Hardly the Last Word

Before I post his text, I want to introduce you to Jim Clark.? He and I were students and for a spell roommates at Milligan College.? We were groomsmen in each other’s weddings.??? We kept going to Milligan’s guitar-and-drums Sunday night Vespers services long after our hip comrades wrote them off as puerile, and to Taco Bell after Vespers even when we were the only two Milliganite regulars.? Slim is a brother to me.? And I still, a decade after our graduation, call him Slim.

And importantly for this post and the next couple to follow, each of us has spent nigh unto a decade working with teens in churches, Slim as a youth minister and I as a volunteer.? We both believe in thinking hard about and doing everything we can to minister to the people in our congregations leaving the ever-shortening American childhood and entering the ever-lengthening American adolescence.? So naturally, Slim took some interest in my recent posts about my return to CIY at Atlanta’s Believe! conference. Not long after returning from a trip to Believe! with his own youth group (in Anderson, Indiana, if I remember right), Slim shot me an email responding to my reflections.

The text of that email (edited because Slim was never the English teacher of our duo) appears here.? Tomorrow I’ll try to write some responses to them, and Slim has said that, when time permits, he’ll likely respond back over at Jim’s Blog Space. ?And so on. ?So here goes the email:

Nate,

I’ve read your posts, and on some levels your thoughts are on target with the two criticisms that I see you leveling (i.e. 1. sensory overload and 2. a lack of quiet).? That said, I think that maybe your time in the halls of a college classroom have allowed you to forget how squirrelly a group of middle schoolers can be.? Then again, if you drove the van, you got a quick reminder.

I think a lot of what CIY does is try to grab their attention and hold it for long enough to share the message of the gospel, and I think they are trying to do it in a way that does a couple of things:
1. It ministers in a fresh way to kids who are Christians already (because don’t we all need a kick in the butt every once in a while when we get off track)
2. It opens the message up to those who have never heard it before.

In my group, for instance, two of my 18 were kids who had never been to church before.? They came because their friends said, ‘You’ll like this… it will be fun.’? Now, have they gotten saved?? Not yet… but who knows what seed has been planted in their hearts and minds?

On the other hand, I know for one of my students (and not one of those) that he finally understands baptism is a fresh way because of [stunt man] Brent’s 20 minutes in the tank and being pulled out by the Inventor.? He has studied the Scriptures– I know because I walked him through it– but he just didn’t get why it was important. But after seeing that, he gets it.? It is pretty sweet to think that 20 minutes underwater (breathing however he did) can help a kid connect the dots of baptism–I can’t hold my breath for 20 minutes.

I do think that CIY has to work hard to maintain some level of sensory input to maintain that opportunity.? Most of these kids are pretty inundated with lots coming at them.? They live in a Hannah-Montana-meets-YouTube, high-speed-internet-and-unlimited-texting world.? At some level, if we as youth ministers and CIY as an organization can’t speak that langauage, then a lot of them aren’t listening.? A couple of weeks back I went to the Dominican Republic (some more pictures coming on my blog… slowly as i don’t have internet at home…), but it was complicated because I don’t know Spanish, so I couldn’t communicate with many of the folks there regardless of how hard i tried.? How slow i went… and how much i wanted it.

Middle school ministry is about (sometimes) working really hard to learn the language.? At our weekend of Believe this past weekend, our speakers did encourage us to open our Bibles.? Many of my kids did bring their Bibles and did open them.? So that criticism may be a speaker-specific criticism rather than a CIY criticism.? But if your speaker was Kurt Johnston, whom i know pretty well… as i do hang with the Saddleback crowd… that’s one of their (Saddleback’s) deals… seeker sensitive… don’t embarrass someone by asking them to open to the book of Jeremiah… half of Millligan’s freshmen may not be able to do that.