Spiritual Growth Marker #3: Allegiance

We’ve probably all been a situation where we reach the point where our heart’s not in it. Regardless of our technical skill or experience, the excitement isn’t there. It happens among talented young athletes and among seasoned professionals, and no amount of coaxing can re-light the fire.

This intangible is called allegiance, and while it’s probably the best direct measure of spiritual growth, it’s also the hardest to measure precisely, and the hardest to stimulate.

The Bible makes clear that our connection with God is not based on begrudging servitude, but on allegiance. It’s a heart issue:

“You shall have no other Gods before me.” – Exodus 20:3

“Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” – Deuteronomy 6:5

“The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live.” – Deuteronomy 30:6

“The Lord says: “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught.” – Isaiah 29:13

“Even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning.” Rend your heart and not your garments. - Joel 2:12-13

“The mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” – Matthew 12:34

“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” – Jeremiah 29:13

God demands loyalty. What’s striking is how many times the command to love God “with all your heart” appears in Deuteronomy, which is a book of the Law! The Law of Moses outlined the Israelites’ duties to God, yet at its core, the Law was meant to produce inward – not outward – transformation.

How do you make this happen? It can be hard enough to maintain our own spiritual enthusiasm. How would we stimulate that in kids? First, the difficulty of this task should prompt us to go slowly and with the appreciation that ultimately, you can’t. You cannot directly steer someone’s heart, any more than you can get someone to fall in love with you or force someone to love baseball. All you can do is try to win them.

So it begins with this: do we believe God is winsome? Do we believe God is actively in pursuit of all people? Is our conception of “following God” basically moralism, where we walk the straight-and-narrow because that’s what God wants? Or is it an adventure, keeping up with the God who’s active?

Kids will never fall in love with rules. Neither will adults. “Goodness is its own reward”? Sometimes. But the overwhelming message of life is that life’s not fair; therefore, grab every advantage you can, because you don’t want to end up with the short end of the stick. The Christian life is not “living according to biblical principles.” That reduces Christianity to just one more ethical system in which we’ve been given the rules and we strive our best to live them out, and when we fail, we try harder. I doubt anyone who lives that way can develop much allegiance to God, because that’s a relationship fueled by guilt and obligation.

No, the only God people can develop a deep allegiance for is the God of yesterday, today and forever. We need to appreciate what he’s done in history, yes, because it is the roadmap of his character. We need to look forward to his return. But we need to follow the God of now.

That’s why teaching kids Bible stories isn’t enough. It familiarizes them with the God of then, but doesn’t necessarily build loyalty for the God of now. I can admire Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln, but day in and day out, would I be loyal to them? Am I thinking about what they would have me do and who they would have me be? The closest I can come is allegiance to the ideals of those historical figures – but ideals are static.

“What did Jesus do?” is only useful insofar as it helps me answer the question, “What would Jesus do?” Still better is, “What is Jesus doing?” We need to talk about what God is up to, because apart from an acknowledgement or awareness of that, God just becomes a character in a storybook. I find that more often than not, Christian kids lack the language to do that. They know generally that God wants them to “be good”, but beyond that have a hard time identifying specifically putting their finger on how God is working or might work in their lives. We can overdo God-talk in a way that turns kids off, and it’s wrong to speak of God’s activity as if our comfort and convenience were his reason for being.

The key is to teach kids to recognize what in accordance with his character as revealed in Scripture God is still doing, today, in them. That’s something they can get excited about, as they see their own lives in a line with all of humanity as characters in a salvation story. God is doing different things in everyone, but ultimately he’s doing the same thing: accomplishing the reconciliation of the whole world to himself.

The Christian life is lived in union with Christ. There is a supernatural element to it. By definition, a spiritual life cannot be lived in the flesh or just by our own willpower. If what we’re teaching is a code of ethics that could be followed by anyone – Christian or non-Christian – then by what right do we call it Christianity? Allegiance will develop when kids are convinced that God is not far off, but is right there with them – guiding them, strengthening them, providing for them, correcting and shaping them. Leading kids to know this sort of God is hard work. But ultimately, it’s the only kind of God I can have allegiance to.

Spiritual Growth Marker #2: Network

If we in Surge host an event for 4th, 5th and 6th graders, the 4th and 5th graders will want to know, "What are we going to do there?" If it sounds fun, they'll come. But 6th graders will ask, "Who else is going to be there?"

That difference points to the importance of network. Last week I wrote about identity as one marker of spiritual growth. As kids grow in their appreciation of what it means for someone to identify as a Christian, it’s both a sign that they are growing spiritually and a good indication that their growth will continue. Likewise, the development of a network of friends at church indicates both growth and the likelihood of future growth.

In a way, network is an extension of the concept of identity, and that’s why its importance is really hard to overstate. We tend to associate ourselves not only with those who are like-minded, but with those who match the profile of how we perceive ourselves. We will become like those we hang out with.

When kids are young, their primary influences are Mom and Dad. Lots of time is readily spent among family members, and that’s why we tend almost unthinkingly to absorb the values and worldview of our parents. But as kids grow up, the peer group takes the place of the nuclear family in shaping identity. Are there exceptions? Are there families where time spent among friends doesn’t come to monopolize an older teenager’s life? Yes – but they are rare.

(A strong qualification is in order here. It’s often asserted that when it comes to influencing decisions, peers take the place of parents during the teenage years. Don’t buy it. Support for that is shaky. Years ago, Search Institute found that teenagers said they were still more likely to turn to parents for advice on serious issues, or if they were in trouble, or if they needed to make a big decision, than they were likely to turn to peers. Maybe the best that can be said is that teenagers tend to consciously turn to friends for guidance, and on matters that affect their day-to-day conduct but that are relatively minor in the vast scheme of things. Parental influence, having been in place since birth, continues to unconsciously shape us, and is considered more valuable when it comes to the big issues of life. That’s provided, of course, that parents haven’t entirely retreated and remain available and willing to be consulted. As kids grow up, they still need their parents; they just need them in a different way.)

Does this mean, then, that kids should only have Christian friends? Emphatically, no. Christians are supposed to be salt and light to the world, and kids absolutely can be this influence to their friends. Raising kids entirely away from the influence of the world is nearly impossible, and even if it were possible, it wouldn’t be a great idea, because a world that’s entirely sanitized is a world that perceives no need for Jesus. The kids I’ve known who have the most zeal for impacting their friends are neither those who’ve been ruthlessly sheltered nor those who’ve been surrendered entirely to worldly influences. Instead, these world-changers are wise, having both an appreciation of the depths of the world’s need for God and the optimism that God is more than able to solve the world’s problems.

So here is the generalization – and admittedly, it’s a generalization: As teenagers, your kids will likely adopt the values and outlook of those they spend the most time with.

There are many candidates for that role, and each resides in separate circles I call networks. We all have networks of affiliations across the many spheres of our lives. You have a work network, a family network, and a neighborhood network. Your kids have a school network (or, if they’re in a middle school that switches classes, a separate network in each class), sports team networks, after-school friend networks, club networks, etc. Sometimes, we ourselves are the only common denominator among our various networks. Imagine you threw a party, inviting everyone you knew, and everyone showed up. Some of us would have lots of overlap, so that the people we work with and play with, for instance, would already know each other and have plenty to talk about. But I suspect for most of us, that would be a very busy party, as we worked to make introductions among the disparate spheres who knew nothing about each other.

The hope, for your kid’s sake, would be 1) that they develop a network of church friends, and 2) that those friends would become some of their closest friends. How do we make this happen? Time! Not just time spent at services and events, but time spent together. I am convinced that one of the best intangibles that can come out of  a kid’s involvement in a preteen ministry is the development of a supportive friend network. We make a mistake if we think this “just happens.” It doesn’t, any more than you’ve become friends with the person who sits four rows ahead of you, whose face you recognize but whom you don't know. Friendships develop intentionally, and sometimes at this age kids don’t yet have the social skills to make friendship sticky. To them, a friend is someone who likes to do the same stuff as you; friendships built around taking a mutual interest in one another requires more maturity.

So we must make big church small, and we must teach and encourage kids to develop friendships. On the whole, I think a large church is a great advantage, because the chance that everyone can find their niche is better. But the danger does exist that we’ll remain a bunch of islands (our 4^th-6^th grade ministry is made up of kids from about 75 different public, private and home schools). Ask your son or daughter: who do they know? Who are they getting to know? And model this yourself – how strong is your own network within the church?

Even if kids have just one good friend at church, that can make all the difference as they age into junior high and high school ministry. Ideally, we all as Christians would have a core of close friends to lean on when we’re going through the tough stuff. That adolescence involves more than its share of tough stuff – at least in the perception of those going through it – is all the more reason that building and strengthening that network is vital when kids are preteens.