shopping for my family's needs, and open at convenient times, too. A church doesn't have to get very big before there develops a sense of "inside" and "outside". The "insiders" are involved in everything, are known, and make the church go. The "outsiders" are consumers. The show will go on, with or without them. The shame is that as churches grow and the amount of work taken on (or taken over) by paid staff increases, people feel less necessary.

Let me stop here and say that the perception that some people are more needed than others in churches is just that, a perception, and it is false. Most churches I know are begging for volunteers to share the ministry. It's a perennial problem. But beyond that, there are ministry frontiers in every workplace, school, and neighborhood in America that the Church, because of inherent institutional limitations, is unable to touch. What would be the impact on a society if every Jesus-believing adult decided to devote 5 hours a week to a ministry cause they felt called to and were gifted in and equipped for? Don't even get me started. The church is a force as well as a phenomenon. I think we forget that: in a church, you have gathered, every week, a group of people called and commissioned by the God of the universe to be impactful on the world they inhabit. How can we be passive or indifferent about that?

If it's your desire that your child be a world-changer and take seriously the mission of God's church, and I hope you do, then you must instill in your child an ethic about church in which they feel compelled to take part because they are necessary, special, and valued.

Necessary? How many kids feel necessary in church? How many view their place in the church as actors, rather than spectators. We (children's ministry professionals) are reaping what we've sown here. We have concocted such a great show, and every week we have to top ourselves, and kids quickly understand their role is to sit back and be wowed. Or, look at the way we teach. The material is so easy, so facile, few kids are ever challenged to think in church and therefore, few of them are affected beyond Monday by what they encountered that weekend. Or, we use incentives and prizes to get them to do things they aren't inclined to do, and in so doing send a strong message that, yes, we also recognize the thing itself has little value of its own.

This weekend David Batstone spoke in main service about uniting vocation (your calling) and profession (how you make a living). I pray that your son or daughter will find a calling in the church, that at least some of them will be led to full-time ministry careers in churches or on the mission field, but I don't know when that will happen. I do know that if they receive the call, it will likely be because they have been immersed in a culture of others serving God - in other words, the church - and that they are unlikely to ever feel called if they never caught that vision.
All of this is preface to the sixth quality shared by kids who thrive spiritually, and that is that they are part of a church where they've had a positive experience, they've identified and affiliated with it, and they are eager to assume God's role for them. We can't, after all, expect kids to identify with church and be loyal to it if their church experience has been negative. My advice to parents is do whatever it takes to make the experience a great one. Drive to events. Host things in your home. Serve with your child. Ask them which service is their favorite. You do not want to enter the teenage years struggling over whether or not they "have" to attend church. The parents I've seen who've been successful on this front have been firm: as long as you live in our house, church attendance is a non-negotiable. Within that dictum there is some flexibility. Some require attendance on weekends plus one other activity. Some will tailor the family's schedule to make alternate services work. Regardless, if it's the weekend, the family is in church.

What if your kid doesn't like your church? That's a tough one. Kids come up with lots of reasons for not wanting to go - it's boring, I don't know anybody, the music is bad, the teacher doesn't like me - and I have witnessed some real battles of the will right outside our classroom over whether or not a kid will stay. We all want to be able to go to church as a family, even if everyone splits up once they get there. So first, I would try diplomatically to resolve whatever is the issue that is causing your child to have a negative experience. If this can't be resolved, or if the child still insists (and particularly so for middle and high school students) I would counsel a long-term perspective. Realize that if a child expresses a positive feeling about any church, even if it's not yours, that's a good sign that they are assuming ownership of their faith. In other words, I would require that your kid is active in a church somewhere.

I was wrong about a lot of things when I was a teenager, and church was one of them. People not only need churches to grow spiritually strong, but strong churches need people.

Factor #6: A Positive Church Experience
Key Question: Does my child feel an identification with and an allegiance to his or her age group's ministry at their church?