The Gap

I spent the weekend hanging out with around forty kids aged 11-13. Some people wouldn't do that if you promised them money. While I don't generally spend my weekends with them, I do usually find myself purposely surrounded by them on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings and various other times when I get the chance. This past weekend just happened to be the Middle School retreat and one of my favorites of the year. I've been involved with these weekends and kids like this for eleven years. The difference between those other years and this one was the fact that for the first time since I started serving in Student Ministry I went on the retreat without the other guys that usually attend as chaperones.

Life happens, things change, and through various circumstances I became the youngest male chaperone not leading worship. I've spent the last several years comfortably in the middle of that age range, not the oldest but not the youngest, usually separated by a year or two in both margins. It was an odd experience. Most of the time I still find it troubling that I'm an adult. Given the choice I'm going to defer to an older person when things come up, here's the problem with that, I'm almost twenty-nine, and I also happen to have served in the student ministry for Middle School at Bayside for longer than most of the other folks, even those older than myself, so I tend to know how things work down to the tiniest detail.

Alas, this post isn't about length of service or how strange it was not having my normal cadre of fellows there to laugh with, occasionally mess with the kids, or just share in what God was doing. Instead it's about the lack of males my age involved in Student Ministry. When I was in Middle School and High School I can remember their being a pretty big group of guys that were there to hang out with us at Church and invest in us. Most of them were just young college students but a few of them were older. They could have been doing anything else but they chose to spend time with teenagers. I don't know many people that want to do that.

I stood in front of our students just two weeks ago and told them that I used to despise having to be in a room with kids their age. It wasn't an exaggeration. Most of my high school years I would skip church on Wednesday nights when I knew beforehand the middle school students would be with us. The girls were too giggly, the boys too loud and obnoxious, now I willingly and gladly submit myself to groups of girls that giggle and boys that can't sit still or stay silent for more than three or four minutes. I am proof that where God wants you to serve isn't always where you think it should be, and it isn't always where you will want to be. Ultimately He changed my heart in a huge way for the generations below me.

I've told them many times they are growing up in a world far different than it was when I was their age. Their faith sets them farther apart from the norm than mine did at thirteen. Now Christianity is synonymous with bigotry and to disagree with the world means they are branded as narrow-minded. Sharing Jesus with their friends or their school comes with an inherent risk of trouble from various organizations that makes me marvel at their bravery, they've got far more courage than I did in middle school.

But, as times change, I get older and a little wiser, I realize the importance of my sitting in a room full of smelly (I had my first run in with their particular odor this weekend which is far stranger than you can imagine), loud, easily distracted, trying teenagers. Many of them come from homes where they have little to no male influence. Suicide is one of the top killers of teenagers (this quite frankly chills me to the bone) There are boys that have no idea how to be a young man because it's never been modeled for them, much less any inkling of what it means to be a teenage boy that follows Jesus. I'm not perfect, and I constantly try and make sure these students don't make the same mistakes I did, especially when it comes to letting fear keep them from being obedient to God, still if I'm suppose to make disciples I don't have to go halfway around the world, I've got a group of ten boys that need to be taught, poured into, and loved just as much as anyone else, maybe a little more so.

I had plenty of young men pour into me as I grew up in the Student Ministry and then older men as I joined the College Ministry, but I found myself wondering just where those young men were now. Has it become too hard to deal with teenagers? Is an hour a week that hard to find? Millennial's are all about making change but I can assure you that anyone would be hard pressed to find a way to more positively change the future than to invest in the generations after us.

More than anything else I suppose this is a call to young men to step up and lead. Take a chance. Make a difference. We can't drop the ball on this one, too much is at stake.