Think, Thank, Thunk
3/14/2008
Some six months after my church’s leaders had to fire our senior high pastor for his inappropriate behavior, I was sitting in a small conference room at the church, going over résumés with the other members of our search committee. We were trying to find just the right person who could step into a heartbreaking, open-wound environment and bring hope, healing, and—most important—trust.
To the kids’ credit, they’d mostly hung together through the confusion and anger that’d been detonated by this terrible betrayal. I was sitting across the table from one of the group’s anchors—a senior named John who was headed to college in a couple of months. Soon after the betrayal was dragged into the light, parents, teenagers, and church leaders had gathered to grieve, ask questions, and vent. As the tension boiled, John stood up, looked around, and said with gravity, “Remember that we follow Jesus, not [name].”
I respected John for tossing out that bolt of truth. It fueled my curiosity about him. So one day, as we were waiting for the last person on the committee to arrive, I asked John what was most important to him in this search. He leaned toward me and said in a low, gravelly voice, “There are some of us who’ve wanted something deeper for a long time. With [name], we were never asked to think very much.”
Something leapt in my soul as John spoke. I leaned toward him and said, sort of self-consciously: “John, if you’re serious about that, I want to invite you and your friends to come to this 10-week study I’m leading this summer—it’s called In Pursuit of Jesus. We’ve tried to create a challenging environment that propels you to think and give and wrestle. Will you come?” John looked at me like I’d just double-dared him—and maybe I had. With a steely look, he promised he’d invite his friends if I emailed him the information about the study.
And John (and a couple of his friends) did show up for the study, wedging it in between a summer missions trip to Africa, family vacations, a job, and preparing for college. In a way, this study is my homage to C.S. Lewis. I’ve always been deeply impacted by something I read in Lewis’ autobiography, Surprised by Joy (Harcourt). A turning point in Lewis’ life came when he stepped off a train in Great Bookham, Surrey, and met William T. Kirkpatrick (nicknamed “Kirk” or the “Great Knock”), the man his father had engaged as a tutor and the chief architect of Lewis’ razor intellect.
Nervous about meeting the “tall, very shabbily dressed, lean as a rake, and immensely muscular” man, Lewis attempted some awkward conversation: “I said I was surprised at the ‘scenery’ of Surrey; it was much ‘wilder’ than I had expected. ‘Stop!’ shouted Kirk with a suddenness that made me jump. ‘What do you mean by wildness and what ground had you for not expecting it?’ ”
Quickly, Lewis understood that polite-but-imprecise conversation would have no currency with the Great Knock. This old man who dressed “like a gardener” and conversed like a weed whacker literally trained Lewis to think. Like taking piano lessons from Mozart, Lewis learned how to make beautiful music with his mind.
And aren’t we sorely in need of some great mind-music in youth ministry? Arthur Farnsley with the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion recently told a USA Today reporter, “So much of American religion today is therapeutic in approach, focused on things you want to fix in your life.” And in a Time magazine article, Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow calls today’s teens spiritual “tinkerers.”
The antidote to the mind malaise that has gripped not only youth ministry but also the church is a commitment to ferocious thinking. I remember the story youth pastor Chanon Ross told in an article for The Christian Century. One of his youth group kids was disgusted by a street preacher screaming fire-and-brimstone—she didn’t like people who were “too religious.” Ross asked her what that meant and persisted through her half-answers until she proclaimed that the screamer was “sort of offensive.” Ross replied, “Right, sort of offensive. Like when Jesus preached his first sermon and made everyone so mad they tried to kill him.” That response threw the girl into “a storm of mental dissonance—the hard thinking that precedes theological insight.”
If Lewis were still with us, he’d be raising a pint to the “storm of mental dissonance” that “hard thinking” produces. Let’s make a little weather...
To the kids’ credit, they’d mostly hung together through the confusion and anger that’d been detonated by this terrible betrayal. I was sitting across the table from one of the group’s anchors—a senior named John who was headed to college in a couple of months. Soon after the betrayal was dragged into the light, parents, teenagers, and church leaders had gathered to grieve, ask questions, and vent. As the tension boiled, John stood up, looked around, and said with gravity, “Remember that we follow Jesus, not [name].”
I respected John for tossing out that bolt of truth. It fueled my curiosity about him. So one day, as we were waiting for the last person on the committee to arrive, I asked John what was most important to him in this search. He leaned toward me and said in a low, gravelly voice, “There are some of us who’ve wanted something deeper for a long time. With [name], we were never asked to think very much.”
Something leapt in my soul as John spoke. I leaned toward him and said, sort of self-consciously: “John, if you’re serious about that, I want to invite you and your friends to come to this 10-week study I’m leading this summer—it’s called In Pursuit of Jesus. We’ve tried to create a challenging environment that propels you to think and give and wrestle. Will you come?” John looked at me like I’d just double-dared him—and maybe I had. With a steely look, he promised he’d invite his friends if I emailed him the information about the study.
And John (and a couple of his friends) did show up for the study, wedging it in between a summer missions trip to Africa, family vacations, a job, and preparing for college. In a way, this study is my homage to C.S. Lewis. I’ve always been deeply impacted by something I read in Lewis’ autobiography, Surprised by Joy (Harcourt). A turning point in Lewis’ life came when he stepped off a train in Great Bookham, Surrey, and met William T. Kirkpatrick (nicknamed “Kirk” or the “Great Knock”), the man his father had engaged as a tutor and the chief architect of Lewis’ razor intellect.
Nervous about meeting the “tall, very shabbily dressed, lean as a rake, and immensely muscular” man, Lewis attempted some awkward conversation: “I said I was surprised at the ‘scenery’ of Surrey; it was much ‘wilder’ than I had expected. ‘Stop!’ shouted Kirk with a suddenness that made me jump. ‘What do you mean by wildness and what ground had you for not expecting it?’ ”
Quickly, Lewis understood that polite-but-imprecise conversation would have no currency with the Great Knock. This old man who dressed “like a gardener” and conversed like a weed whacker literally trained Lewis to think. Like taking piano lessons from Mozart, Lewis learned how to make beautiful music with his mind.
And aren’t we sorely in need of some great mind-music in youth ministry? Arthur Farnsley with the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion recently told a USA Today reporter, “So much of American religion today is therapeutic in approach, focused on things you want to fix in your life.” And in a Time magazine article, Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow calls today’s teens spiritual “tinkerers.”
The antidote to the mind malaise that has gripped not only youth ministry but also the church is a commitment to ferocious thinking. I remember the story youth pastor Chanon Ross told in an article for The Christian Century. One of his youth group kids was disgusted by a street preacher screaming fire-and-brimstone—she didn’t like people who were “too religious.” Ross asked her what that meant and persisted through her half-answers until she proclaimed that the screamer was “sort of offensive.” Ross replied, “Right, sort of offensive. Like when Jesus preached his first sermon and made everyone so mad they tried to kill him.” That response threw the girl into “a storm of mental dissonance—the hard thinking that precedes theological insight.”
If Lewis were still with us, he’d be raising a pint to the “storm of mental dissonance” that “hard thinking” produces. Let’s make a little weather...
Youth Ministry “Don'ts”
Youth Ministry “Don'ts”
Youth Ministry “Don'ts”