What My Dad And I Have Been Arguing About

I have a special relationship with my dad. He is one of my favorite conversation partners and we both have become masters at throwing zingers at each other. Conversations is the polite term for what my mom would call arguments.

Lately we have been having a recurring conversation.

My dad serves as the district manager for the American Red Cross’s efforts in Placer County. Placer county is home to some of the biggest and wealthiest churches in the Sacramento area. We are talking big ones. Ones with more parking spaces that strip malls. Ones who can drop $400,000 redecorating their youth ministry center. And that is the source of our conversation.

I come from the perspective that if a church has succeeded in attracting huge crowds of teenagers to youth programs it is time, not for celebration, but for asking some hard questions.

Questions like: Yes, they had 400 kids at their day camp, but did they come for positive mentoring with caring adults, or for the highly advertised chocolate water slide (no, I am not making that up). Or questions like: Is it good for kids to be ushered into their own room, far from their families for “church”, when all research indicated their parents play the largest role in their faith development?

My dad tends to acknowledge the merit of the questions. Then he hits me with this one: Are you sure you aren’t just jealous.
Ouch.

The truth is, I think I am jealous. Who doesn’t want to be the center of all that attention from teenagers? Who doesn’t understand feeling so passionate about something – say, building faith in teenagers – that you are willing to try anything to realize it, even using a chocolate water slide? I think if I had the budget for a chocolate water slide, I might find myself finding a way to argue myself into renting it.

And this is why I need these conversations with my dad. He allows me to make my arguments, and even acknowledges their merits. But he then he forces me to deal with my own reality, the thin space of life where my idealism and neediness connect to from the substance of my life. By helping me see my own failure to live up to my ideals, he helps me see with more compassion and respond with more respect to those whose ideals are different than my own. I think they end up making me easier to live with.

Time for Steps

"One must not only preach a sermon with his voice. He must preach it with his life." Youth ministries are really familiar with these famous words of Martin Luther King, Jr. We like to use them to motivate our kids to live a big life of faith, one that includes risk, sacrifice and, ultimately, growth. I think as youth pastors, the daily tasks and expectations of professional youth ministry often leave us with very little time to preach sermons with something other than words. It makes us feel a little guilty. So, naturally, we hope our students will live louder than we do. Thus the King quotation.

Until recently, however, I have been ignorant of the context King's admonition. Taylor Branch points out in "Pillar of Fire" that King delivered this message to a collection of ministers, rabbis and priests at a conference on Race and Religion. Immediately after this conference, King would launch the Birmingham campaign, a campaign that would lead to days of solitary confinement for King, and the stunning visual of children being hauled to jail and swept down the street by water hoses. This was a dangerous moment.

King had spent a great deal of time calling on clergy to summon their moral courage to face down segregation. He had become world famous for his oratory, for his words. And less than 8 years after the successes of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the movement was stymied, lunch counters were still segregated and the religious institutions of the nation were, by and large, still very fond of talking, but only talking.

King's famous words were less a directive to the assembled listeners, as it was an attempt to convict himself of the need to take the next, painful, uncertain steps. He was reminding himself, the great preacher of words, that the time had come to become a preacher of steps. He was reminding himself that if he was going to survive the inner turmoil that racked his inner life, he would have to go to Birmingham, whether anyone followed or not.

I like using the quote the other way. I like using the quote to remind kids they need to sacrifice and live more deeply than the expectations of my job seem to allow.

But I know I need to absorb the quote as King did: As a calling to transform the great words and ideas that inform my faith and my understanding of what it means to truly live into steps - halting, uncertain, doubt-filled steps.

Will I? That is the question that drives this blog and informs my anxiety and my dreams.

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