Spiritual Heroes

Easter Sunday is in the books! We saw many new faces as well as familiar ones. We were able to open two nursery rooms again, and Hildreth Hall was full of children.  NUMC is experiencing growth and momentum, and as Matt mentioned in his post last week, it’s all happening at an exciting speed. So, what now? It’s time for the church to embrace the young families that have been coming in and engage with the next generation. There are toddlers, preschoolers, school-agers, middle schoolers, and high schoolers that are looking for spiritual heroes right here at NUMC. As you get to know me, and my husband Chris, you will learn very quickly that our passion is for the next generation. You may not have children, or your kids may be grown and out of the house, but this post is for you as much as it is for those currently parenting little ones.

One of my favorite verses is from the book of Psalms, 78:4 “We will not hide these truths from our children; we will tell the next generation about the glorious deeds of the Lord, about his power and mighty wonders.” We must get the word out!

We know that parents play a vital and critical role in guiding, directing, and raising their own children, but I believe this call to tell the next generation extends to other people’s kids too. We have all been called to love God and love people… and that includes children. They are not JUST kids, they’re our future and the church’s future. Our responsibility to them as a body of believers, as Christ’s followers, is to understand and embrace how important their role is in the body of Christ.

What our kids need are spiritual Heroes. So, what’s a spiritual Hero you ask?

A spiritual hero is someone who comes into your life and leaves a lasting impression that points back to Christ before it points back to themselves.

I think we can all look back on our childhood and have someone come to mind that we looked up to and admired. A coach, a relative, a teacher, a pastor- someone who made a genuine impact on you. So how do we now, as adults, become spiritual heroes for the next generation?

I know some of you right now might be thinking “I am not called to kid’s ministry, teaching, or coaching…kids are not my calling or my gifting.” That is OK! We know from 1 Corinthians 12 that the body of Christ is made up of many different parts that are all important. You may not be actively engaged with a group of kids so to speak, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you’ve got at least one kid (or more), that God has put in your sphere of influence. That could be your grandkids, your nieces/nephews, your friend’s kid, or your neighbor’s kid! They’re out there! They are here too, right in our church waiting for us to step up and lead the way.

The first step to becoming a spiritual hero is to live out your faith. Pastor Reggie Joyner said, “The best way for a kid to know God, is to know someone who knows God.” Let your own kids and those around you see your excitement and love for the things of God. It’s one thing to tell a child how they should act and live, it’s impactful and memorable when they see you do it.

The next step is to invest some time. Be there and show up. If a teen from youth has a softball game, get there! If a single mom in your neighborhood has a child that needs to get to VBS, bring them. Ask kids how they are and actually listen! Pastor Joyner also said, “The reason you build a history with kids is so you can earn the right to influence their future.” I’ve only been here a very short time, but we have met some amazing kids at NUMC. All with their own talents, giftings, and unique callings. Every one of them has a story worth listening to.   

Last, and certainly most important, pray for the next generation AND for their parents. In today’s day and age, it is harder than ever to be a kid with what they’re facing. It’s also unbelievably challenging to parent them through it. As a body of Christ followers, we must all stand strong together and be a voice for those kids in our church and our communities. We need to pray for kids and their parents to find Jesus in a radical way. The next generation needs us to rise and be adults worth looking up to, and ones that are going to point them to Jesus.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is not just an attempt to try and get you to volunteer for nursery, kids, or youth ministry. Although, I will most certainly grab you an application if you’re feeling that heart tug. I’d also like to help break down any walls you may have put up about joining us in ministry. There is no age limit, or “cool quota” one must meet to make a difference in a child’s life. All you need is a desire to listen, show up, and share Jesus. No experience is needed, we will train and equip you! But even more importantly, I want you to finish reading this with a burden to pray for and be there for a kid who needs it; whoever that may be that God is putting on your heart. Every one of us has a child in our sphere of influence.

In fact, I’d love for you to pray with me today.

Lord, we thank You that You have called us to love God and love people, and we say a special prayer of thanks for all the children and young families that have come through our doors.

Lord, we thank You for all the people that prayed for and invested in us and helped shape and mold us into who we are today.

We ask that You help us to rise to the call of sharing Your word, Your goodness, and Your mighty works with the next generation. Let it consume us Lord, where we can’t keep that excitement in. Let it pour out to those around us, especially the children.

We pray for divine appointments with those kids that need a touch from You, reassurance, and encouragement. Holy Spirit, help us to be open and sensitive to those promptings.

We pray for our own kids. Ones that are on their way, ones that we are currently raising, and even the ones that are now adults and on their own. We especially pray for the prodigals, Lord. Place spiritual heroes in their path to point them to You when it matters most.

Speak to us today, Lord, about those kids you need us to minister to specifically.
We thank You and praise You for all our current NUMC kids and parents You’ve placed in our lives. Help us to stay focused on You as we all work on carrying out Your mission.

In Jesus’ name,

Amen.

If You Build It

Every once in a while a year comes along in the life of a church that is a landmark in its history. If the past couple of weeks are any indication, I feel like 2023 could very well be one of those landmark years. We invited a new staff member to oversee our children’s ministry while I am now moving to full-time youth/student ministry, and we are beginning to break ground on a moving project that will have a tremendous impact on how we do ministry for children and youth at Navarre United Methodist.

And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them. But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them. (Mark 10:13-16)

I’m often reminded at times with how Jesus spoke to the disciples concerning children being brought to him to be blessed here in Mark. The reaction I see from the disciples can be one that churches fall into even today. But Jesus stresses the importance that not only are they welcomed and have room in the Kingdom, they’re example of child-like faith is also the standard we should have as adults. Jesus also calls his disciples to “not hinder them.” The efforts we are putting forth this year are to make sure we are not hindering the growth of our children and youth. Each group has its own special needs in order to make that work. Our young people need an environment that is conducive to learn at their level and capabilities; as well as a space that is safe and designed for their spiritual growth! This is what many prospective families are looking for when they visit a church.

I have seen our church band together and put on amazing VBS weeks and raise funds for youth camps. However, I want to challenge us to not just save that energy for events or “once a year” activities. Let’s keep that energy for discipleship and intentional relationship building on a weekly basis! We do not need to wait to have a certain number of kids each week to begin investing in their spiritual growth. It reminds me of a line from one of my favorite nostalgic movies Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come.” We are about to make an incredible investment in the spiritual lives of children, youth, and their families. There are so many families struggling with a plethora of issues in our world today, and if the church cannot provide that sense of safety, education, love, and peace in the lives of our community then what hope is there?

This means that we all may need to be more flexible and more patient with one another over the next few months as we make these transitions. We might have to put up with a little extra glitter on the floor, louder voices in the hallways, see a little bit of messiness. But all of these are just signs of children growing, learning, and having a little bit of fun in the Lord’s name. This is a joyful and wonderful noise. And my prayer is (as I hope it will be yours as well) that this year will be the beginning of many great things to come for our church.

Grace and Peace.

Holy Week

Holy Week is the week between Palm Sunday and Easter, containing three of the biggest milestones for Christians: the triumphal entry (Palm Sunday), the day Jesus died (Good Friday), and the day Jesus rose from the dead (Easter). But somehow, nearly 2,000 years ago, in a span of just four days, the people of Jerusalem went from celebrating Jesus to demanding His death. What happened?

The people of Jerusalem had a unique opportunity that most of us have wished for at some point in our lives: to see Jesus in action, to sit and talk with Him. But that's also where the problem lay. They witnessed Jesus performing miracles and heard the depth of His wisdom that surpassed human understanding. They saw God in the flesh, and that made them come face to face with the reality that they are NOT God. Imagine if Jesus were to visit our town. At first, we'd all be thrilled, I mean it's Jesus! But how long before doctors would start to resent the lack of patients? My guess is that it wouldn't be long before the clinics shut down and they had to look for new jobs. The more Jesus would do, the less important we would become to the rest of the world. Sporting events wouldn't be quite as much fun when you realize that Jesus did indeed hear what you just said to the referees. When you are constantly around perfection, you are reminded of how imperfect you are... constantly.

Jesus sounds great when He's in the next town and you hear about the wonderful things He's doing. But it's harder to feel the same way when He starts challenging your own life. As Bonhoeffer said, "In the gospels, the very first step a man must take is an act that radically affects his whole existence." Easy Christianity dies when we spend too much time with Jesus. When presented with the option of picking up our own cross or putting Jesus on the cross, the people of Jerusalem made the same decision that most of us would have made. Next Sunday, as we celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus, let's take a moment to reflect: have we allowed Him to radically affect our whole existence? Or would we have crucified Jesus too?

The Return Department

Setting – A clerk mans the desk of the Return Department

Customer:  Hi, is it too early to return these New Year’s resolutions?

Clerk: Were they unrealistic or just soul-crushingly awful?

Customer:  Does it matter?

Clerk:  Of course not!  Next in line…

Customer 2: Is it possible to return this negative self-talk?

Clerk:  Did you get it from here?

Customer 2: No, I’m pretty sure I picked it up on social media.

Clerk - as she feels around the bags: Let’s see… “I should not eat carbs” and… “I don’t deserve dessert.”

Customer 2: How’d you know?

Clerk: A lot of people are returning these.  They’re very unpopular.   Next…

Customer 3: Can I return this love-hate relationship with cookies?

Clerk: Do you want to return them both, or just the hate?

Customer 3: I can return just the hate?

Clerk: Yeah!

Customer 3: I love that!  I hate the hate.

Clerk:  Hate the hate!

If you are a TV watcher, like me, you will recognize these interactions as the scripts from the newest series of Weight Watchers commercials.  I love them, all!  My first job after college, was working the desk at the Wilbro Customer Service counter in Dothan, Alabama, where I heard every reason imaginable for wanting to return a recent purchase.  Wilbro policy was simple. If the customer wants a refund or exchange, just give it to them.  No hassles at all.  We were as cheerful and as helpful as the clerk in these commercials.

Still, customers always seemed to feel the need to offer a good reason for the return that would not reflect poorly on their own choices.  In all the time I worked there, not one customer ever said to me, “I made a mistake buying this” or “I was impulsive and have now decided I don’t need it” or “I really can’t afford this.”  Many customers walked up to counter, loins fully girded, as if they were expecting a confrontation.  You could tell some of them had been rehearsing their story in the car all the way to the store and practicing for the inevitable escalation of the conflict should we give them any trouble about it.  Maybe they had been to other stores where the policy wasn’t so forgiving. Maybe they just carried a little sense of shame to the counter with their return item.  Whatever the reason, it was not necessary, and I always took great pleasure in their stunned looks as we cheerfully took the items they didn’t want and peacefully handed over their refunds – the very same looks of relief and surprise we see from the customers in these commercials.

Of course, it all reminds me of church.  Oh, come on, you knew it was coming eventually! These commercials tap into a basic need in people to acknowledge and recover from their mistakes and poor choices AND the need for a place where the “associates” understand this happens to everyone AND where there is a process and a policy that can make things right again. We have all of that at church, or at least we should.  For all the good we do in our community meeting financial and physical needs, I think our Return Department is the greatest service we can possibly offer anyone.

Isaiah understood this, very well. He tells us in Isaiah 61:3 that the Lord appointed him to seek out those who mourn and trade them beauty for their ashes, oil of joy for their mourning, and a garment of praise for their spirit of heaviness.

What better mission for us to be on during this season of Lent – a time of year we set aside to acknowledge and even to mourn over our sin?  I would expect this should be the busiest time of year for our Return Department, which I should also tell you, is equipped to handle much more than just our sin.  Our associates understand there many other returns you need to make.  Our grief, our betrayals, our depression and anxiety, our finances, our illnesses, our concern for our children, our jobs, and many other things can produce artifacts in our lives we need to return.

People in our community need to know our Return Department is open 24/7 and the boss is always on duty.  (If you haven’t already guessed, its Jesus.) His mission and passion is to take whatever we bring off our hands and give us something better in exchange.  I heard in a great song once He is available “anywhere we choose to bow.”  No need for elaborate stories or fancy excuses.  We can leave it all with Him with no judgement.  And if you prefer to visit a brick-and-mortar location, our pastor has arranged for the altar of our sanctuary to be open every day during Lent. If you would like for someone to pray with you, we can arrange that, as well.       

If that were something we wanted to advertise to our church and our community, our commercial might go something like this:

Setting - Jesus manning the desk of the Return Department;

Prodigal walking up to the desk:  I would like to return this reckless living.

Jesus: Not really working out for you, huh?

Prodigal: No, not really.  There were a lot of attractive things out there I thought would make me happy, but they didn’t.

Jesus: Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of that this Millennium.  Of course, I’ll take back the reckless living.  What would you like in exchange for it.

Prodigal: I really just want to go back to my father’s house and work as one of his servants.

Jesus:  Well, I think we can do better than that but let me make a quick call.

Jesus hanging up the phone:  Yes, go ahead and find your way home, Son.  Your father is waiting for you on the road.  He has ordered his servants to bring you his best robe, a ring for your finger, and new shoes for your feet.  Later today, he will kill the fatted calf and throw a great party in your honor and declare to everyone, “My son was dead, but is alive again.  He was lost and is found!”   

Prodigal: OMG! Thank you, so much!

Jesus: You are very welcome!  Next in line…

Our boss is always able “to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.”

Joy for your mourning.

New lives for old.

Beauty for ashes.

You are not going to find a better deal anywhere!

Grace and peace, my friends.

Kiss

I like to think of myself as a smart person. However, I’m also aware that 65% of people think they are smarter than the average person, which is a statistical impossibility, so there’s this whole other side of me that thinks I’m just an idiot. As I said, I “like” to think I’m a smart person, because it hurts less than thinking I’m an imposter.

There’s a term that I recently learned called the “Dunning-Kruger Effect”, which basically describes why some people think they know everything when they really have no idea what’s going on. If you’ve ever been around a pre-teen, you know exactly what I’m talking about. After a 30 second YouTube video they suddenly know everything there is to know about driving, quantum physics, or investing. There’s a fun little graph that goes alongside the Dunning-Kruger effect. My favorite part isn’t the peak of Mount Stupid (even though I laugh every time I see it) but rather the Valley of Despair. As weird as that may sound, it just resonates with me because I’ve been there so many times. It’s that moment where you just want to throw your hands up and quit because it gets too hard.

As you learn more, you suddenly realize that there is so much more that you don’t know. As our circle of knowledge increases, so does the edge of that circle that touches what we don’t know. And at a certain point, our circle becomes so large that we forget that some core principles were hard fought for and learned.

Karl Barth is probably the most influential theologian of the 20th century. I had the “privilege” of reading seven of his Church of Dogmatics for one of my college courses. Literally thousands of pages explaining God, the Word of God, creation, and reconciliation. His footnotes alone take up thousands of pages. But he was able to sum up everything about his theology in one simple sentence that was turned into a children’s song. “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

When it comes to reading Barth, I still feel like I’m swelling in the valley of despair. But he did something incredible when he was able to boil it all down to one sentence. In a way, he reminds of when Jesus was asked to sum up all the law and the prophets and he replied with “Love the lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength” and “Love your neighbor as yourself”. Jesus took hundreds of commands, thousands of years of his people’s history, and communicated it’s essence in two easy to understand sentences.

I look at these examples and think “Anyone could have come up with that”, but that’s exactly what makes them so genius. Anyone can understand what they mean. They have taken some of the most complex things and made them easily accessible for everyone. I don’t know if it’s more art or skill to be able to do this, but I know that I want to be able to do that with everything. While on a youth white water rafting trip, our guide asked our kids “What is the Gospel”. After several of them tried extremely hard to give super complicated and accurate answers, one of the youngest girls on the trip spoke up and said “Isn’t it like John 3:16? For God so loved the world that he gave his son?”

There were few moments that made me prouder as a youth pastor than that one. She got it. She was able to take all of the stuff that we tend to overcomplicate it, process it, and come up with the simple answer. When someone asks you why you believe in Jesus, you don’t have to give them a complicated answer. In fact, if you do, you’ll probably end up scaring them away or intimidating them. Instead, keep it simple. Maybe you share a story about when God did something incredible in your life, but keep it to only 3 or 4 sentences. Before God acted my life was like this. God did this. Now my life has changed and is like this. If they want more information, they will certainly ask. Maybe you don’t feel like you have a compelling story, so you just share one or two sentences about why you believe. If you get into a whole apologetics argument they’ll tune you out.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking we know everything, but the truth is that the more we learn, the more we will realize how much we don’t know. And so we strive for deeper understanding and somewhere along the line we forget that not everyone has the same background we have. We have to be able to take the knowledge we have gained and be communicate it to others in a way that they can understand, even if they’re in the valley of despair. It’s often the simplest answers that have the greatest impact.