This year I became a mom to two Ethiopian toddlers. Prior to this year, I would’ve read this article without hesitating to applaud Mark Yaconelli’s initiations with his sons. The youth pastor in me knows how invaluable experiences like that are in the holistic development of young men. It was a bold, intentional, relationally centered, loving and thoughtful holistic experience at poignant times in his sons’ lives.
Yet, as a new mama, I found myself deeply feeling the anxiety, questioning and fear Mark and Jill experienced as their two sons walked two different and intense initiations. I imagined my three-year-old son going through an experience like this in his adolescence. My mama-bear instincts made me want to protect and shield my son from any danger, any pain.
I had a hard time simply reconciling what was right and what was responsible. What’s the difference between responsibility and releasing? And what are the differences in the youth ministry context and parenting?
Safety, the Spirit and Suffering
A lump in my throat grew as I read the Spirit-filled words of his Native American friend; “You wanted a safe passage for your son. You tried to control all the variables. You wanted a symbolic act, but the Spirit intervened. A young man’s passage is always an awakening to suffering, learning to face and hold suffering. It’s about the parents’ suffering as well—the parents learning to let go and trust their son, trust the larger community and trust God.”
Isn’t this the movement of discipleship and surrender for every follower of Jesus Christ? We are presented opportunities like initiation for our children and students to encounter a wild and unsafe God, but I wonder how we might inoculate them with symbolic, safe acts instead of boldly presenting them to the consuming fire. As a pastor and a parent, I regularly go back to C.S. Lewis’ brilliant description of Aslan as God: “Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” Can we trust in that kind of God?
Our Church
We create annual opportunities for rite-of-passage experiences for our transitioning eighth graders and seniors from the old into a new beginning. Honestly, we control a lot of the experience. It’s safe. Permission slips are signed. Clear boundaries are set in place. There’s little risk involved because it’s calculated. Perhaps we would do our students a better service by offering them to God like Abraham did Isaac because our children our never our own. They are God’s. They’ve always been his.
Perhaps what may serve our parents and students better in our ministry is not to offer them a packaged program for an initiation but to offer them guiding thoughts and questions that would allow every parent to customize an experience for their growing child to encounter the living God. What if this customized experience would become the norm in our church culture and parents actually felt empowered and equipped by the church to create experiences like this in partnership with the church? This is the kind of youth ministry I want to help nurture and lead.
With these customized experiences directed by parents, it also allows us to consider the individual personalities, weaknesses, sin bents, opportunities for growth and gifts that will help usher our adolescents into this new beginning of adulthood.
Wait and Trust
These are not words we readily embrace in our American culture. Maybe what I loved most about Mark’s initiations with his sons and their band of brothers was Mark’s sensitivity to what the Spirit was doing in each of his son’s lives. It was different because his sons were different. But in each experience he listened to the voice of the Spirit and obeyed: “Something deep within told me this was part of it. This was the Spirit, allowing us to feel the fear and pain of letting go, of trusting our son, of trusting God, of knowing that Joseph is growing up and will enter many situations we can’t control or manage.” It was in this trust that Joseph knew “that all of you were waiting.” Had Mark and the band of brothers intervened, Joseph would not have risen victorious in this life-changing event.
May God graciously help us as parents and pastors to surrender, wait, trust and radically offer our kids back to God to wholly experience him. Amen.
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