GraceBlog

THE “DEFINING PROCESS”

    It is a spiritual leader's special privilege to work with young people on their way to making a decision to embrace Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord.  It is a “defining moment” in their lives.  Every young person should be offered that opportunity of a moment.  But no moment is so instantaneous that it has no process.  And no process is so gradual that it lacks a moment.  The truth of the matter is, confessing faith in Christ has a “defining process” to it.  I often sort through my own experience to get this truth to sink in.

    Before I embraced Jesus…there were people who had been hugging on Him long before (is it too shallow to speak of Christian commitment and trust as, "hugging on Jesus?").   Long before I came along, Billy and Evelyn, Pop and Gram Baskin, Aunt Thelma, Mr. Barnett the fifth-grade boys Sunday School teacher, Dave Ferry (who actually assigned “homework” in a high school small group), John and Eleanor Nickel retired missionaries to Nigeria, Wes Roberts, youth director, and a host of unnamed others whose faces I see and remember they said something that helped me along the way to my "defining moment."  These were saints-in-process who helped me along in my process to faith, trust, and commitment.

    The Apostles’ Creed which we recite so many Sundays like a favorite hymn, was a song being sung by the saints long before my voice joined the chorus.  And before that, a fellowship of believers had been singing the confession “Jesus is Lord, Christ is Risen!” two millennia before I awakened to self-consciousness, faith, and a momentous personal decision.

    That’s why we keep baptism and discipleship in the closest contact.  That was where Jesus put it in his great commission of Matthew 28. And that discipleship is a process with many features: the memorizing of Scripture, recalling the order of the books of the Bible, and recitation of the Creed.  It can include weeks and months of study with spiritual leaders and models.  But the larger setting is this: a relational-mentoring-spiritual-intellectual process in which the entire “communion of saints” is effective through the work of the Holy Spirit.  God uses the ordinary “defining community” to invite its children and youth—indeed everyone—to a moment of response to the gracious gift of God in Jesus Christ.  Defining moment?  Yes!  But before that, a defining community, a defining process.

                  --Larry

MEET ME IN THE AIR...

   In the 60's the hang out for students at John Glenn High School in Norwalk, California was Taco Joe’s. I graduated from John Glenn thirty-some-odd years ago, but I hear the students still gather there and sometimes there are class mini-reunions at Taco Joe’s.  If you went to “Glenn” and wanted to connect with students, the “where” was Taco Joe’s.

   Today the “where” is in the “air.”  The “where” is anywhere and everywhere.  Kids are not connecting at Taco Joe’s any more.  They meet by cell phone in the air.  Then, like a herd, they’re off somewhere. I sometimes hear the arrangements in the making: “…Peking at seven,” or “We’ll be at Matt’s, c’mon over!”  “The game’s at six not seven!?  Where are you? Can you pick me up?”  Cell phones all over town light up and sing out.  Kids are meeting in the air.

   What does it mean for ministry?  It means that ministry with our youth is intensely and spontaneously interpersonal— so much more spontaneous than in those Taco Joe’s days.  We’ve always known this, but now technology has intensified the interpersonality of life.  That’s not what we thought would happen.

   Remember our angst about being reduced to a “number”?  Pop singer Johnny Rivers lamented in a familiar line, “They’re giving you a number and takin ‘way your name.”  Not so.  I have four sons with cell phones. I don’t know any of their numbers. I punch in a name; the cell phone connects the number. Numbers have been reduced to names.  Technology has intensified the interpersonality of life.

   Ministry is intensely interpersonal.  It’s word becoming flesh (i.e. real) all the time and anywhere.  Of course it’s only a potential enhancement of community; you have to make it work.  One of the things I try to do each year is get to some of the nearby campuses where our youth have gone off to college. Ten years ago it was impossibly hard to do this.  You mailed invitations, but you could not be sure letters were received; kids didn’t write back or return phone calls--no RSVPs.  No one was ever in a dorm room to answer a phone.  But now we meet in the air.  It's so easy.  I once surprised one of our college students with a cell phone call; he was on his way to class at Ole Miss.  I shocked another at  UAB in a biology lab.  I interrupted my own son Drew in Tuscaloosa (“Dad,” he whispered with a snap, “I can’t talk now I’m in Spanish!”)  Maybe there’s a downside to cell phone technology.  But I see it as a means for ministry—to stay close, be in touch.  Meet me in the air.  Are you "in the air"?  I’m up there at 256-627-1625.  We can make plans to do lunch.

                            --Larry