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.