One Last Time

Let me try and explain our model of doing youth this year. Some still think it was primarily about building bunk beds for poor kids. That was never the primary purpose. Building beds was just a common, sustained, concrete, challenging object lesson for discipleship and spiritual formation.

Spiritual formation requires a balance of knowing, being and doing. Leave something out and you will not be spiritually fit. Let's admit it, traditional youth activities, either event or relational focused, do not do a good job of providing youth with a balance of experience.

Traditional youth activities are relatively easy because we have so much experience with them. Doing something different in an attempt to provide a youth experience that has a balance of head, heart, and hands is hard. It's hard because there is no blueprints or models out there to follow. It is hard because many adults do not have a lot of experience with a balanced spiritual life themselves, so you have the issue of getting good leaders or training them.

We experimented with doing something different in youth this year. We got away with it only because there was no church leadership to say we couldn't. We tried to provide experiences that involved the head, heart, and hands. We praticed. Intentional, well directed practice. We practiced droping into the heart and seeing what was there and what was influencing our wills. We practiced trying to sense what the right thing to do was and then actually doing it. We intentionally put ourselves in a position where the needy would come across our path. We practiced seeing them like God saw them. We asked God what we should do and practiced listening for his leading. We practiced doing what we thought he was leading us to do. It was one big object lesson of the discipleship journey. Not in the abstract, but lived out in real life. In trying to pull this off, we came head on to concrete issues of discipleship. How many? More than we could adequately address.

We succeeded in some areas and failed in many others. Some kids stayed and others left.

One last time: It was not primarily about building beds. It was about trying to provide a balance of knowing, being, and doing at a program level. I may be naive. Maybe this can't be done at the program level. Maybe in the long run it will not be any more effective than traditional youth activities. But I think it will.