So I have the awesome blessing to
have lunch with my students (middle school or high school) each week if I choose. One of my core beliefs about ministry, and
frankly being a Christian, is wherever. Wherever
people are who are disconnected from God are is where I need to be and in this
case it my students and they “happen” to eat lunch with other students who are
disconnected from God. So why then would
this practice be founded upon. Ok so
eating lunch WITH then isn’t…but going to where people are is!
Youth ministry
is almost more about keeping up with what’s going on than anything else: schedules, concerts, birthday parties,
ballgames, special events, etc. One of
the BIGGEST misconceptions about who I am and what I do is that its only about
fun and games. If I’m spending time with
a student and a group of students….I HAVE ULTERIOR MOTIVES! My motive is, surprise
surprise, to love them as I love myself.
I can’t do that if I'm not where they are and, surprise surprise, they can’t
get to where I am (most are under 16-18…. hellur). Yet the general way most churches do ministry
is, “meet us at this place, at this time, on this day, looking this way,
and do it this way, then we will show
you how much we love you. I'm no theologian or Biblical historian but I'm
almost certain Jesus didn’t minster that way.
Just ask the slutty prostitute, thieving tax collector, cheating wife,
naked “crazy” man, stinking dead man, and many more sick, blind, deaf, and
generally sinful people Jesus spent time with.
[btw that list would have included you too]
We single
out certain sins as if they're worse than others, as long as nobody singles out
ours, and essentially say to people to “get right with God” without ever being Jesus
to them. If Jesus went from heaven to
earth, to the cross, to the grave, back to the earth, then back to heaven (btw
He’s coming back) so that I may
reconnect (get saved) with God…why do we make hard for people to know Jesus. Well, it may be in fact some of “us” don’t know
Jesus to begin with OR we have forgotten what He did to make salvation convenient
to us sinners. Discipleship is supposed
to be hard for the believer, getting saved isn’t.
My life
in youth ministry I have noticed we fail in making the Gospel (the extent to
which God loves EACH and EVERY person) convenient and accessible while succeed
in making it inconvenient somehow hidden.
This is backwards. The Gospel is already inconvenient enough to those
still seeking it, as it forces one to examine their own life with an eternal
perspective and forces them to choose while trying to weigh eternal consequences. We (youth ministers, leaders, pastors…CHRISTIANS)
shouldn’t be making it any harder than it already is. I challenge you to inconvenience yourself for
the sake of someone else’s’ eternal destination…after all, someone (Jesus) did
for you.
