The Glass House
Reason 5: Youth Ministry
You cannot please God if you do not know Him.
Family and secret devotions are not going on. That's the entire
problem in a nutshell. Stop calling Dr. Phil. Stop whining, stop
running in circles, beating your chest wondering why, oh why, is
my kid out of control. You don't pray with them, You don't have
a time of sharing with them. They don't see you pray. They don't
see you keep a regular personal quiet time of devotion.
Everybody's got a soccer game. Everybody's rushing to the mall.
You've parked your kid in front of a TV for fifteen years and
now you're wondering why she's cussing you out and letting
unemployed, clueless boys get over on her. You did this.
I've never known a pastor, well, at least not a black pastor,
who regularly checks up on his people. I don't mean a smile and
a handshake as they exit the building, I mean calling, working
the phone list, with some
regularity. How are things going. How's she doing. Are you
keeping a regular, appointed time to worship and share together?
Never known a pastor to pick one, two families a week to come over to
the house and do this with them, to model what this Christian
family experience should look
like. This worship time doesn't need to be a big deal. Fifteen,
twenty minutes and we're done. But, for Christian parents, it
should be the law.
In 47 years, I've known only one sister who was serious about
family devotions. She got her kids up at 5:30 in the morning,
indifferent to their protests, so she could pray over them
before leaving for work. She did this every day. They thought
she was a nut, and she probably was. But that was her
conviction. And it was training that stuck.
This “church optional” nonsense is the number two reason our
youth know nothing of God. Mommy opens the cellar door Sunday
morning and hollers downstairs, “Johnny—you goin’ to church?”
This is, typically, the extent and quality of Mommy’s family
devotions. The parent who knows God, who loves God, usually asks
the same question, but in a different way. More like, “Johnny,
how you goin’ to church today?” Johnny can get dressed
and go wearing his clothes or he can be dragged out by his ear
in his underwear. Either way, he’s going to church.
Kids don’t get to choose. They’re kids. Their little kid
brains—centers for logic and reason—are still developing. Stop
negotiating with these people. They are CHILDREN. You are the
ADULT. You have to be the parent. You have to make the tough
choices for them, to risk losing their "friendship." There is
no “choice.” Get your butt in the car.
The number one reason, however, is the parent unwilling to
confront their own child for fear of upsetting them. Because
they don’t want to argue, don’t want to fight. Raising kids,
teens most especially, is all about struggle. It’s supposed to
be. If your kids are rebelling against you—that’s part of life.
That has to happen. At some point your kid will begin to
define himself—usually at your expense. By turning away from
your values, from your example. Usually, this is a phase, and
once they get past this annoying, hormone-driven nonsense, they
usually emerge with their values intact.
Trouble is, many parents are simply not teaching their kids any
values. They are abandoning their kids to a TV set. All day
long, the kid sees murder, cussing, drinking, sex. While you’re
off catching vapors at the church house. Your son, your
daughter. Man, they can’t wait for you to put on your big hat
and grab your keys. No sooner are you out the driveway, your
fifteen-year old daughter’s got some twenty-something or even
thirty-something man laying up next to her rolling a joint. Some
of you are laughing now. Some of you are getting angry at me,
now. But these are the facts.
Ministry is top-down: the rebellious godlessness of youth is a
direct reflection of what is being preached in the home—nothing.
The nothing being preached in the home is a direct and accurate
measure of the quality of the pastor's leadership.
Pastors: do your members actually have family devotion with
their spouses and children? That's the tough one—I'd guess
99.999% of our families do not, in fact, have a daily or even
weekly time of family worship. We stand up every month and read
that lie—that useless and doctrinally questionable Baptist
church covenant, and promise to keep “family and secret
devotions.” Most of us do neither, and our lives reflect that.
This is why the divorce rate is so high. We try to do things on
our own. We exclude God from our choices, our thinking, our
family process. This is why our children know nothing of God and
do not fear God: (1) our failure to share Christ with them,
usually because we ourselves do not know Christ and do not
worship Him and do not live a life that honors Him and our kids
know it, and, (2) we keep paying that cable or satellite bill,
literally financing the garbage that is destroying our kids
right in front of our eyes. And you cry and cry and pull your
hair out and toss and turn and call Oprah. “I can’t control
her!” This is a battle you lost long ago.
Quick—what color are my eyes? Who does this glorify?
You can’t wait until your kid is 15 and cussing you out
to decide to man up. It’s too late: you blew it. Parents: your kids
are watching you. All the time. They may not say it, may never
call you on it, but your hypocrisy is like a billboard sign to
them. Your weakness undermines your claim to know Christ. Human
weakness is not something easily processed by young minds, which
we have trained, from birth, to think in moral absolutes—right
and wrong. We’ve lied to them since birth, with all those lies
about Santa Claus and good people going to heaven and all of
that. Lies. And we do this because this is what our parents did
to us and what their parents did to them: lied. Santa Claus,
lie. Tooth Fairy, lie.
Then what happens? She turns thirteen and begins to develop what
Grandma used to call “a mind of her own.” She begins watching
and listening ever more carefully. And she realizes you’ve lied
to her. Most little kids can’t even fathom a mother lying to
them. But the day will come when your child will realize you’ve
been lying to them all along—about Santa or whatever. And, once
your child realizes you have lied to them—about anything—they
realize you might be lying to them now. Your word no longer has
instant and unqualified credibility with them. Now they want
proof. Smoking is bad for me? Prove it. Sex before marriage is
wrong? Prove it.
The trust is gone. You’ve squandered it on nonsense that means
nothing. And you don’t even know why you did that—frittered away
your child’s trust on Tooth Fairy nonsense and lies about her
“uncles” spending the night in your bed. You did this. You lost
them. Your weakness, your wretched character and your
selfishness—unwilling to sacrifice your needs for your child—did
this. The TV as babysitter and all that lying.
And this is largely because the parents themselves don’t know
God, don’t have a thriving, productive relationship with Hm.
Because they think church membership is what saves you. Because
they have lousy pastors who haven’t bothered, even once, to call
and ask how they are and break bread with them and get in their
face about their spiritual walk and that of their children. But
this pastor’s name is on the side of the bus, and these same
moron parents give him a bag full of cash at his anniversary.
Where’s the accountability? Where is the point where we step
back and realize our leaders have grossly failed us?
The worst threat to youth ministry is the mommies.
The over-protective mommies who use their children as emotional
crutches, fearing to lose their companionship and, in some
cases, their child's approval. Many of these women have serious
emotional issues, having been hurt and/or abandoned by some man
or men in their lives. Wounded and emotionally needy, they throw
themselves into mothering and find reward only in the emotional
connection they have with their child. But this is a connection
which must, by the laws of nature, be strained and even severed
as the child matures, discovering his or her own
identity—usually at the expense of the parental bond.
Many mommies, frustrated by increasing emotional distance
between themselves and their child, switch tactics, becoming the
child's buddy or roommate, attempting to win their friendship or
appease the kid in an effort to keep peace and/or maintain the
closeness Mommy has been using as her own emotional crutch for
years. Mommies often take out their frustration on the other
people in the child's life, notably teachers and ministers:
anyone trying to instill values in their child. A youth minister
becomes a major target because his efforts to instill spiritual
values in mommy's child can often be received by mommy as an
indictment of her parenting. The child comes home, ticked off
because she has to read three chapters of the bible, and Mommy
calls the pastor and gives him an earful about what a jerk his
youth minister is.
Which is where the pastor blows it. See, he takes that phone
call. Nine out of ten times, a histrionic mommy on your phone is
taking out her frustrations with her child on you. She is
scapegoating the other authority figures in her child's life
because she feels guilt about no longer having influence over
her own child, or she is attempting to champion the child—no
matter how obviously wrong the child is—in an attempt to either
keep peace at home or win the child's favor. Most Mommies are so
unaware they're even doing this, that any authority
figure—particularly any male authority figure—will inherit
Mommy's wrath simply for pointing out how incredibly wrongheaded
Mommy is for objecting to her child's being asked to read the
bible.
Thus, the second biggest threat to effective youth ministry is
often the pastor himself. Weak pastors have weak youth
ministries. Weak youth ministries do not effectively seed the
next generation of believers, which leads to a shrinking
congregation.
Pastors: women despise weakness in men. Women will always test
boundaries and jump in your face and try you. You may think
you're being conciliatory and keeping the peace, but you are
displaying an inconsistent testimony to these people, being bold
and decisive in the pulpit while being a jellyfish whenever they
confront you.
Pastors, you are doing the very same thing to the mommies that
the mommies are doing to their children. The mommies are trying
to be their kids' buddy, when their kids desperately need their
mother to be their mother. The mommies need their pastor to be
their pastor, not their buddy. Not tip-toeing around and
trying to keep peace, but be a man, Stand on biblical principal,
get her to open the bible, to read it for herself, to understand
how Christians resolve conflict (Matthew 18).
But many pastors fold, cave into the hysterical mommies, and
then go and spank their youth ministers for simply doing their
job. Little by little, the youth pastor's authority is eroded
and undermined to the point where he becomes little more than a
babysitter. He can instill no discipline because the kids know
he has no power. His threats are empty, he can't even make them
stay after and sweep up the place because Mommy is on her way
and she can't be bothered. Worse, the kids know—I mean, get this
in your spirit, pastors—the kids know you don't have the youth pastor's back. They can smell it. They've got Mommy jumping
hoops because Mommy is in Buddy Mode trying to appease them.
They know Mommy is going to bypass the Youth Pastor and go
directly to the pastor who will cave in to Mommy and smack down
the youth pastor. So the Youth Pastor comes to accept the utter
meaninglessness of his work in your church. The program gets
watered down and watered down and watered down to the point
where it's just a joke. Kids stop coming, the youth pastor
eventually moves on to another church, the pews get emptier.
Your church stops growing
Next: Reason Six: Non-Relevance
Christopher J. Priest
13 July 2008
editor@praisenet.org
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