This week at our church, Stuart Briscoe made this comment to a group of pastors (as close as I can recall the wording): "The amount of unmobilized resources in our pews is the biggest scandal in the church." Week after week, people are "fed" in churches - but very little of tangible change in the world comes of it. (Briscoe also said - and I've got this one down exactly, "When all is said and done, more is usually said than done.")
There are many reasons why Christians are held back from living out the gospel in a way that impacts the kingdom of God. Churches themselves sometimes get in the way. But I think much of the reason is something I alluded to last week: many adult Christians are hindered by priorities, habits, and liabilities that keep them in bondage. These are holes we've dug for ourselves, and we're so preoccupied by the tyranny of the urgent we cannot extricate ourselves and live from a place where we can be all God wants - and needs - us to be.
It isn't that we don't care or can't see the problems in the world. It's that we feel already overburdened with our own lives. Or, we may be giving in to the belief that the world's problems are so big, why even try? These forces of apathy and powerlessness derive from what the Apostle John calls "the world", making for an odd paradox: the very world we're trying to impact and redeem is itself full of an inertia that makes such change unlikely.
What's needed is a new dose of youthful optimism. You and I had it before it was eclipsed by "the world". But your kids are full of that optimism now. How much of that optimism, the wholehearted belief that in God "all things are possible", carries into adulthood depends a lot on how rich we make them as kids.
Did I say rich? Well, yes, I did. Because Jesus used the same term. In scolding a young man who wanted to make a power play against his own brother to get inheritance money, Jesus warned that "a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." He told him this parable:
A man had a good crop and saw an opportunity to get rich. He made plans: he'd build bigger storehouses, cash in, and live an easy life. But God delivers a whopper: "This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?" And Jesus concludes: "This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God."
Being "rich toward God" is the game-changer! It's why the kingdom of God is an upside-down kingdom. It's why many who are first will be last, and the last will be first. It's why those who are humble will be exalted, yet those who are exalted will be made low. "Rich toward God" is a concept that stands in opposition to much of what the world values for us - and for our kids.
We're visiting the concept of "rich toward God" right now with our 4th-6th graders. It's clear that it is the antidote to the type of living Jesus warns against: in other words, there were things the man in the parable should have set his sights on, places his thoughts should have defaulted to, that would have revealed a right heart. What were they, and how do we get them? That's something we want kids to wrestle with. They will make up their own minds whether being "rich toward God" is a worthy goal. We can only lead them there; we can't choose it for them. It's their life.
But, your preteen kid isn't fully autonomous yet either. Parents still exercise a vast amount of control over kids' environments and activities. So I want to suggest four aspects of this "being rich" that we might strive for in the lives of your kids. Or perhaps I should say, "being R.I.C.H.", because I've distilled the four into a nifty little acronym:
R stands for Relationships. I want your kid to be rich in relationships: same-age, family, and with older supportive adults.
I stands for Identity. I want kids to know who they are. Part of this includes acknowledging and accepting who they aren't, as well as the fact that God does everything on purpose. Who they are is a purposeful design; how they live ought to be filled with purpose-filled intent.
C stands for Christ. I want them to know, acknowledge, believe, understand, get, embody (etc.) who Christ is. The Christian faith is not Jesus-optional! Something about his life, death, and work on our behalf absolutely matters. Without it, we are absolutely adrift. How many of our kids get that?
Finally, H stands for Heart and Hands experiences. We learn best by doing. Life changes life. Words might change life a little. Beliefs alter life more. Those beliefs are shaped by life. So if kids can see (that is, experience) redemption and transformation in action, they are more likely to adopt life patterns that continue to have transformative effect on the people around them. (Or, to put it more simply, people who are in the habit of serving others, serve others. Pick your favorite.)
I believe R.I.C.H. kids are the kind of kids who grow into adults who change the world. They are the type I wrote about last week: God-centered, Spirit-filled, truth-founded, mission-minded, others-focused, and purpose-driven. In the coming weeks, I'll detail why I think making your kid R.I.C.H. in each of these four areas is essential.
But one more thing: one of the ways people become rich - at anything - is by investing. Investing is always an act of faith. Not a blind gamble, but far from an airtight guarantee. There's always a cost, and sometimes we get the return we want, but sometimes not. Kids' spiritual training is also an investment. It's why we must absolutely measure progress over the long term. It's also why we must be faithful: nothing ventured, nothing gained. Let me suggest that any investment in making your kid R.I.C.H. - in relationships, identity, Christ, or heart & hands experiences - is worthwhile.
Info, articles, and thoughts for parents of kids at North Coast Calvary Chapel.
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Friday, October 18, 2013
The Purpose of Surge
Six years ago I scrawled out a question that was nagging me and has been nagging me ever since: What's the best tangible benefit a kid can take away from their involvement in our weekend programs? Is it some nugget of truth? Is it a warm feeling toward church? Is it a chance to serve others?
It turns out the answer is something that sounds about as cliched as they come: it's God. The answer is always "God" in church, isn't it?
So that's the task. How do we get these kids to God, and get God to these kids? Not information about God - that's relatively easy. No, the scores of young people who are walking away from churches that raised them are not lacking knowledge about God. Many of them think there's nothing left to learn (an inevitable consequence of us making church too much like school, because after all, school is something you eventually finish and then move on from) and that they have a handle on God: he's ancient, he's static, and he's pretty much irrelevant to now.
Once we acknowledge that second-hand experience does not substitute for first-hand experience, the objective is plain and simple: encountering God. Achieving that objective is not so simple! And that's the paradox. We believe in a God who is everywhere and can do anything, yet we're directly opposed by cultural messages that claim God isn't anywhere and can't do anything.
Exposing that lie does not happen by skillful argumentation. It's not the product of logical proofs or flashy showmanship. God can use all of those things, but it isn't really until he breaks through all of our machinations to touch an individual human soul that a person really encounters God.
To me, that's the short-term goal: kids meeting God, often, again and again. It might be in our room, or it might be in the quietness of their own bedroom at home. It might be in a moment of adversity, or at a camp, or standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. It might be in the midst of family, surrounded by people who love them, or in the loneliest moment of their life. But God is there, and they meet him.
We've even distilled this into a snappy little "Driving Purpose Statement": The purpose of Surge is to come alongside the work God is already doing in each 4th, 5th, and 6th grader and create some "spiritual momentum" by continually putting them in God's path.
There are a few assumptions baked into that sentence above. One is that God is already at work. Kids don't come to us empty, because God and talk about God and ideas about God are not absent from the world. So since we don't start from scratch, it follows that the product of what we do isn't something we create! The point is to expose and name and try to understand what's already there, namely, the spiritual reality that undergirds all of our lives.
Another assumption is that God is at work specifically in each kid. For some, he is around and about them, in their world, but he has not been acknowledged or received. For others, he has been received, but is in competition with a host of other influences and interests for the title of "master".
A third is the simple belief that meeting God personally always changes us. And one of the most significant changes is that our desire to know him and capacity to "get" him grows more and more. It's not uncommon for kids at this age to go through a period of fascination with God. They suddenly have lots of questions, and they're into reading the Bible or other Christian literature. What's happening? They're meeting him - in a way we can't engineer, we can only nurture. When this interest wanes, its usually because we didn't feed it, or because we pushed too hard. Sometimes the best thing we can do is get out of the way of what God is trying to do!
What does a God encounter look like? Well, you know it when you see it. For one thing, it's pretty personal. Kids are gaining insights and acting in ways that show you they've connected with something beyond themselves. For another, it's unpredictable - you really can't manufacture it. But if that's the case, then what's the point of church? What can church do? As the statement above says, we can "put them in God's path."
That's how I see our weekend ministry, our midweek ministry, our camps, our outreach events (like KidsGames)...all of them are "teeing up" potential God encounters, and building the infrastructure for continued God encounters years down the road. That doesn't mean everything we do is stained glass and pipe organs (come to think of it, none of what we do is stained glass and pipe organs). In fact, you can see how that might stand in the way of people meeting God. So a lot of what we do might not look incredibly "churchy". It may even be - gasp - fun! But that's ok, because God and fun are not mutually exclusive. I don't want kids growing up thinking that all God stuff is gloomy and sad and serious, that if fun or smiling or laughter is involved, God can't be in it. Do you?
But there's a longer-term goal associated with Surge, too. It is that one day we might see a generation of adult Christians who are unhindered in their worship of God: not weighed down by debt, addiction, dysfunctional relationships, materialism, isolation, workaholism, narcissism, etc. In a word, a generation that is free. "It is for freedom that you have been set free," the Apostle Paul tells us, but how many of us take that freedom - our salvation - and yet live in lives of bondage that we cannot or will not extract ourselves from? The better way is to live in fellowship with God - God in us, us in God - and be so deeply invested in that relationship that our lives grow rock-solid: God-centered, Spirit-filled, truth-founded, mission-minded, others-focused, and purpose-driven.
That's what we must ultimately train them for. Such lives do not come about overnight. And they will not happen unless kids start to meet Him.
It turns out the answer is something that sounds about as cliched as they come: it's God. The answer is always "God" in church, isn't it?
So that's the task. How do we get these kids to God, and get God to these kids? Not information about God - that's relatively easy. No, the scores of young people who are walking away from churches that raised them are not lacking knowledge about God. Many of them think there's nothing left to learn (an inevitable consequence of us making church too much like school, because after all, school is something you eventually finish and then move on from) and that they have a handle on God: he's ancient, he's static, and he's pretty much irrelevant to now.
Once we acknowledge that second-hand experience does not substitute for first-hand experience, the objective is plain and simple: encountering God. Achieving that objective is not so simple! And that's the paradox. We believe in a God who is everywhere and can do anything, yet we're directly opposed by cultural messages that claim God isn't anywhere and can't do anything.
Exposing that lie does not happen by skillful argumentation. It's not the product of logical proofs or flashy showmanship. God can use all of those things, but it isn't really until he breaks through all of our machinations to touch an individual human soul that a person really encounters God.
To me, that's the short-term goal: kids meeting God, often, again and again. It might be in our room, or it might be in the quietness of their own bedroom at home. It might be in a moment of adversity, or at a camp, or standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. It might be in the midst of family, surrounded by people who love them, or in the loneliest moment of their life. But God is there, and they meet him.
We've even distilled this into a snappy little "Driving Purpose Statement": The purpose of Surge is to come alongside the work God is already doing in each 4th, 5th, and 6th grader and create some "spiritual momentum" by continually putting them in God's path.
There are a few assumptions baked into that sentence above. One is that God is already at work. Kids don't come to us empty, because God and talk about God and ideas about God are not absent from the world. So since we don't start from scratch, it follows that the product of what we do isn't something we create! The point is to expose and name and try to understand what's already there, namely, the spiritual reality that undergirds all of our lives.
Another assumption is that God is at work specifically in each kid. For some, he is around and about them, in their world, but he has not been acknowledged or received. For others, he has been received, but is in competition with a host of other influences and interests for the title of "master".
A third is the simple belief that meeting God personally always changes us. And one of the most significant changes is that our desire to know him and capacity to "get" him grows more and more. It's not uncommon for kids at this age to go through a period of fascination with God. They suddenly have lots of questions, and they're into reading the Bible or other Christian literature. What's happening? They're meeting him - in a way we can't engineer, we can only nurture. When this interest wanes, its usually because we didn't feed it, or because we pushed too hard. Sometimes the best thing we can do is get out of the way of what God is trying to do!
What does a God encounter look like? Well, you know it when you see it. For one thing, it's pretty personal. Kids are gaining insights and acting in ways that show you they've connected with something beyond themselves. For another, it's unpredictable - you really can't manufacture it. But if that's the case, then what's the point of church? What can church do? As the statement above says, we can "put them in God's path."
That's how I see our weekend ministry, our midweek ministry, our camps, our outreach events (like KidsGames)...all of them are "teeing up" potential God encounters, and building the infrastructure for continued God encounters years down the road. That doesn't mean everything we do is stained glass and pipe organs (come to think of it, none of what we do is stained glass and pipe organs). In fact, you can see how that might stand in the way of people meeting God. So a lot of what we do might not look incredibly "churchy". It may even be - gasp - fun! But that's ok, because God and fun are not mutually exclusive. I don't want kids growing up thinking that all God stuff is gloomy and sad and serious, that if fun or smiling or laughter is involved, God can't be in it. Do you?
But there's a longer-term goal associated with Surge, too. It is that one day we might see a generation of adult Christians who are unhindered in their worship of God: not weighed down by debt, addiction, dysfunctional relationships, materialism, isolation, workaholism, narcissism, etc. In a word, a generation that is free. "It is for freedom that you have been set free," the Apostle Paul tells us, but how many of us take that freedom - our salvation - and yet live in lives of bondage that we cannot or will not extract ourselves from? The better way is to live in fellowship with God - God in us, us in God - and be so deeply invested in that relationship that our lives grow rock-solid: God-centered, Spirit-filled, truth-founded, mission-minded, others-focused, and purpose-driven.
That's what we must ultimately train them for. Such lives do not come about overnight. And they will not happen unless kids start to meet Him.
Friday, October 11, 2013
The Continuing Need to Build Up Girls
Friday of this week marked the 2nd annual "International Day of the Girl." The United Nations created this day to focus attention on the rights and challenges of girls around the globe. This year's emphasis is ensuring that girls everywhere can get an education. While the stated purposes of the day may seem a little foreign to us (after all, American girls are now outperforming boys in school - being more likely to complete college, among other things), I think there's plenty here to be encouraged by - and challenged.
For one thing, the effect of education on a woman's future and opportunities is staggering. We may have lost sight of this in the U.S., where women have made rapid gains in the last 100 years, and where we take for granted that, at least in theory, girls should have all of the educational and career opportunities that boys do. But worldwide, of the 880 million illiterate adults, two-thirds are women. In Nigeria, despite its oil wealth, many girls receive only six months of school for their entire lifetimes. In areas of the Horn of Africa, girls don't go to school for fear of being abducted and forced to marry.
Again, concerns like these aren't even on the radar screen of most Americans. But let's peel back national identities and try to examine this from a purely human point of view. Otherwise we get mired down in arguments about "equal rights" and "equal pay" and "special rights" and "gender bias, all of which distract us from the truths, which are:
So there are cultural pressures that work to marginalize women and girls, pressures that must be curbed with intentionality. And as soon as we relax those efforts, women and girls are in danger of losing the ground they've gained. [Alert: If you think I'm saying women can't achieve things by hard work, relax - that's not my point at all. Nor am I making any kind of point about women with careers vs. wives & mothers. Here again, it's helpful to broaden our focus beyond the United States: there's a vast difference between a poor woman in sub-Saharan Africa who has no access to education or career options and a woman in a developed nation who chooses to be a stay-at-home mom.]
You and I might call that package of pressures "sin" - part of our collective fallen condition. After all, being female is not itself a sin. God "created them male and female", the Bible says in Genesis 1:26. And historically, Christianity has done as much - I daresay more - than any other movement to dignify and raise the status of women. So it's part of our tradition to stand by and stand up for people who the world puts down. "Many who are last will be first, and the first will be last" in the Kingdom of God, and "whoever exalts himself will be humbled, but whoever humbles himself will be made great."
So as standard-bearers of that tradition, we are bound to continue to uphold and protect the dignity of women, by advocating for the health, education, and opportunity of girls worldwide. In our culture, of course, girls face obstacles of a different sort. They are pressured to accept unrealistic body image ideals, pressured to become sexualized too young, pressured not to appear too smart in school, pressured to not pursue certain careers that are male-dominated. We dignify them when we create environments and bring alongside mentors who allow these girls to be who they really are - rather than silently conforming to who the culture says they ought to be.
Our high school ministry at North Coast Calvary Chapel runs an event every other year called "Unveiling". It's a conference for high school-aged girls that aims to "unveil" the lies our culture tells girls about what they are and can and should become. This year's event is November 15-16. If you have a daughter that age or know a teenage girl, send her. It only costs $39. Meanwhile, as we work with girls in 4th, 5th and 6th grades, girls who are just embarking on the journey of adolescence, the job before us is to launch them into middle school with both eyes open, hopefully to keep them from buying those lies in the first place. But we're fighting: fighting culture that wants to define them, fighting inertia that says, "we'll never change it", and fighting a short-sighted vision that expects girls to suffer, rather than thrive.
For one thing, the effect of education on a woman's future and opportunities is staggering. We may have lost sight of this in the U.S., where women have made rapid gains in the last 100 years, and where we take for granted that, at least in theory, girls should have all of the educational and career opportunities that boys do. But worldwide, of the 880 million illiterate adults, two-thirds are women. In Nigeria, despite its oil wealth, many girls receive only six months of school for their entire lifetimes. In areas of the Horn of Africa, girls don't go to school for fear of being abducted and forced to marry.
Again, concerns like these aren't even on the radar screen of most Americans. But let's peel back national identities and try to examine this from a purely human point of view. Otherwise we get mired down in arguments about "equal rights" and "equal pay" and "special rights" and "gender bias, all of which distract us from the truths, which are:
- Education makes women better parents. A child whose mother can read is 50% more likely to survive past the age of five.
- The World Bank says an extra year of education nets a 20% increase in earnings as an adult.
- There are 31 million girl children who are of school age who are not attending school.
- Girls who are educated end up having fewer children, lower rates of HIV and rates of AIDS transmission to their children, and healthier children.
So there are cultural pressures that work to marginalize women and girls, pressures that must be curbed with intentionality. And as soon as we relax those efforts, women and girls are in danger of losing the ground they've gained. [Alert: If you think I'm saying women can't achieve things by hard work, relax - that's not my point at all. Nor am I making any kind of point about women with careers vs. wives & mothers. Here again, it's helpful to broaden our focus beyond the United States: there's a vast difference between a poor woman in sub-Saharan Africa who has no access to education or career options and a woman in a developed nation who chooses to be a stay-at-home mom.]
You and I might call that package of pressures "sin" - part of our collective fallen condition. After all, being female is not itself a sin. God "created them male and female", the Bible says in Genesis 1:26. And historically, Christianity has done as much - I daresay more - than any other movement to dignify and raise the status of women. So it's part of our tradition to stand by and stand up for people who the world puts down. "Many who are last will be first, and the first will be last" in the Kingdom of God, and "whoever exalts himself will be humbled, but whoever humbles himself will be made great."
So as standard-bearers of that tradition, we are bound to continue to uphold and protect the dignity of women, by advocating for the health, education, and opportunity of girls worldwide. In our culture, of course, girls face obstacles of a different sort. They are pressured to accept unrealistic body image ideals, pressured to become sexualized too young, pressured not to appear too smart in school, pressured to not pursue certain careers that are male-dominated. We dignify them when we create environments and bring alongside mentors who allow these girls to be who they really are - rather than silently conforming to who the culture says they ought to be.
Our high school ministry at North Coast Calvary Chapel runs an event every other year called "Unveiling". It's a conference for high school-aged girls that aims to "unveil" the lies our culture tells girls about what they are and can and should become. This year's event is November 15-16. If you have a daughter that age or know a teenage girl, send her. It only costs $39. Meanwhile, as we work with girls in 4th, 5th and 6th grades, girls who are just embarking on the journey of adolescence, the job before us is to launch them into middle school with both eyes open, hopefully to keep them from buying those lies in the first place. But we're fighting: fighting culture that wants to define them, fighting inertia that says, "we'll never change it", and fighting a short-sighted vision that expects girls to suffer, rather than thrive.
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