BGU Journal - 1/20/09

We watched Barack Obama's inauguration to start the day.  After that, Ron Ruthruff, one of the directors of New Horizon ministries that we visited last week, lectured for about an hour.  This was one of the highlights of this class for me because I am so interested in outreach to youth at risk in Pittsburgh.

One of the big passions of Ron's life has been to advocate for troubled adolescents at the government and policy level.  His big thing is that these are just kids, even though most policies impacting them are formed for adults.  Adolescents are stuck in the middle, between childhood and adulthood, rural and urban, and between being kids of color and being white.  Because of the way cities are set up, kids all over the country (including rural areas) are listening to hip hop music and playing violent video games.  For the first time, young people are living in a world where the future is more fascinating to them than the past.  This comes as a result of modern culture.   Young people are more cross-cultural than adults, and they often know more that we do!  

We need to provide culturally appropriate services for children, biologically, psychologically, socially, developmentally, and physically.  Also, ministry models for youth at risk (and he would argue that all youth are at risk) need to leave room for failure.  Young people have been asked to "grow up" even though they are not really developmentally prepared for adulthood.  If young people are obsessed with the future, they know more than we do, and they are obsessed with individuality, then the questions stands:  How do we set up mentoring relationships for these kids that takes these issues into consideration?

Young black men in America are six to eight times more likely to be shot and killed than young white men.  One in three African American young men in America are either incarcerated, on probation, or have a criminal record even though only 10% of Americans are black men.  The question is, what are the major societal processes at work that lead to black men being disproportionately incarcerated or killed?  Many leaders are disappointed that black rappers or athletes don't stand up more often to make a positive impact in this culture, but many of them are young men themselves (not capable of understanding the appropriate roles that they were designed to play in society).

In America, one in four girls are sexually abused as children.  One in eight boys are sexually abused as children (this number is mostly lower because boys are more afraid to talk about this than girls).  Sexual abuse creates trauma for young people, which is more or less traumatic depending on how young they were when they were abused.  Kids are also traumatized by other events they see in their lives, and they are only able to become functional adults if they have "anchors" in their lives.  Anchors are the support network that help to guide adolescents through difficult years and traumatic experiences.  Anchors are relatives, schools, churches, programs, mentors, etc.  When children don't have enough anchors in their lives, they become troubled adults.    The worst ages for trauma are 2, 12, and 18.

Cognitively, the older a person is, the better they cope.  Children become extremely desensitized to violence and sexuality if they experience it commonly at a young age.  Morally, children begin to develop discrepancies between those who have power and those who don't if they are subjected to trauma at a young age.  This often leads to rebellion against authority in adolescents who have experienced trauma.  Adults who work with troubled adolescents need to teach them the answers to questions like, "What is life, who's in charge, who do I form alliances with, and who are life's protagonists and antagonists?"  Adolescents need help navigating through all of this.  Children develop identities from right and what is.  Adolescents develop identities from what's wrong and what is not.  This is a gateway to rebellion.

Adolescents form identity based on two ideas:  personal fable (nobody understands me or the world I live in like me) and imaginary audience (the entire world is watching every move I make).  Again, young people can navigate through all kinds of troubles when they are given the right kind of anchors.  This is why mentoring is so crucial!

In the late morning several people lectured about the missional and practicing approaches to church.  How can churches be incarnational and missional?  Our role as a church is to announce, demonstrate, and embody the good news of Jesus Christ.  Many churches seem to have different callings within the body of Christ.  Relationships are the key, and in many cases, people feel like they need to belong before they believe.  Churches love to create bounded sets, where people know who is in and who is out.  For instance, a church with a bounded set won't allow people to smoke, or drink, or dress a certain way.  In contrast, in churches with a centered set everybody is welcome and considered to be moving toward a relationship with Jesus.

When people belong to a faith community before they believe, it creates a mess.  What do you do with a gay couple, people who are living together, or Muslims who are seeking?  Some pastors prefer to have the mess of the centered set because the mess of the bounded set is even more difficult to navigate through.  In the bounded set, people take their struggles and problems underground so that nobody talks about them and they are eventually manifested in a major way at a later date (such as a pastor secretly having an extramarital affair for a number of years).

Pastors can decide to grow a church "big" rather than grow a "big" church.  This is done through connections, conversations, and collaborations.  Followers of Jesus serve in three realms:  personal, local, and global.  The goal for Christians is spiritual transformation into Christ's likeness for the sake of the world.  Our spiritual disciplines empower us to go out into the world with what God gives us.  If you depend on the offering plate to grow missional dreams, it may not happen.  Churches should also seek partnership.

Many pastors are more concerned about the view of insiders that outsiders.  This is wrong!  People rate their pastors just like movies or restaurants.  This is wrong!  In many churches, over 80% of the resources go toward creating a show, or program, that draws people to the church.  This is wrong!  When people get bored with a church, they just leave and go to another competing church with a better show.  This is wrong!

Churches are becoming a business, or professional religion.  They are developing beliefism, which is the worship of right beliefs (also known as our beliefs).  In America, we have generated a culture of professional Christians.  There is really not much of a foundation of professional ministry in the Bible, it's just something we've come up with.  The truth business leads to the morality business.

Paradigms in society are very powerful.  Christians should learn about which paradigms they are operating in, and they should also seek to understand uncertainty and randomness (something our modern version of Christianity seems to be against).  As a solution, people in the church should start talking with each other once again.  It is alright for Christians to engage people who do not believe as we do.  We can search for common ground upon which to base our relationships.  Churches should be practicing churches:  personally, locally, and globally.  We can practice personally by noticing people, praying for people, talking to people, and listening to people.  People won't understand local or global perspectives until they understand personal perspectives.

In the afternoon we toured a Four Square church that has several different multicultural churches operating within it, including English, Iranian, Spanish, and Korean.  It was an interesting glimpse into a model of diversity in the Kingdom of God that is not usually implemented in homogenous churches around the country. We also discovered how this church is partnering with their local community through the police department, nonprofit organizations, and city hall.  BGU values diversity and partnerships, and today I was able to see examples of these ideals in progress.

As I was experiencing these ideas today, two things seemed applicable to me:  LAMP, and the externally focused church movement at North Way.  LAMP is critical because we are working as mentors to so many African American and at risk young people in the city of Pittsburgh.  The externally focused church initiative is critical because it provides a framework for mobilizing the body of Christ in a strategic manner in areas all over Pittsburgh and around the world.  Christians are called by God to engage culture, and influence the world.

Also, one of the questions that interests me is, "How can North Way become a more diverse community?"  I would like to be able to do this intentionally, perhaps through future multisite efforts in Pittsburgh.  Even if we are unable to utilize our multisite strategies to become a more diverse congregation, would it be possible for us to use our new space for other international communities to hold services in our facilities at different times of the day on Saturday or Sunday?