Making Kids R.I.C.H. - The "H" is for hearts & hands

Here's an experiment I'll sometimes do with 4th-6th graders. I'll ask them, "As a pastor in a church, what's my job?" and the answer is usually, "to teach us." (Sometimes, "to get us to follow God.") Then I'll ask, "And what's your job?" The answer is not surprising. But it is revealing.

"To listen," is the most common response. "To learn," is the second-most common. And of course, given the way we've structured church for people under 18 (as school), it's not unusual that they'd say that. But when I press, and ask, "What about your job as a Christian?" very few kids can answer, beyond, "to learn about God."

The earliest Christians were doers. They were learners, but the bulk of what distinguished them was their deeds. They stood out for their compassion towards humanity. We have to remember that for about the first 20 years after Jesus, there were no New Testament letters or gospels, and that the canon of scripture didn't coalesce for at least another 100 years.

So what drove them? The Spirit of God and the spirit of the life of Jesus. We have to think that they were so moved by his example, his sacrificial life and death, that they felt obligated to live differently.

What are we doing as Christians? I call these heart and hand experiences, and they are the "H" factor in making kids "R.I.C.H." Serving others changes us, in ways talking about serving others never will:

• Serving empties us, creating a need to be filled.
• Serving makes us reflect on the concept of "lack", both material and spiritual.
• Serving tests our patience and challenges our motivation.
• Serving makes us thankful for all that we have.
• Serving puts us in contact with others who serve, and who know of other needs we weren't aware of.
• Serving stretches us to do things we don't really want to do.
• Serving forces us to set aside time in our schedule that's not about us.
• Serving brings us close up to folks who aren't like us.
• Serving pushes us beyond ourselves.

Years ago, I applied for a middle school ministry position and didn't get the job; I wasn't the person they were looking for, but also, "because it seems like you have a heart for missions." That was a really strange statement to me. Shouldn't all Christians have a heart for missions? Isn't that what we do - whether it's in your family, neighborhood, city, country, or internationally?

The "doing" in Christianity has to do with living our lives on purpose. It's not just existing day to day, and it's not just "being nice". When Christian living is nothing more than "being nice", Christianity is nothing more than a system for training children in virtue. No wonder so many kids outgrow it.

Heart and hands experiences set kids up to live lives on purpose. Short-term missions - even one-day projects - transplant kids to a different environment, where they think about different things and do different tasks than they would ever do on their own...with the hope that the doing will follow them back into everyday life and become part of a daily rhythm.

We have a missions opportunity coming up for kids & parents (kids can be any age, up through high school), to Mexico April 4-8. An interest meeting will be held next Sunday, February 9, at 12:30 in Room B-202.

Even if you can't travel to do missions with your kid, here are a list of ways to help in the community. Pick one (with input from your kid), and make it your "thing":

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·      Host single Marines for a holiday meal (you can contact Jack & Nina Baugh janiba1@cox.net who run our Military Support Network)

·      Care for an elderly neighbor (and, see below)

·      Provide a meal for 40 at Solutions for Change (http://solutionsforchange.org/)

·      Brother Benno’s (bring up a group) (http://www.brotherbenno.org)

·      Make a quilt or a craft, donate it to a hospital

·      Bread of Life (http://www.bolrescue.org)

o   serve at a nightly meal

o   twice a month they need volunteers to pack food boxes

o   Pick-up once a week or month from Trader Joe’s (good opportunity for a homeschooling family)

·      Respite care for someone who’s disabled in your neighborhood (and, see below)

·      Nursing homes need people to read or play cards (the low-income facilities need more visitors)

  
Then watch your kid get R.I.C.H. from the experience of living for something beyond themselves.

Some helpful info you need on a couple of apps, and some thoughts on competition

 “Tween Us” is a feature of the Chicago Tribune and frequently has short, helpful blog pieces about parenting kids 9-12. You can subscribe on their site if you want new posts e-mailed to you. Here are a few I’ve found helpful lately:

“What parents need to know about the Whisper app”
  
“Scary facts parents need to know about the Tinder app”

and a thoughtful piece asking Why must everything related to kids’ activities be a competition?

Some Thoughts on our "Digital Invasion"

Pulling off an event like this week’s presentation on kids & technology by Archibald Hart is not a small undertaking. Any time we put on a parent program, it’s never one program, but usually three – one for parents, one for young kids, and one for the older kids. That means a lot of details to cover. And my main thought the morning of the event was: this is all a distraction.

Not the presentation itself; it was informative, relevant, and challenging. I mean the whole issue of kids and technology, specifically the intrusive, ever-present personal computing devices most of us are attached to a good part of each day. (This, written on my laptop after midnight on Thursday.)

It’s all a distraction. By which I mean that ten years ago, we were barely dealing with the stuff we are now: Internet addiction, texting, sexting, easy access to streaming pornographic videos, and i-Devices which have brought e-communication off of the desktop and into our palms, making the digital presence all the more ubiquitous. And 20 years ago? Almost no one had even heard of the Internet.

And yet, 10 and 20 years ago, we were not easily churning out healthy, well-adjusted, spiritually strong kids and teenagers. There were enormous challenges and barriers keeping kids from spiritual maturity even in the pre-Internet age. Which makes all of these issues regarding technology – and they are big issues – a distraction.

Because even if there was a magical cure that kept kids away from porn and ended cyberbullying and cyberstalking and brought down people’s anxiety levels and re-set our brains (which are being re-wired by the demands that electronic communication place on them)…it still wouldn’t magically make kids into spiritual rockstars. It would merely put us in a place like where we were in 1994 – and we weren’t exactly a screaming success when it came to discipling kids back then, either.

My point is, everyone talks about technology as if it’s the biggest issue facing their families these days. And it may be. But we are naïve to think that if somehow we could remove tech from the equation or at least contain its negative effects, we’d pretty much have no more issues dogging families. Poor communication, lack of empowerment, the need to train kids to take on responsibility, high-risk behaviors, and dysfunction are still a part of family life because, well, we’re screwed up and it’s work to get along.

All of these issues with tech aren’t real issues. They’re irritants. And they’re factors which complicate those five features of family life I listed above. Tech is (often) a hindrance to effective communication, it detaches us from real life, it thrusts kids into an adult world they’re not ready for, it is a playing field that encourages risk-taking, and it promotes dysfunction.

Sometimes when we have a really big job to do, we chip away, taking baby steps, rather than taking the radical steps needed to finish the job. After all, if we aggressively conquer the biggest problem in our life, what then will we have to obsess over, right? Yet tech is not the biggest problem families face. It may be the foremost problem, but that just means it needs to be dealt with first so that moms and dads and their kids can get to work on the real issues of family living.

So let me encourage you to be decisive and to go after the tech issues in your home – because there are, in reality, bigger fish to fry. Need boundaries on tech use? Put them in place. Have a kid addicted to porn? Get help. Have kids who repeatedly abuse online privileges? Wean them off. You cannot afford to let these issues consume your child’s adolescence. Believe it or not, there’s more to life than that – theirs and yours.

If you aren’t looking for advice on containing the digital storm in your home, stop reading here. (And thanks for reading.)

If you are, here are my audacious suggestions of some things you might implement immediately. These won’t “solve” the issue forever, but they’re steps in the right direction.

1. Get a handle on your own tech use. Because we don’t reproduce what we want, we reproduce what we are. So to expect your kid not to text at dinner while you text at dinner is an unrealistic double standard. And it will fail. If kids don’t get to go online after a certain hour, adults don’t either. (And remember that kids play games or use social media for fun and to prevent boredom; many adults do work on their laptops or phones for the same reason. So it’s not enough to say, “You can’t play games, but I can work.” That, too, is a double standard.) The bottom line is, we cannot expect kids to use digital devices any less than we use them. We adults have to get this under control. (And this, written on my laptop now well after midnight.)

2. Kids under 13? No social media. Period. Know why? It’s illegal. Yup, that’s right – the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998 makes it illegal to collect someone’s personal information online if they are under 13 without parental consent. And since most social networking sites and apps don’t want to go to the trouble of verifying consent, they state that a person must be 13 or older to use their services. In other words, kids who have Facebook and Instagram accounts are lying about their ages in order to sign up.

Parents – hide behind this law! The online marketers and social media people hate the law. And, given how much has changed since 1998 (the dinosaur days of the Internet), it probably is a little out of date. But for now, it’s the law. So when your son or daughter asks if they can start an Instagram account, you can say, “No. It’s against the law.” But all my friends have one! “It’s against the law.” See how easy that one is?

3. Practice saying no. As in, “Mom…really, I can’t have an Instagram?” (Answer: “No. It’s against the law.”) You will be the meanest, most unreasonable parents on the planet if your kid is the last one to get an iPhone…according to your kid. You will be the dorkiest, most backward family in the neighborhood…according to your kid. But you must say no – at some point. I can’t tell you where that is. You will decide for yourself at what age your kid gets his or her first phone (hopefully a dumb phone at first), at what age they graduate to a smart phone, and when they get their own computer or tablet – but build in “no” somewhere. There has to be a limit to what you will buy or provide. Because the other option is, there’s no limit, and that’s a terrible position to put yourself in. And it’s a terrible thing to grant your kids, who will always ask for more than you really want to grant them permission for (and believe it or not, they don’t always expect you to say yes). Have some standards. What won’t you say yes to - when it comes to tech or otherwise? Because if the answer is nothing – if you will not say “no” to anything your kid asks – well, then, that’s the answer: it’s never no.

4. Seriously, seriously rethink handheld Internet devices. I mean, seriously. Because your son will use it to look at porn. Not exclusively. But it will happen. “It will happen anyhow.” In all likelihood, you’re correct. Most teenage boys not only have looked at porn, they do so regularly. Part of your job is to make it not so easy.

5. Wi-fi must die after a certain hour. This is one of the making-it-not-so-easy steps. (And this, from me, posted to an online blog well after midnight. Sheesh.) But really, it makes sense. If night is for sleeping, and you turn the lights off, and the TV off, and the computer off, why not the Wi-fi, too?

6. Install filtering and/or accountability software. www.covenanteyes.com is a good place to start if you know nothing about this. Filters are frustrating. There are ways around them. Both true, but again, your job is to make it not so easy for kids to encounter harmful things online. Trust your kids, because you must. But also verify. I like accountability software for kids who are older, because it puts them in a position of having to answer for where they’re going online. Don’t install it as a “gotcha” maneuver; install it with their full knowledge and participation.

7. Get kids prepaid phones that charge by the minute and per text. These phones show a declining balance on the home screen. Kids tend to think that minutes and data transfer are “free”. Disabuse them of this, immediately. Put a fixed amount of money on the phone each month and when it’s gone, it’s gone. (Caveat: Since I often hear that the reason preteens have phones is so their parents can easily get in touch with them, make it a rule that Mom and Dad’s calls must be answered. If minutes expire, deduct $10 from the next month’s allotment. If they don’t answer when you call – either because they’re out of minutes or aren’t paying attention – take the phone away, because really, why then do they have it at all? And really – they’ll be fine without one. They’ll be ok. So will you. Just make sure they know how to call home – that they know your home number and your and your spouse’s cell number.)

8. Become a student of tech. You must do this. Even if you never use apps. Even if you wish they were never invented. Even if your phone is still dumb (like mine is). Whatever your reason for resisting and resenting the tech onslaught, you must be familiar with what’s out there. Because your kids are. It’s second-nature to them. Two sites I recommend: http://internet-safety.yoursphere.com/ and http://www.commonsensemedia.org/

9. Allow kids to be bored; don’t allow tech devices to rush into the vacuum. Archibald Hart closed with this, and I thought it was like gold: When he was a child, he was often bored – and it made him creative. I thought about that and thought about a kid I know who’s a really good artist. He was showing me a cool drawing once, and told me he did it over a school break when – you guessed it – he was bored, with nothing else to do.

Then I thought about my own work, and how one of the things I so often lack is creative space. Though I dream of having whole days and weeks to brainstorm ideas for KidsGames or summer camp or teaching series, it never seems to happen. You know what else never seems to happen at work? That I am bored. More often – nearly always – my schedule is packed to the gills, with half a dozen things to do at once, five tabs open on my Internet browser, and four messages I should have returned a week ago.

And you know what happens when I do hit a point where I feel caught up? Facebook, that’s what.

10. Say no. (Now that you’ve been practicing.) We must say no to some things so that we can say yes to other things. As good as it feels to check the items off your electronic to-do list, or clean out your e-mail inbox, or delete a bunch of files you no longer use (all the organizationally challenged people are thinking, “Files? What are files? I use the desktop.”) – it is fleeting. So fleeting. And so not the point of our lives. Which is why I’m going to hit save and close this laptop, right now. And why you should, too.

Making kids R.I.C.H. - the "C" is for Christ

Without Christ, there is no Christianity. Profound, I know. But the great religious struggle of your kids’ generation will be to maintain the distinctness of the Christian faith, up against every other religion, philosophy, and value system. The big question, when it comes to navigating life in a world that is prone to dysfunction and disorder, will be Is Jesus really necessary? Only kids who are rich in Christ will answer rightly.

I have seen many attempts to explain away the significance of Jesus: that he was a prophet, as was Abraham and Mohammed; that he was an altruist, as was Gandhi; that he articulated a paradigm-shifting philosophy of loving one’s neighbor, putting him in the ranks of the world’s great thinkers; that the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ” of faith are different – the former being a historical figure, the latter being an invention of the church which bore his name after his death.

Some of this I even accept as the product of curiosity; so, Jesus becomes like Gandhi because he’s not like Hitler. I get that. But what’s troubling is when I hear language that downplays the importance of Christ from Christians.

It’s happened right under our noses the last several years with Christmas. I couldn’t care less whether Target wants to wish me “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays”. What I care about is the narrative that accompanies the Christmas season, which has become nearly entirely secularized despite borrowing heavily from traditional Christian songs and symbols. And we’ve bought it. Christmas, the prevailing storyline goes, is about goodwill toward others. Cunning marketers will even throw in a reference to “Peace on earth, goodwill to men” despite the fact that those words were not spoken by the angels to the shepherds as a command. They’re not another version of “Love your neighbor as yourself.” They were heralded in response to the angel’s pronouncement that a Savior had been born, that the awaited Messiah had come, and they tell about what God did – he brought peace between us and Him.

Yet the retailers who invoke “Merry Christmas” are the good guys and those who don’t are the bad guys? It’s as simple as that? Uh-huh.

Christianity is losing its predominance in America, and that makes some believers feel insecure. I get that. But have we really become so desperate for affirmation that we’ll embrace any bland, civic, watered-down appeal to religion of whatever kind because “at least they mentioned God"?

There’s now a holiday called “World Kindness Day” (this year November 13). So from September-on, kids are hit with almost four months solid of messages urging them to “be good” and “make good choices.” Think about it. The school year begins with pep talks about cooperation and the importance of good character, followed not long after by Red Ribbon Week (don’t use drugs, in October), followed by World Kindness Day, followed by the Thanksgiving-Christmas-Happiness-for-all season. Forget the ever-expanding Christmas shopping season. Pretty soon, the entire year will be one, continuous feel-good and do-good fest, a marketing triumph and a retailer’s boon.

And you ask, “What, Scrooge, is wrong with that? The whole world is ‘celebrating’ Christmas!”

Quite simply, that Jesus didn’t live and die for commerce. He died for salvation, which is not a tweak to the human condition, it’s an upheaval. But when we settle for “whatever works”-style religion, his sacrifice – his whole existence – becomes a detail.

We live in a world that is trying desperately to flatten the landscape of religion. The result is that rather than defining ourselves, Christianity gets defined by cultural wishes. That’s how demonstrably untrue statements like “all religions are basically the same” have taken hold. In that equation, Jesus is quaint – kind of like how your grandparents grew up listening to the radio, your parents were raised on TV, but your kids watch their iPads. Different mediums, same objective.

Well, Jesus is not Gandhi. He is not Buddha. He is not Muhammed. Sorry, but I can’t accept that. I can’t accept that God allowed the murder of his one-and-only son for the redemption of the world if hopeful thinking, “sending positive energy” and random acts of kindness could have achieved the same thing.

Jesus did not come that he might leave behind “Christian principles”, nor did he die so that we would “live by the Bible” or “love one another” or “forgive” or be nice or smile more or try harder or save ourselves! No, Jesus came “that we may have life – and that life is in his Son.” (1 John 5:11) You know, all that “Apart from me, you can do nothing” stuff that Jesus hammered home the night before he died (John 15)? And all of those benefits – love, forgiveness, the healing of relationships, etc. – flow as byproducts of the life of Christ, in and among us.

So I think we need to insist upon, highlight, reaffirm, and celebrate the centrality of Christ in Christianity. Not Christian principles, but Christ. In the days before pluralism, we didn’t pay attention to this as we should have. Jesus was the only game in town. If people made an appeal to religious ideals, they were Christian (or at least, Judeo-Christian) ones. So the essential nature of Christ (“without Christ, there is no Christianity”) got muddled.

We need to make kids rich in Christ, and we do this by challenging them not just to think about their faith from the inside-out, but from the outside-in. So instead of merely asking them, “Why did Jesus die?” (something everyone inside of Christianity ought to know), we need to also pose the question, “Can sin be forgiven apart from Jesus? If not, why not?” Because those are the questions people outside of Christianity (in other words, more and more of our friends and neighbors) are asking, or would ask if you entered into a dialogue with them about religion.

If we don’t insist upon the centrality of Christ, the power of the cross gets neutered, because Jesus died for no reason. Paul says so in Galatians 2 – if we are going to take our salvation into our own hands, trying to accomplish it by our own actions, then we are “setting aside” the grace of God. Jesus was God, expressing his grace – so to claim Jesus for anything less than he was is to remove grace from the Christian equation. What you have then is an entire world under condemnation. Not good.

So have a meaningful Christmas. But let’s not leave Christ there. Let’s take him into the rest of the year, too.

Here are four ways, besides challenging kids to think about their faith from the outside-in, that we can make kids rich in Christ:

1. We must teach (and believe ourselves) that Jesus=God. Sometimes it’s more helpful with kids to use the phrase “God in human form”, or “When God came to earth, he was called Jesus”. “Son of God” means he came from God, but can also imply to a kid that he was created. And if he was created, he isn’t God. (Incidentally, here’s how I explain the Trinity to kids: I am an uncle. And I am a pastor. And, until recently, I was a seminary student. Then I ask kids, when I’m working at the church, what am I? Do I stop being an uncle or a student? No, it’s just that the primary expression of me at that time is as a pastor. When I’m with my nieces and nephews, do I stop being a pastor or a student? And so on. Skip the apple or egg metaphors – they imply that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are different parts of the same thing – each one-third of God, if you will. That’s wrong.)

2. We must believe and teach that the Christian life is supernatural. Humans are natural. We can try hard to be good. But that’s not Christianity. That’s still of ourselves. God is supernatural – outside of ourselves. We need to bring him inside.

3. We need to be surrendered to him and teach surrender. Not verbal assent to facts about Jesus or the Christian religion or the importance of kindness. Surrender.

4. We also make kids rich in Christ by doing what he did. No, we can’t become a sacrifice for their sins. But Jesus didn’t only die. He also lived, and where he went, he ministered – he met people’s needs. Needs like relationship and identity – which are the first two legs of making kids R.I.C.H.

Read more about the "Making Kids R.I.C.H." strategy here
Read more about making kids rich in Relationships here
Read more about making kids rich in Identity here

Making Kids R.I.C.H. - the "I" is for Identity

When I was a kid (I started school in 1978), it was common to hear, “You can be anything you want to be.” It was encouraging, and it was the natural outworking of a distinctly 20th century American philosophy. Our grandparents had weathered the Great Depression and won World War II. Our parents had fought communism and for the rights of blacks and women. And now, the world was our oyster. The modern version of the American Dream lay straight ahead, and we could choose our path. We were, in the words of the quintessential ‘70s anthem for kids “Free to Be You and Me.”

The problem is, it was a myth.

More and more I have become convinced that we don’t do kids any favors when we tell them they can be “anything”. The intention is noble – we want them to work hard, to believe in themselves, and to exceed everyone’s expectations. And we want them to persevere. We think of Michael Jordan, who was "cut" from his high school basketball team (he wasn’t, but it makes a good story), and look what happened because he didn’t give up?

But the fact that Jordan stuck it out through a year of junior varsity and went on to be the greatest basketball player ever doesn’t prove that “you can be anything you want to be.” Instead, it’s an argument for the dirty little secret that cuts against the grain of all our wishful thinking: we thrive in our giftedness.

Because remember Jordan the professional baseball player? The one who led the White Sox to a World Series championship, proving that with hard work, an athlete can be good at any sport? Of course you don’t, because Jordan’s baseball career, sandwiched between his stints in the NBA, was not memorable. It wasn’t wrong – he probably had a lot of fun, and he’s Michael Jordan, so he gets to pretty much call the shots on anything he wants – but Jordan belonged in the NBA.

And that’s what identity is all about: Belonging. Like it or not, we are defined and shaped by the crowd around us. There have been self-made men and pioneers and guys like Richard Proenneke, but they are extreme exceptions.

The truth is that for most of us, “be anything” is not liberating, it is crippling. When you can be “anything”, it means that you are, in fact, nothing until you become whatever it is you choose to be. And to a certain set of over-achievers, it even communicates that you ought to be everything. Most of us are not destined to become everything, but a few things. There’s no shame in that. And the ideas of “calling” and “skill set” and “giftedness” are having a renaissance. I say, it’s about time.

What does it mean, then, for your kid to be rich in Identity? Three things, corresponding to the past, the present, and the future:

The first is for them to live in the acknowledgement that they are created beings. As such, they are dependent. And they have no rights. Sound harsh? I don’t mean rights in the American political sense, but rights in the sense of a deserved birthright of destiny. Lots of people live under this myth: I deserve a happy life, to make lots of money, to have the family I want, to live where I want, on and on. Truly grateful people recognize that they’re not independent, and not reaping an endless supply of deserved benefits. It all comes from God. How would it change the way you prayed to God if you started by acknowledging, "I have no rights"? How would it change the way you live?

The second aspect of being rich in identity is intrapersonal awareness. Kids rich in identity know themselves, and this means knowing not only what they are, but knowing and coming to peace with what they aren’t. This is hard when you’re young, because you live under everyone else’s expectations. Discovering who you are and what you’re good at entails a lot of trial and error, but we've pretty much eliminated failure as a component of upbringing. There are dead ends and false starts. It takes a mature kid to say not just, “I don’t like that,” but “I’m not cut out for that.” And certainly, we don’t want to give kids permission to give up too easily. What might not appeal to them at one age might end up being what they love to do and are good at a few years down the road.

But that’s the thing about giftedness: we don’t choose it, we discover it. It is revealed as it develops in us, and yes, lessons and tutors and mentors and exposure can shape that to some degree, but as Muff Potter sings in the musical Tom Sawyer, “A man’s gonna be what he’s born to be.” So somehow, without slotting kids too soon or rigidly tracking them in school, we need to help them discover that they have a design, which has suited them for certain things and limited them from other things (which, amazingly, other people might be perfectly suited for). The KidUnique program that just wrapped up at our church was all about this: What draws your child? What makes them come alive? How can you encourage that? Those are questions some adults have never considered for themselves.

I’ve found that for kids, labels are not particularly helpful and can be debilitating. So adults really get into knowing that they are INTJ and not ESFP, and reading the descriptions of each. Kids just know how they feel. They know if a certain kind of work or style of working or environment or group of people feels right. They know the difference between engaging in an activity that’s boring and one they hope will never end. All we have to do is teach them to pay attention to this and then be reflective and try to put words to it: what was happening that really made you come alive? When else have you felt this way? etc. Then rather than intimating that they be “well-rounded” (i.e., good at everything), we let them lean into those strengths.

To acknowledge that they are created, dependent beings is to acknowledge something God has already done, in the past. To discover the design He’s put in you is an ongoing work, in the now. The final aspect of identity pertains to where they’re going. It is to experience and bring redemption.

Kids rich in identity understand that their purpose in the world isn’t related to short-term things like pleasing adult authority figures. It is future-focused and other-focused, and for that reason, purpose shapes every major life decision. God does things on purpose. Our job is to pick up that ball and run with it. We experience redemption as we live in his forgiveness. We are new creatures. We then bring this gospel of newness to the rest of the world, in the context of the personhood we’ve been given by God. We are the message. A person living as though they’re unredeemed is a poor billboard for redemption.

Cassie Carstens, the South African pastor, trainer, and author of The World Needs a Father will be out in February, says kids need to have a handle on their identities by age 11. Much later than that, and the storms of adolescent life will batter them from one pole to the next. A preteen understanding who they are is incredibly counter-cultural. To make it happen, we have to open the world to them and relax the perimeter of protectiveness much sooner than we are accustomed to, and sooner than many would like. But Carstens says the window of opportunity for kids to apprehend the state of the world and their place in it is really narrow. If we wait until they’re teenagers, chances are they will have already bought into so many of the world’s values ("It’s all about me"..."Safety and comfort are the highest goals"..."School achievement is paramount to life success"..."Money buys happiness") that there’s no bringing them back.

Think of that: Your 11-year-old’s ability to be used by God for the rest of their lives hinges largely on the self-perception they’ve honed up until this point. How are we doing at giving kids opportunities to understand the world, and as a part of that, themselves? If the church of now wants to be an effective church in 30 years, maybe making kids rich in their identities while still young is the best investment we can make.

Making Kids R.I.C.H. - The "R" is for Relationships

Last week I wrote about the importance of making your kids rich – in the right ways. One of the ways we in affluent areas nonetheless experience poverty is in the area of relationships. Relationships are the “R” in R.I.C.H.

Kids lack the relationships they need for many reasons, but first, the big picture: Why are relationships good and necessary? One reason is simply social development. We are social creatures and can’t develop in isolation. We can’t learn to communicate, work out conflicts, or work collaboratively all on our own. “But my kid has two parents. We’re enough.” If you and your spouse embody every imaginable personality type in the rest of the world, then yes. But of course, the world is filled with a variety of people, and exposure to those different types – the easy-to-get-along with and the not-so-easy – is an advantage. We need to learn how to get along.

But another reason is that there is a hole in us, an incompleteness, that was meant to be filled by relationships. God looked at Adam and said, “It is not good for man to be alone,” and he created Eve. Marital partnerships are an obvious model of the way two people compliment one another. But it’s not only in marriage that we experience this sense of completeness, and I would suggest that if a person hasn’t experienced the benefits of deep friendship as a child or teenager, they will struggle in forming the intimate relationships as a young adult that will lead to marriage. Why do I say that? Because one way or another, we are going to get that relationship need met. Unfortunately, there are counterfeit ways to try to meet the need for validation. People may turn to drugs, the Internet, overwork, overeating, or become depressed and withdrawn. The trouble is, these somewhat satisfy, but they keep people wanting.

So why do kids lack the relationships they should have? You can probably guess a few of the reasons right off:

1. We’re really, really busy, and relationships take time to develop.
2. Neighborhoods don’t work the way they used to. “Going to a friend’s house” has been replaced by arranged “play dates”.
3. We’re more mobile, and that means kids are sometimes growing up far away from extended family. The absence of grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles and cousins really does make a difference, because who’s taking their place? (An iPad?)
4. “Stranger Danger” scared the devil out of my generation, convincing us that anyone whose name we didn’t know could be (probably) an imminent threat to be avoided. And we’ve never fully recovered.
   

Let's focus on two sorts of relationships your kids need to grow up healthy and well. The first is peer relationships. Every parent wants their kid to get along well – not necessarily to be popular, but to be well-liked and have lots of friends. And it’s a special kind of pain to see your child struggle here, because there is so little you can do directly. (And sometimes, kids don't want you to. When one researcher asked a group of 7th graders what role parents should play in their social lives, a boy answered, "You parents should have no role in your social life.")

But I would suggest that the nature of friendship in the preteen years makes a shift, from revolving around things we do to revolving around who we are. When kids are very young, friendship shows itself in “parallel play” - each kid playing on his/her own, not really interacting with the other, but still considered “playing together”. As kids approach school age, they engage in more interactive, imaginative play (“house”, “school”, “store”, etc.). Play eventually evolves to hobbies and interests, and then, around 5th or 6th grade, friendship gets rooted in identity: I am friends with people who are like me. Middle school kids “hang out”, and their hanging out may be centered around an activity, but it’s really more about bonding with others who reflect who I see myself as. In so doing, I am affirmed that I belong, that “this is who I am.”

If your child struggles with friendships, let me encourage you to keep trying. (Remarkably, this article just came into my inbox this morning.) Get them involved in lots of things. The law of averages is on your side, that if they’re exposed to enough different kids, they’re going to find some they click with. They need this, because as kids move through adolescence, they begin to reach outside of the nuclear family to get their social & emotional needs met. You did it, and so did I. And it can be painful for parents. It creates stress on a family. But it is necessary. It is part of God’s design. You weren’t meant to be everything they need relationally, forever. Yet if they’re not practiced in relationships, they get caught in a bind – they sense their need, but can’t get it met. They’re vulnerable to the counterfeit substitutes mentioned above.

The second type of relationships your kid needs are called developmental relationships. These are relationships with someone older who cares and invests themselves in your kid. The Search Institute has identified four components of an adult-to-kid relationship that makes it “developmental” in nature:

1. There is an emotional attachment between adult & kid, not just a transactional arrangement (where the relationship is based on the kid doing something or producing something – taking a test, checking out a book, buying something at the store).
2. There is two-way influence. The adult seeks to influence the kid, but first, they are learning from them, and that helps shape the kind of guidance and influence that is offered. (This would be in contrast, say, to putting kids through a class or seminar on life skills, which is not entirely bad, but classes tend be static, while relationships are dynamic.)
3. They become increasingly complex. It becomes deeper and more meaningful over time. People themselves change over time. If our involvement with someone doesn’t grow as they grow, we only have a surface relationship with them.
4. There is a shifting balance of power. Kids gain more and more ownership and direction over their own lives within the context of our influence.

Most kids experience an extreme lack of developmental relationships. Oh, there are adults in their lives – teachers, coaches, friends’ parents, librarians, retail clerks, police officers, etc. - but how many of these people have a personal, vested interest in your kid specifically? Developmental relationships are marked by both care and challenge. Your kid might have people in their lives who care about them, and that’s good, but nobody’s pushing them outside themselves. Or, they might have figures who challenge them, but there’s little care for where your kid is starting from or where they particularly care to go.

A study called the National Promises Study found that 33% of kids don’t have an adequate level of caring adults, even if you count the adults in their own families. It found only 18% of kids got the right mix (a “balanced diet”, if you will) of positive family support & communication balanced with boundaries and high parental expectations. Just 22% of the kids surveyed experienced both a caring school climate and high teacher expectations/school boundaries. And in relationships with adults in the community (non-school, non-parent), only 15% of the kids could be considered “rich” in the level of support they were getting from adults. (It was in a presentation on developmental relationships from Search that I first heard the phrase “rich in relationships”, and it really caught my attention; it’s where I got the idea of the "Making Kids R.I.C.H." acronym.)

If you think about it, our relationship with God resembles a developmental relationship. God is invested in us. He has affections for us. We are not just products in his eyes. He is personal, and relates to us personally. The longer we walk with God, the deeper we go with him. And there is an element of empowerment. God’s goal is that we be released – not to declare our independence and break free of him – but that we “grow up”, which is to say that our relationship with him gets to a point where it’s not just “Me & Jesus” but “Me & Jesus & the rest of the whole world”.

Here are some recommendations Search makes by way of ensuring that your child develops the developmental relationships they need:

• Be on top of the relationships your kid already has with teachers and coaches and evaluate: does this person like, respect, and treat my child fairly? If not, it may be a sign that this adult has more of a transactional relationship in mind than a developmental one. They may honestly feel that knowing your kid personally and caring is too much work or “not my job”.
• Notice whether your kid is pushed to achieve beyond where they are currently, by teachers and leaders of after-school activities. We don’t do kids any favors by not challenging them. (And, we don’t do them any favors when we push them too hard, which is also a sign of insensitivity.)
• Look for teachers who promote the love of learning and mastery of skills, not just high achievement and winning.
• Do you see energy and excitement in the people who work with your kids? That’s a sign that the relationship is developmentally significant.
• Ask other adults you respect and trust to watch our for, mentor, and spend time with your child.

Finally, if you think your kid doesn’t need these relationships, think again. For one thing, you don’t know what’s going to happen. Divorce, death, major family illness, job loss, or other life disruptions happen to the best of us. Relationships are invisible infrastructure, so that if for a time you’re unable to support your kid in the way they’re accustomed, there’s at least a safety net. Also, having other caring adults in your kid’s life doesn’t represent a failure or a lack of anything on your part – at all. You are a parent, and no one else can parent your kid. You are uniquely situated to provide things only you can provide. You have a role – a parental one. And others are uniquely situated to provide things only they can provide. They also have a role. So invite them to play it.

“R” stands for making kids rich in “Relationships”.
“I” is for “Identity”. Read about that next week.

I Want Your Kid to be R.I.C.H.

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.

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.