Turklets

Last weekend I was asked to present at a conference in South Australia called Emerge.  My topic was about how to move kids, youth and adults from the kiddie pool of faith all the way to the deep end full of difficult questions and murky bottoms.  As I looked around at the room, I was pleased to see that there were fifty-five teens and twenty-somethings.  I was the only one even close to being bald.  What a great feeling.  The fact that all those young leaders had gathered together to invest in the future of Church was invigorating, but I was left with the fact that most people were interested in how to use technology to enhance faith - my own presentation, laced with ideas and opportunities for children's and youth ministry, was not as popular.  I guess it's not surprising because most people would like to see how we can use computers, youtube, Twitter, and all sorts of digital expressions of our inmost desires to encapsulate the future of the church.

So for two of my sessions, I watched both people enter the room.  Fortunately, they were wonderful expressions of the church, both seeking rejuvenations for youth ministry and ideas for overcoming the stagnancy of the contemporary church mired in mid-20th century paradigms for youth ministry.  I asked them why they were in my group when a the digital magnificence was right down the hall.  Their answers fed right into my talk:  they were tired of leading children's and youth ministry programs using the same tired programs.

Emerge - It's an emergency.

Our church is on the verge of flatlining.  The bleeps and blips of a beating heart are fewer and farther between and the church is floating somewhere between this world in the next hoping for the next shock that will wake it up but not ready for the pain of the jolt.  What is that jolt, you might ask?  It's the Sunday morning 7:30 a.m. service that hasn't seen a child in eleven months.  It's the 9:30 service that hasn't had a baptism in six; it's the 11:00 service that has exchanged reverence for relevance.  It's the understanding that most church buildings, in the next twenty years will be museums and mausoleums because our ecclesiastical myopia is greater than any LASIK surgery can fix.  In short, we've got not kids and when we've got no kids, we've got no future.

Perhaps I'm looking at the darker spectrum and probably many who read this will say "We can't give up our traditions for the sake of being contemporary.  Why can't we go back to the way we used to be?  Why don't people come to Christ in the same way they did forty years ago?  Why can't God bring us back to the way we used to be?"

It's a lot like the book of Lamentations - yeah, that book that no one ever reads but probably should.  Notice the author's beginning sentence:  "How deserted lies the city once so full of people... (verse 1)  In the days of her affliction and wandering Jerusalem remembers all the treasures that were hers of old (verse 7)... All her people groan as they search for bread; they barter their treasures for food to keep themselves alive... (verse 11)"  The author is looking out over Jerusalem after the destruction of the nation and wishes, wishes beyond all hopes, that we could return to the way things used to be.  It sounds a lot like the contemporary church - wishing with the greatest of prayers that somehow we could return to full houses, the treasures of the church held tightly to the chest and the Bread of Life fed all people in the church building each and every week.

Oh, if that were only possible.  But then I looked in the very last verses of the book of Lamentations and I was shocked to find the author's deepest prayer:  "Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may return; renew our days as of old."  It's not that we go back to those days, but that we are returned to God - we are renewed in His life and His love in one of His places.  Restore us to new life, including youth in the arms of the Church.

It all comes down to the gospel, doesn't it?  That we couldn't be returned to God until he came and got us himself.  He literally had to force feed us the good news so that we could take our medicine and learn to eat again.

When I was younger, my parents raised a lot of poultry, a lot of chickens, a flock of ducks (or whatever you call that) and a gaggle of turkeys.  Every year, the young chicks, ducklings and turklets - or that's what I called them last weekend because I didn't know what a little turkey was called (I looked it up, though.  A baby turkey is called a 'poult.') - would arrive through the mail and with squeakings and twirpings we would unwrap the box to see, and smell, the new arrivals.  By and large, poultry were pretty stupid.  Without their grown ups teaching, they had no idea what they should have been doing when they arrived at our house.  So, my dad would traipse his children out to the old garage where the poultry feeders were and one by one we were allowed to take individual turklets in our hands and cram their faces in the medicated feed and the water pans.  It may seem like turklet abuse, but unless we actually force fed them, they would die for lack of knowledge of how to eat.

I smile now when I hear students at school say to me, "I hate religion and I hate religion at this school.  It seems like they are always trying to cram it down our throats."

Yup.  I nod silently.  We are.  We have to.  If we don't, these young pullets will have no idea how to survive in this spiritless world.  Even if they are mad and they spit it out, or they sputter coming back with the Water of Life, we've done our job by showing them where the medicated food is - the stuff that will heal them and bring them newness of life.

Peter, the disciple, had this experience most closely.  After the resurrection, Peter encountered Christ three times in rapid succession, and perhaps because of his denial, Peter had a guilty conscience.  We aren't told specifically in the scriptures, but Jesus asks him a pointed, pertinent question in John 21: 15.  Simon, son of John, do you truly love me more than these.  I can imagine Jesus waving his hand to the other six disciples munching on their feast of fish.  But Jesus' question carries much more weight in the original language - Simon, son of John, do you truly (agape) unconditionally love me, no bars held, more than these. 

Peter's answer is revealing.  Yes, Lord, he said, you know that I love you.  But Peter does not answer with the same kind of love.  His response is that of (philos) brotherly love, or fondness.  Yes, Lord, he said, you know that I am very fond of you.  What a difference there is in those two statements if we don't look at the original texts.  Jesus asks for an affirmation of the unconditional, Peter can only respond with the ersatz version of Jesus' love. 

Thankfully, though, Jesus does not deny Peter for the three times he asks that question.  Perhaps fondness (philos) is the extent of the love we humans can achieve.  Perhaps unconditionally loving Jesus is a pipe dream which is why the unconditional love had to be offered by God as a substitute for our fondness.

But somewhere in the midst of Peter's confession of fondness and our own cultural understanding of a Buddy Jesus, we find the call from Jesus to follow him.  And his first call to mission is...

Feed my lambs.

Jesus doesn't first say, "Feed my sheep, or take care of the older ovines first.  Make sure that they are fed and watered and have nice soft bedding."  His first priority is to feed the lambs - the little ones - lead them to the feed, hand feed them the life giving food that will carry them into the future.  He leads them beside whatever stream might be available before they thirst to death. 

Feed my lambs.

There is no greater mission for our contemporary Church than to feed the lambs, the littlest ones, the ones that Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it." 

Bring us back to yourself, Lord and help us to feed your turklets.