You may or may not know, may or may not have guessed, may have suspected but prayed that it wasn't true, that I'm a youth minister. After church a few weeks ago, I was greeted in the parking lot by the mother of one of my teens. They're a Christian family, but so far, have been unable to find a church that they're welcome. The son is home-schooled and so, does not run in the same social circles as most teens in our town. For this reason, among many others, including income, race, familial situation, and so on, they have been disincluded from many congregations in our town. None of this was on my mind when she pulled me aside. I am given to rather unusual stunts, sometimes and I fully expected to recieve the blunt end of her disapproval. Instead, she was there to ask me if she needed to pull her son out of our youth group. She assured me that it wasn't anything that he had said that brought her to that conclusion, but that he had been in our group for six weeks and, up to that point, had never made it past three before being asked to leave.

That makes me sad.

I assured her that if I had the chance, I would take a dozen kids, just like her son. It was unusual, she said, to find a church that emphasized community, safety, and acceptance. It was equally rare to find a church that thought God's love was as good a motivation for salvation as a fear of Hell. She thought it was odd that we focused on fixing the problem--man's lack of a relationship with God--rather than the symptomatic sins that churches usually attempt to fix.

I say this not to toot my own horn--God knows I've done nothing to be proud of, with the exception of free-climbing the exterior wall of our church. I say it because I think that right now, there are other youth groups like ours that are being labelled as wishy-washy or liberal. We are neither. And we need to encourage one another. You're doing the right thing.

~J