#10         Your Board of Elders just voted to go to solar energy and your church is in Seattle.

#9           Your business person just printed yet another “personnel manual.”

#8           You define missions as “overseas.”

#7           You have “First” in your name but you stopped planting “Seconds” long ago.

#6           A high schooler comes to your worship service and needs you to explain all the song lyrics.

#5           Your Baby Boomer senior pastor is nicknamed “Kid.”

#4           Your leadership team has spent even one minute fighting over whether to serve Decaf or Regular.

#3           Regardless of what your vision statement says, you know the real motto of the church is “Keep People Happy.”

#2           Most of your congregation thinks “typo” when they see the word “facebook”

#1           Your interim pastor has qualified for a Sabbatical.

April 11, 2012: Brooke Harris, a 26-year-old English teacher Pontiac Academy for Excellence Middle School, was fired “after she supported students’ effort to plan a wear-a-hoodie-to-school day.”

 It was the line at the end of the Seattle Times (p A3) article that got my attention: “(Superintendant) Cassell said she couldn’t discuss personnel matters but she wanted students to focus on learning, not activism.”

In this post I am not going to engage in the Martin/Zimmerman case, or even the “personnel matter” of Ms. Harris’ firing. In response to this comment, I have only one question today:

 What, then, is the point of learning?

 In my work and study of thousands of teenagers the last decade and more, culminating in Hurt 2.0: Inside the world of today’s teenagers, one of the more sobering conclusions is that over the years our educational system has shifted from being about inclusive and honoring societal preparation into a data transmission machine. In 1900, 1% of high school aged kids went to what we now know as high school. By the 1930s, high school was mandatory in every state. During that brief period of time we rallied in defense of our kids, teaching them that they were all “gifted and talented,” and each one was a part of us.

For many years now education has morphed from being a community partnership between parents and the rest of us, with the purpose of helping our young become included members of adult society, into factories of “learning” information. This trend has been exponentially increasing, to the point now that the biggest battle over education is finding ways to produce data depositories capable of competing with other nations over facts, figures, spreadsheets and vocabulary. Our “best and brightest” are now so tightly defined that only a small percentage of our kids are offered the label “gifted and talented.”

 What about everybody else? What do we do with those whose “gifts” and “talents” cannot be measured by “data dump” standardized tests? How do they grow up? Where do they connect to the rest of us? What makes them matter?

The bigger issue, of course, and what grabbed my attention, was what do we expect of the data we throw at our kids? Or, to put it more starkly, what is the point of the learning enterprise? When we allow an educational philosophy that leaves our kids with only knowing data, and having no map to navigate or even respond to that information, we deny their human potential, and reduce each one to a being a captive of endless adaptation to the whim of others. Is this our goal? To fill kids with data and information without helping them to know how to connect life with what they’ve received? Is “activism” such a bad thing? Or can there be healthy and productive ways to teach all our kids that healthy and life-giving activism actually contributes to the betterment of community?

The endless cycle of idea and action,

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries

Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

- T.S. Eliot, Opening Stanza from Choruses, The Rock

Its raining “Isms”

Isms abound. They’re everywhere. According to the website, “Phrontistery” (Gk, a thinking place), there are hundreds of “isms” in the English language. Most of us have probably never heard of most of them, like pyrrhonism (total or radical skepticism), titanism (spirit of revolt or defiance against social conventions), or adamitism (nakedness for religious reasons; I think I would have called this Davidism, but that’s just me).

Often, if not usually, “isms” are defined as a doctrine, belief or practice, like modalism (belief in unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit) or intuitionism (belief that the perception of truth is by intuition). Sometimes those “isms” describe important historical doctrines of the Church and are good and helpful, like monotheism (belief in only one God). More often, however, they describe a doctrine or belief that is off – sometimes a little (bonism, the doctrine that the world is good but not perfect), sometimes a lot (dualism, doctrine that the universe is controlled by one good and one evil force).

What is common among “isms” is that each was hammered out over time by people. They didn’t pop up out of nowhere. There is a context that drove a new thought, a lengthy conversation that refined that idea, and finally a group that gathered together to protect and proclaim the “truth” of the doctrine or belief.

Because our world is filled with conflicting, screaming voices vying for our kids’s attention, a big part of our role as parents and adults in their lives is to help them to be able to discern between what God has revealed are His “isms” and the many counterfeits (by the way, often many came and come through the teaching in the church; that’s why we at ParenTeen and Project 51 are deeply committed to seminary – some of these “isms” are pretty subtle, and potent).

At Project 51, our prayer for parents and adults is that no matter what role we play in the lives of children and teenagers, we will take seriously to pass on the words of Paul to his “son in the faith,” Timothy: “Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Timothy 4:6)

I woke up to three articles that grabbed me by the throat and have not let go (besides the all-around tragedy in Florida; not only the horrifically preventable death of young Trayvon Martin,
but also the way the Florida “self-defense law” enabled George Zimmerman to change his life forever as well… plenty of tragedy to go around!).

The first, “Soul-Searching in small town over gay teenager’s suicide” (Seattle Times, A1, March 26, 2012), told the story of Rafael Morelos, an “openly gay” 14-year-old who hung himself a few hundred feet from home. The article focused on regular and at times brutal bullying and taunting that had defined Rafael’s late childhood and brief adolescence.

What words can describe this boy and his family’s plight? Senseless doesn’t come close, nor does tragic. “Rafael was the only openly gay kid in the school, his friends say, and that made him an easy target.”

The second I read a few minutes later, this time in the NY Times section, Arts, Briefly: “High School Drops ‘The Laramie Project’” (C3, March 26, 2012): “Amid concerns from parents, Notre Dame High School … has cancelled its production of “The Laramie Project,”Moises Kaufman’s play based on the 1998 murder of a gay college student in Wyoming… administrators received calls arguing that the play’s content, which depicts a gay man being beaten and left tied to a fence, was inappropriate for high school students, and the administrators concluded that the production had become too distracting.”

All of the third article I needed was the headline and first line, also in the NY Times: “’Hunger Games’ Ticket Sales Set Record” (C1, March 26, 2012). “’The Hunger Games’ hit the box-office
bull’s eye over the weekend, taking in a record $155 million in North America…”

Okay, let me see what the news told me this morning: An “openly gay” child killed himself this weekend because he couldn’t live with the unspeakable treatment he endured day in and day
out in his rural, “small town America” middle school, and a Catholic high school in New Jersey decided that to portray this same kind of violence that permeates our society, especially against the most vulnerable, is too “distracting” for the community to wrestle with. All the while the film that broke all records, with likely hundreds of kids from both of these schools in attendance, has as its central plot theme adolescent murder.

Is it possible we have a problem coming together to help our kids as they try to eventually participate in adult society?

POST #2

In my last post, I argued that missional communities will begin to reshape youth ministry in two ways over the coming decade.  The first way is squarely in the target of why ParenTeen is committed to seeing Project 51 succeed.

Missional Communities can restore young people to their proper place in the Church

My ecclesiology (theology of the Church) holds that children and teenagers are part of the Church AND that adults of all ages have a vital role to play in faith development in kids.  Great work by Chap Clark and Kara Powell at Fuller Youth Institute have shown that, tangibly, this has implications.  Youth ministry typically finds ONE adult to invest in every FIVE kids.  Many are realizing that needs to be flipped now:  We need FIVE adults for every ONE kid. 

That’s Nice… Is it Possible?

You’ve probably heard about finding five adults before and might even think it’s a good idea.  But let’s admit something: Youth ministry, as it exists now, can’t put five adults in every kids’ life (welcome push back!).  Don’t get me wrong:  I LOVE finding volunteer leaders who pursue young people and model Jesus for them.  I pray that method will never go away.  BUT, on its own, that strategy is not ushering kids into the heart of the community of the Church that includes the breadth of adults kids need.

Biblical Roots: The Oikos

So how could the church tangibly achieve more investment from adults in kids?  There are Scriptural clues for us in how “family” and the church was understood and practiced.  Did you know there is NO word in the Scripture for the “nuclear family?”  The Scriptural word for family is oikos meaning “household” and includes mom, dad, kids, grandparents, other family, friends, and even slaves.  It was probably a group of up to 70 people who depended on each other to survive and functioned as the church together.  Kids were part of the oikos – having five adults who invested them was not a problem.  In a healthy oikos, kids had far more adults modeling faith in Jesus for them than five.  The concept is actually quite similar to what is now being called “missional community.”  Instead of pursuing just "small groups", could the Church today help people find extended family?

Hmmm… So What?

What if children in your church were swept into “extended families” at a young age?  What if, by the time our kids hit middle school, they were already a part of mini-communities of other kids and adults who were living out the gospel together?  What would happen if our kids not only heard the story of the Scripture, they experienced and saw Jesus at work through the community?  What if, instead of teaching classes and running programs, our churches and its staffs were dedicated to equipping  communities of people that are leading an effort to bless the world around them?  This gets to the concrete structure of how your church is organized – will it teach people how to be the Church with each other? 

I Can’t Resist

By the way, creating extended family will become all the more critical in the coming years culturally: A study released in the last two weeks show more than half of today’s children are born outside of marriage.  Over half.  Mark my words: those single parent homes WILL desperately seek and need “extended family” – the kind of community that forward-thinking churches and youth ministries will strategically pursue in missional communities.

Game On

I’m amazed every week at the number and kind of churches that are starting to adopt the thinking around oikos/missional communities.  This isn’t just a small church strategy.  Some of the biggest mega-churches in the country are tired of endless “mission studies” with little to no accompanying action.  I think we are in the first five percent of this movement with much more to come.  The learning curve (including my own) on how to pursue missional communities and kids’ role in them is steep, but more are hopping aboard daily because it is concrete, theologically in the center of the target and attainable for courageous churches and leaders.