While I’ve always been drawn to youth-ministry at our church – I’ve done ‘junior church’ and am teaching the university-level Sunday school class for my second year – I’ve somehow managed to avoid the middle area. That is, I’ve never worked directly with junior/senior high school kids. I was always interested in it, but I never actually got there. For some time I wondered why that was, but once again, God has demonstrated He knows best.
Firstly, I needed to be taught ‘moderation.’ It’s no good trying to work with teenagers if you’re ready to slap their fingers every time they express a view that is theologically inaccurate. We need to be teachers, yes, but we also need to recognize that God conforms people at different paces, and in different ways. It was the fact that I wasn’t dismissed or wrist-slapped as a neophyte Christian that allowed me to proceed on a steady course, learning more and more every day.
Interestingly enough, it was the study of Church History that really taught me the necessity of balance and moderation. Looking back at people and events who both demonstrated moderation, and the lack thereof, really opened my eyes to the necessity of maintaining a balance view, as well as balanced behavior. If you’ve never been interested in it before, I highly recommend it.
Secondly, last year the Lord broke me of my addiction to tobacco. I could have never been involved with the youth with that chain binding me. Imagine teaching kids about the sufficiency of God’s power to help us overcome any struggle, and then excusing myself to go outside for a smoke. Ridiculously hypocritical! Thankfully God took that away from me, and tore down that barrier between myself and those I would teach.
Lastly, I needed to be in a place where I was comfortable with ‘leadership.’ That probably took the longest of anything I learned. Marsha sometimes likes to share the story of how she joined New Minas Baptist originally because she could hide in the back. She grew up in a very small church, with a maximum membership of perhaps forty people. Everyone knew when you weren’t at church, and were calling you the moment service was out to ask you what was wrong. My wife, who is an independent person by nature, despised that, so she joined a much larger congregation where she could fade into the faces. Marsha will tell you that, one day she was a veritable ‘nobody’ (and happy!) and then, the next day, everyone knew her name. She blames me for that. I’m pretty much a loudmouth to begin with, but when I converted, I had years of atheistic baggage dragging behind me that needed to be dealt with. I had tough questions! I had fallacious arguments! And each time I encountered a new truth from God, and was conformed to that truth, I felt like it was my personal responsibility to confirm the orthodoxy of ever single person I spoke to. That attitude really put me out there in the spotlight a little more that Marsha was used to. She’s grown to appreciate it, mind you.
Over the last couple of years, weird things have been happening. I was invited to go to a church leader’s conference, which I didn’t understand at all because… well… that’s for leaders! That’s not me. Then I was asked to come in one Saturday afternoon to be in a group filling out some surveys so that we could try and get a handle of the various gifts/talents of the key leaders in the church. There was that nasty ‘L’ word again! I am not a leader!!! After incidents like those kept on coming, I started to think that God was trying to tell me something. He’s placed me in pastoral situations recently that have challenged me immensely, but blessed me just as much. My Sunday-school class is one of the few that is growing – after starting out with a whopping three students, I’ve since had to move to a different room in order to have enough space for my current group. Just this past Sunday, at a church family supper, a woman was asking me how my class was going, how the students are enjoying it, etc. Unfortunately I had no idea who she was, and when I stumbled at her questions, she said, “You’re Pete, right?” Now, the first thing that came to mind to say was, “Yes. I am. But how on earth do YOU know that?!”
I realize now that I’ve somehow become a recognizable person in the church. I have no way of hiding, no way of simply fading into the faces, nor does Marsha. I have the option to love it, hate it, or simply accept it. I think I’m at the ‘acceptance’ phase at the moment. I can’t see that I’d ever ‘love’ it, but I most certainly won’t ‘hate’ it. I still don’t think that makes me a leader of any kind – everyone should be involved in ministry – but it does make me realize that God, my God, can make something good out of even the worst mire of filth. He is the potter. And what a potter he is.
So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him. (Jeremiah 18:3-4)
This whole meandering babble is really about the fact that, last night, I attended my first youth-group meeting, and it was an amazing experience. The kids were just talking about some of the things they did over the summer, and their stories were just such an amazing testimony to the fact that God is definitely at work in this world. He has not left us. He has not abandoned us. We sometimes think of the public school system as an evil place where God has no place. Many of these kids see it as a mission-field. Even Katelynn and Shelby bravely got up to speak about the effect that these Christian kids have had on their lives. It was just an awesome thing to see.
I was lying awake last night thinking, “Why did it take me so long?” The Solid Rock Youth ministry is so vibrant and incredibly edifying that I started to wonder why I hadn’t been involved earlier. I remember actually walking in on a SRY leadership training session three years ago, thinking it was an open-house. I didn’t stick around once I found out what was going on. Why not?
I was then reminded of where I was in my spiritual maturity three years ago. God had some maintenance to perform before he could put me on that track. Change a couple tires, an oil filter, maybe top off the gas tank… vroom-vroom! Let’s see where this baby’s gonna take us now!!!
