Raising Radicals
I have just returned from speaking to the student body at Columbia International University. My topic was “God made you for greatness.” When you talk to a large group like that, you see that young people are very different from even a generation ago. Young people aren’t tuning in to talking heads like me in the same way they used to. R.E.M.’s hit song “Losing My Religion” (video of the year in ’91) might have meant something personal to Michael Stipe, but for many young people it was an anthem describing their attitude to faith as their parents practiced it.
This poses an interesting challenge for the ministry that I run. We take young people to other countries, expose them to poverty and sometimes to danger, and help them grow. We’ve become excellent at this and take thousands every year. But, what young people want and what their parents want often look different.
Recently, two fathers of solid participants told us that their daughters reported excessive bad language and some secretive drinking on their team. The fathers were disappointed in our program, and I had to ask myself, “Where did this come from and what does it mean?” I asked my own twenty-something daughters where this comes from, and they said, “Our generation sees that their parents’ way of doing religion is broken. They don’t want to turn out that way. Being authentic is very important to people our age. The cussing, drinking, and tattoos are small ways of rebelling. We may not know exactly where we’re going, but we know where we don’t want to go.”
In my twenty years of discipling young people, I’ve never seen anything like this trend. How will we respond? With stricter rules and programs?
Here’s where many parents miss the boat: discipling is a process that usually is attended by pain and discomfort – something that parents work hard to protect their children from all their lives. Parents seem blind to the fact that their kids will never get to greatness without diving headlong into uncomfortable, stressful, and ambiguous situations. Therefore, many parents are at odds with discipling ministries – like your youth ministry.
Those of us who are interested in raising up young world-changers want to respect parents and their investment, but if we are going to have a shot at discipling their kids as Jesus did, we need for parents to respect us and empower us. When the distressed phone calls to mom and dad back at the homestead go out, many parents struggle with the angst of letting go – they’ve had the steering wheel so long that they want to keep on backseat driving.
Some parents call or write me to ask detailed questions about what’s going on with their kid on the mission field. Many want to get a regular phone call update from them – something we discourage as it keeps young people stuck and unable to grow. Those parents have elastic apron strings that sometimes stretch as far as Africa. Dealing with them is exhausting. Sometimes I just want to refuse to take any young person whose parents can’t prove that they really get this point. It’s a fool’s errand to fight them. I want to tell them, “Hey, you did such a great job with your kiddo, why don’t we send them back home to you so you can have another whirl at it?”
The whole thing becomes really complicated when the logistics on the mission field get fouled up, and the overanxious parent complain that we aren’t doing our job. At times like that, I just want to quit this ministry and go disciple African youth instead. Hey, in Swaziland they’re lucky to even have parents!
Raising radicals is dangerous work. The process must be uncomfortable and even downright painful if progress will happen. When you’re doing what Jesus did, you see the fruit of parents who have been trying to do discipleship on the cheap. As a discipler, your job is to help parents to graciously let go and watch their children follow Christ as He leads them out of security into a danger that will grow their dependence on God.