Here is what I mean by this: follow the metaphor.
You get out of high school and take a JOB at a local factory, or a grocery store, or restaurant. The first day on the JOB, your boss beckons with a finger as he walks towards a large empty floor. He hands you a broom and says: “You got to start somewhere.” After the first hour, you are a master. After the first month, you are desperate to volunteer for any other JOB you can find.
We’ve all been there. I started my working life hauling trash for 5 bucks an hour and all I could eat. I started there for the same reason everybody else starts the world of work–using muscle and brawn; I didn’t have skills much past the very basic:Â a pulse body temperature… and if I was really good, I showed up… AWAKE.
This is how we acquired employable ability. This is how we started working. We pushed a broom and built up our employable skills until we got to the big stuff and earned a bunch of money so we could live in a half a million dollar home, buy a luxury car, own a trophy wife, have 3.45 kids, and raise a dog.
We have decided that starting a JOB without skills is the same as GIFTING in the Body of Christ.
Why do we think this? Simple: Uber Church Leaders need free work, so they need a carrot to go with the stick of “Submit to Authority.” It isn’t all that hard to sell folks on the idea that “ministry” starts with lowly service and manufacture a hierarchy of important church occupations. Big Spiritual Stuff is preaching in the big room to the big people, under the lights to 5,000 filled seats. Everything else is less important.
The importance scale is usually a reflection of the Uber Dog’s sensibilities. Whatever those sensibilities are specifically, the presumption remains that you’ve got to start at the bottom, and push a broom to get to the big spiritual stuff.
Here is the tragedy of Broom-Pushing Theology. This operative assumption catastrophically pairs people with JOBS for which they are unGIFTED to perform. It requires people with longstanding professional experience to waste time doing menial tasks that somehow validate their calling. It requires people who have limited or no passion to persist in activities that do not add to their abilities or (even worse) quashes their natural gifting and divine callings for fear of outshining someone else who is comparatively incompetent. Or it puts people in positions they really have NO business doing because we have defined a hierarchy of BIG SPIRITUAL STUFF.
As long as the Uber Preacher has a vested interest in dangling the carrot of “Promotion” to the big leagues in exchange for free work, I suspect that the failure of Broom-Pushing Theology will persist. Or the theology will persist until we all see the true measure of the disaster.
So let’s take a good look at the disaster. Let’s talk about Youth Ministry: the standard bottom ministry position for most aspiring professional ministers. This is where the majority of Senior Pastors start: working in the local youth group. It seems like a logical starting place: just out of Bible College, close in age, still remember what high school was like, and hip to the music and culture of the coming generation.
The freshly-minted bible school graduate has his eye on the stage and the Klieg lights, and a Senior Pastor slot. That slot is already taken unless the college grad thinks he should start his own church and then the Klieg lights are a few year off. The Senior Pastor says that is where he should start: Gotta push the metaphorical spiritual broom for a while. Show your self approved, and wait on tables, and all of that. So by all means: turn ’em loose on the kids.
Working with kids is a blast. Hanging around 13 to 18-year-olds is like being around a perpetual party, full of all the trivially important anxiety of adolescents. They live tossed and blown by their passions and their frailties: full of life and wide-eyed wonder, full of fear and terrible insecurities.
Oh, the bliss of adolescent drama!
Maybe, as a youth pastor you get paid. But if not, you get to cool concerts, and the theme parks, and camping trips, and the pizza parties. And you get to preach to a captivated audience. Well… maybe a better word is captive: the kids are there because mom or dad sent them there. So IF the kids actually listen, that is a bonus.
If they aren’t listening, >shrug< we aren’t going to do this forever. We are pushing a broom. We are showing ourselves approved. One day we will be before the adoring masses of adults who will appreciate our wisdom. Until then, let’s plan another outing to the theme park. We gotta do stuff the kids like after all.
So, you gain experience with the kids and then you move on to the adults.
Hummm…
Really?
Our Fruity Assumption
By definition, we are sending the LEAST qualified person to teach adolescents. That is a comforting thought. And it is sooo backasswards. Why do we put professional inexperience in the path of those who have the fewest tools deal with incompetence? Said another way…why do we define working with kids the place to start? Said another way…why do we put the least qualified where they can do the most damage?
Adults have a lifetime of experience to deal with bad ideas, bad instruction, and misplaced or ineffective ministry.
(Well, they should, but an overview of modern Christianity puts that assertion to the test.)
Ehemmm…
Kids don’t know a bad idea from a good idea. And that assumes that they have ANY idea, but yet we use them as our testing ground, all because we think someone should push a broom for a while. Everybody starts at the bottom. And our kids are the bottom. That is how we all got a JOB.
We are all under the disastrous, unstated assumption that talking to the grownups in the big room under the lights is BIG IMPORTANT SPIRITUAL STUFF. People get PROMOTED to talk to the significant people.
It is like making it to the Big Show:
“Now batting for Covenant Church USA, after 10 years of hard work in the kiddie leagues, with an Earned Soul Average of 221, Pastor Wanna B. Force.”
The crowd goes wild… Raaayyyyy!  Ohhhh…. Ahhh…
Cynical?
Not, really.
Reality.
The Fruit of Our Fruitiness (AKA the cause and effect of our Outcome)
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
After raising children in church, parents send them to go to the University with the highest hopes for sound economic futures. The kids are good kids. They have spent their entire young lives listening to God’s word, mostly shielded from bad stuff, fully armed with naïveté to combat the rigor of the big world. They were raised in the “Fear and the Admonition of the Lord,” AKA the endless pizza party youth group: they are sent out as sheep among wolves, harmless as doves and as wise as serpents…ooppsss… no, that isn’t right…as harmless as doves and as wise as doves.
The kids spend a semester at the University. They come back from “Secular” education with their Christian fire dwindling and their vocabulary filled with subtle doubts and vague suspicions. Parents are distressed but not truly frightened. Kids have to sprout their wings after all.
Two academic years pass and the formerly dedicated youth group attendees will not be going to church… anywhere. Parents will start paying regular visits to prayer meetings to win their children back to the Lord. And by year four, the now young adults will have mastered all the academic objections to Christianity that dismantles youth group Christianity like a wet piñata.
Parents will be beside themselves. Their lovely bible-quoting tyke is now quoting Kant and Marx, justifying Cultural Revolution with the insidious ideology of Altruism and spouting frightening agnostic ideologies. (Most Parents will have virtually no ability to talk to their kids on that level–most parents don’t even know what I just said.)
A rift enters the family. The kids think mom and dad are out-of-touch, bible thumping, irrational, stupid zealots: they show them no respect. The Parents think their kids are going to Hell and preach fire and brimstone in a desperate attempt to get their kids back on the straight and narrow.
Unfortunately, there is no punch line to this joke. This happens so often that we assume it is normal. The attrition rate for youth group dropout is so vast that those young men and women who navigate all of their Major University higher education and remain believers is the EXCEPTION.
This is UNCONSCIONABLE. It all stems from our broom-pushing theology.
Christians (and Liberals) ignore the elements of reality with utter disdain. What is the substance of our practice? Conduct a quick survey of Youth group activity for two months. What is the content of “ministry?”
- A trip to a theme park for another QP doll?
- A pizza party with pool tables and Xbox?
- Christian Rock concerts?
- An annual trip to a Christian version of Woodstock?
- Some alternative hip dance thing so they don’t have to go to local clubs?
What has your church done to become an adolescent social center?
Don’t answer that. I have too much to say about the customer social service Church; I really don’t want to get started on that.
Anyway…
What does the youth pastor preach? Did the youth pastor prepare them to deal with the rigor of a College Professors systematically dismantling the intellectual foundation of their faith? When the youth pastor does preach, (when he’s not at the party) his top 5 are something like: “Get serious?” “Be sold out.” “Are you Radical for Christ?” “Don’t listen to Rock Music!” And if all else fails, “Rededicate your life.”
If you have spent any more than about 10 minutes in a youth rally, you’ve heard these sermons preached and preached and preached and preached. The content of the sermon is rather stock. Seriousness, “sold-outness”–is that a word?–radicalness, et al. are always defined by some outward display of adolescent zealotry. Beyond being stunningly vacant sermons, they are really nothing more than heavy-handed head trips for young minds.
What is being “Serious” about Jesus? What is “Sold out-ness”? What is “Radical for Christ”? What body of action do we want to see? What is the ruler of our authentication? What is the outcome that we are trying to extract from these young souls? Are we exhorting kids to sobriety? Focus? Single-mindedness? Temperance?
I have got to laugh. Temperate Adolescence is an oxymoron. Exhorting a teenager to sobriety, focus, and single-mindedness is like asking a man who has not discovered fire to cook dinner.
Does the Broom-Pushing Youth Pastor ever teach how to deal with Immanuel Kant, the single most influential philosopher of the last 200 years, whose intellectual synthesis has infused most every expression of our culture, reducing man to an intellectual automaton?
Does the Broom-Pushing Youth Pastor explain how to refute Marx and the host of Statist/Collectivist heirs populating American social agenda with an onslaught of communism and its subsequent slavery of the Haves to the Have-Nots?
Does the Broom-Pushing Youth Pastor address the hijacked bible ideals by the insidious morality of Altruism that is currently driving the rise of Globalism and justifies every manifestation of bloody Despotism around the globe?
Did the Broom-Pushing Theology Youth Pastor teach Apologetics in preparation for dealing with the rigor of College Professors systematically dismantling the intellectual foundation of their faith?
Did the Broom-Pushing Youth Pastor explain the philosophical underpinnings that EMPOWER a soul to abstain from sex until they have found their mate, match, and partner in life?
Are you kidding?
Most freshly-minted bible school graduates DROPPED OUT of “Secular” University precisely because they couldn’t HANDLE the intellectual rigor of those University Professors. And most freshly-minted bible school graduates don’t even know how to spell Apologetics, let alone know what it is. Most freshly-minted bible school graduates don’t even know themselves the BRAIN work necessary to develop a sexual identity and a corresponding resilient sexual ethic.
Did those broom-pushing bible school graduates teach respect for parents?
That is a tough sermon to give at 22 to 25.
Riddle me this: how does a 22-year-old, freshly-minted bible school graduate explain the concept of respect to a 17-year-old? The 17-year-old knows the 22-year-old youth pastor standing before him is a punk…well, mostly a punk because he’s not that much older. He might be cool. He might be hip. He might relate. He might be fun. But he is a pal, a peer, a buddy. What does he know of respect? He Disses me every Wednesday night youth group when he asks me to pray out loud. You want me to listen to him? WhatEeeeVER!
If you are one of those freshly-minted bible school graduates–or worse, a bible school DROPOUT in youth ministry–and you are insulted, (not sure why you should be), if you accepted your current position as a way to work up from the bottom…to push a broom for a while, by definition, you are in your current position because you are incompetent. But be released…it isn’t your ENTIRE fault; your Senior Pastor and PARENTS are complicit in the incompetence.
Broom-Pushing Theology is a disaster.
Broom-Pushing Theology is part of the overarching body of teaching that puts MEN in charge of dictating the outworking of other Men’s callings. It gives MEN a carrot to go with their stick of “You will submit to my Authoritaaayy!” because if you don’t, I will never promote you to do what you are really supposed to do.”
As a result, People are catastrophically required to do JOBS they are without GIFTING to accomplish. In the name of Broom-Pushing Theology, people with longstanding professional experience are mandated to waste their time doing menial tasks that somehow validate their calling. It obliges people who have limited or no passion to persist in activities that do not add to their abilities. And, in the name of submission, some of great gifting must quash their natural gifting and divine callings for fear of outshining someone else who is comparatively incompetent.
I will say it until everyone agrees with me.
Acquiring skills for a JOB is vastly different than divine gifts and callings. Who God calls is utterly different than who you pick to work in the Church office. And even a casual reading of God’s prep time with major bible players shows He stuck them in the very jobs their calling was supposed to fulfill.
When Church leaders dangle that carrot of pushing a broom as validation towards further spiritual big stuff, what they are really after is FREE WORK. The carrot they dangle before our face is that someday THEY will let us fulfill our calling IF we sweep the floor in the name of service.
Some of you have been pushing brooms for 20 years. How long are you going to keep doing that all the while the vision and calling is dying on the inside of you?
Maybe you will have this consolation. On that day you will be able to say to God: “I kept the floors clean.”
But don’t be surprised when He says: “People went to hell and remained in bondage in their mind and body because of a little dirt on the floor?”
John – another home run..wow
I’ve been amazed that NOBODY has spoken on this topic really – except for Mark Cahill, who is an evangelist and his major complaint is simply concerning all the playing around youth groups do..but the problem is way beyond that, as you have shown here.
I’ve always wondered why parents are SO surprised when their church-fed children go apostate after leaving home, as if that was the last possible result. The sad thing is, Christian parents today really do think that if you keep your kids in church, away from the opposite sex, and you fill their head with creeds and catechisms somehow you have accomplished your the parental mandate to “train up a child”…and when this same child turns into a beer guzzling nymphomaniac agnostic, they wonder where they went wrong.
EQUIPPING. TEACHING. Church legalism doesn’t prepare children for life, it strips the life from them. I’m so glad my son was 9 when he got out of the church before it ruined him. I doubt we/he will ever go back. Now the possibility that he will be equipped and full of faith as an adult are more likely, simply because “church” is out of the picture. How ironic is that?
I got the first comment! yeah, I’m number ONE – I know..I’m such a dork…but at least I beat Dan and Anony! bahahahaha
I agree, especially since youth is the first thing we were asked to tackle when we spoke up about our calling from God. “Oh God has called you, ok, why don’t you preach a sermon to the youth!”
Youth are so fragile!
I don’t think youth pastors are all together the problem with the youth gone astray, though I suspect that is not what you meant to suggest.
Again, I agree, why would anyone think of a calling only in terms of a JOB. And what are we trained to think of ministry as then. Shouldn’t we all have a calling and some form of ministry as part of the body of Christ? That’s where the hierarchy of church gets in the way of the truth of our purpose.
The original Greek word for laymen is idiotes: idiots. Some examples of such laymen according to the Bible would be Moses and Paul. The term simply means “uneducated.” Not, ungifted, or uncalled.
I’d rather be an idiote and sure of my calling than an “Uber Dog” and unsure of my next job.
Sadly though, this is where the suppression of individual revelation and the supposed inability to hear from God personally plays into things – churches (including SGM) love to say things like:
Your gifts are confirmed in the Body.
Your calling is confirmed in the Body.
So, what if the Body is wrong? Can’t a hundred people be just as wrong as one? Or more so? Actually, a hundred people who are wrong ARE more wrong than just one, mathematically speaking 🙂
Here is where it gets interesting – suppose an individual in the Body pretends to be something they are not (Gasp! I know…that would NEVER happen, but just suppose) and then the Body looking on sees these things and supposes the gifting to be such and such..all the while, the individual is only showing a side of themselves they want to, but not their real self. This one invidual can convince masses of people of a lie, and when the group says it to be so, then it becomes reality – sort of.
Don’t believe me? This happened to me. More than once. In two churches in fact. (one not SGM) Because I spent time passing out gospel tracts and telling people about Jesus “Presto!” I had the “gift of evangelism”
The next week, because I swept the floor after a pot-luck dinner I had the gift of service..and then when I opened my home to a prayer meeting or a Bible study? The gift of hospitality. When I made food for someone who had a baby, the gift of helps..and on and on..where does it end?
My former care group leader once told me, after I asked him “how do I know what my gifts are?” – his response was “The body will confirm what your gifts are.”
So I asked him: “So, you’re my care group leader, I’ve gone to church here two years, what do you think my gifts are?”
Him: “I think you have the gift of mercy.”
(To which I busted out laughing hysterically, because anyone who REALLY knows me knows how I struggle in that area – I am more likely to tell someone where their thinking has gone wonky and why they got in the mess they did in the first place rather than commiserate with them)
I turned to a close friend, very close who actually knew me very well, and told her what he had said and then SHE busted out laughing.
Needless to say this irritated him. He asked “Why don’t you think you have the gift of mercy? I’ve seen you make meals for people, you are always helping others out, you go into the jail, etc.”
And in that moment, I realized (and felt ashamed as well) that he was just seeing the things I had WANTED him to see. I was a real people-pleaser back then, which is just a nice way of saying a spiritual butt-kisser.Â
The really sad thing is this: I wasn’t even exhibiting the FRUIT of the Spirit at that time, much less the GIFTS of the Spirit – but for some reason I guess they assumed if I just learned enough doctrine I would figure it all out.
Yes, John.
Honor, Truth & Demonstrated Value.
The Cure is having it’s effect.
Thank You!
Doggone it…Juli beat to the punch….
John, you make some excellant points here and I have nothing to dispute — my knowledge in this area is limited however.
From my own experience growing up in the Jewish faith is entirely different. There, they put a huge emphasis on teaching and always had everyone up to the Rabbi talking with us. Nothing was done to “shield” us from the big bad world. In fact, the big bad world was center stage a lot of times due to world events (I remember clearly the Yom Kipper war) and the history of the holocaust.
It seems to make more sense to me to put the most experienced minds with youth and not try to shield them so much.
By the way, I will digress here for a moment to let you all know I got to see “Jesus Christ Superstar” at the Warner Theater last night in DC. If it was all as easy as depicted in the show, (Jesus was not a Calvinist) wouldn’t it be better instead of all the doctrine fighting that goes on? End of digression.
I’ve always wanted to see that Dan. I used to have the songs memorized. I’m jealous.
It was great…they guy that played Jesus in the movie (about 35 years ago), Ted Neeley played the main part. The guy is 65 years old…it was amazing…
Back on topic — I think you could make an arguement here in that in real life, when you start a new job (especially when you are young), you start at the bottom and work your way up. To use a cliche, you must walk before you can run.
In this case, I would make the arguement you would probably want to put your most experienced and best minds with the kids — they are the future.
well, then the question would be – what does a man or woman do who is called by God? What is the next step? The church would say even the calling itself would have to be confirmed – after all, you might have “misunderstood” the call. So much for “My sheep know my voice”
I am thinking of Joan of Arc, I suppose, as the classic example of what happens to a person who says “God speaks to me personally” – they call you a heretic and burn you at the stake. Especially if you are a woman!
The bottom line is – what would happen if people were left to their ownselves to follow God’s call to them, what is the worst case scenario? perhaps a Jonestown scenario. And mass people Drinking the Kool Aid and believing the lies.
But, as I think of the dangers and exploits inherent to self-proclaimed prophets and seers..there is no denying the problem also lies with the masses of people – unable and unwilling to THINK for themselves.
Jim Jones could not convince everyone of his ideas – that is why some left before the mass suicide. There is a remedy to the madness. It’s called Truth. When we know it, it sets us free.
Free thinking  is the antecdote for oppression, deception, manipulation…that is why “they” work so hard to convince us we can’t think for ourselves.
Free thinking…
Did you know my hippy name is Revolution Breeze…
John’s hippy name is — He who Could Never Go to His Left…hehhe
Anon, that’s because you are a “Freebird” remember?
Dan..that’s a good one. But remember, I still beat you as first commenter!
<phbbbbt!>
John never goes left because he’s always right. Get it? bahaha
just thinking..maybe the definition of cult should simply be: a group of people unable to think for themselves and under the control of others as a result.
I dunno….just thinking.
Juli — sorry it was an inside joke. In basketball, one of the things you are judged is how well you can dribble a basketball with your off-hand. For many people, that is their left hand.
John was a pretty good basketball player is his day (maybe still is — he is just older than dirt now). Although, if you so much as breathed on him he would call a foul.
I must stop now. I digress way too much. John will ban me from the site.
So Juli, about your cult definition. What would you call people who follow the catholic church then?
Does anyone find it odd that those who have been “approved” and certified as “gifted” are the ones that came up with the Youth Pastor Career Path Program?