Not long ago I sat in a worship service heavily populated by young men and women. The music was sensational. The energy of the crowd was beyond anything I’d ever experienced. Joy and exuberance! Intensity and focus! This, I thought, is what the church is supposed to be.
But I couldn’t avoid thinking about a different level of reality below the surface of what was visible in that hour. For I had spent time with the pastors. And I knew what they would face when the lights, video screens, and amplifiers were turned off.
In groups and one-on-one, conversations would turn to issues of sexual identity, desperate loneliness, the inability to make commitments stick (or last), debt, addictions, deep anger and insularity from past patterns and perceptions of abuse, scars of bad religious experiences.
These pastors would feel the interior “winds” raging and find themselves probing away at themes like trust, the power of vengeance, resistance to and confusion about authority, fear expressed in a score of forms, guilt (general and specific), obsessions and lusts, the sense of spiritual captivity.
To seize upon one of our Lord’s favorite metaphors, the “fish” business these days is not as simple as it once seemed. The human fish now come out of outrageously polluted cultural waters, and they bring all the effects of their pollutedness with them.
The consequences of the cultural sea-change everyone’s been talking about are here. We now know some of the long-range effects of an intrusive amoral mass media, latch-key lifestyles, high octane individualism, the minimalist perspective on rules, and debunking the notion of delayed gratification.
It’s here. It’s shaped the minds and souls of an entire generation or two. And now we have to deal with it.
Government isn’t going to prevent the pollutants. Medication, obviously, isn’t the answer. And alternative church programs that insulate our children and youth from the real world aren’t that useful either.
First-century Christ-followers had a pretty tough world in which to raise their kids, and they seemed to do a fine job (as far as I can tell). We’ll just have to do what they did: rely upon the power of conversion and discipleship. I mean sound conversions and powerful discipleship.
No more home field advantage
My generation certainly didn’t set the standard for human excellence. We have our problems. But, generally speaking, we did enjoy a privilege that the new generation doesn’t: a context of civilizing influences that were a good platform upon which to build Christian character.
We may have been the last generation in which most boys and girls had the benefit of a couple dozen “close-up” adult relationships. Parents figured in our development, but they were not the only key players. Any number of males and females were there for us and formed for us a view of maleness, femaleness, community, and where one’s place was amid it all.
That social matrix has all but collapsed. The new generation longs for community, but hasn’t been raised with one. Result: spiritual and psychological devastation.
Sunday’s praise, Monday’s pain
Talk to any pastor who engages the people of a congregation and he/she will tell you about people who struggle with basic issues of emotional and spiritual intelligence:
The ability to trust. A basic sense of self-confidence. The capacity to engage in conflict in a civil manner. To identify and respect legitimate authority. To give and receive forgiveness. To lead (and want to lead) or to follow. To carry on a reasonably ordered personal life (not overspending, being on time, finishing tasks, controlling one’s impulsive desires).
These and other social skills and marks of personal development are set in place, normally, by family and community. When family and community break down, such skills are never developed.
If a congregation is populated with people lacking these skills, pastors face the challenge of building a church that is reasonably stable, purposed, and able to get on with the challenge of living Christianly.
How do you develop leaders—productive disciples of Jesus—from a population that wasn’t grounded in personal and social skills?
The word re-parenting comes to mind. It suggests an effort at conversion, discipleship, and leadership development—a thorough renovation of one’s life in line with Paul’s strong words: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” Not just a nicer person, but a new creation. Re-birthed!
And if re-birthed, then also re-parented.
Leaving one culture for another
Being re-parented suggests learning three things: a new way of behaving, a new way of thinking, and a new way of investing one’s life. Biblical people believe this begins with the energizing work of the Holy Spirit, but, having said this, recognize that change does not just come out of the air. It is a process, a way of ministry, implemented in community with the believing congregation.
The military understands this principle. Thus the existence of our service academies where some of America’s best and brightest are brought together for four or more years. In such a context they are “baptized” into a new military culture. I don’t perceive arrogance in most military officers I meet, but it is clear that they see themselves as a culture apart from the rest of us. They think differently, behave differently, live by a different set of standards and ideals, and they feel a strong camaraderie with men and women of similar background.
They have been re-parented.
It was after a weekend of preaching at West Point that I began to revise my view of what my church was (or wasn’t) doing. My bleak conclusion was that we knew next to nothing about how to renovate people of this new cultural era. I knew how to preach; I knew how to conceive and mount programs; I knew how to communicate ministry strategy. But I didn’t know how to re-parent people.
Where was our version of West Point?
Frankly, it was almost impossible to get many people to understand my question. Each time I tried to delegate the effort to create a West Point for our congregation wherein young men and women would be developed to the fullness of their spiritual potential, the idea went nowhere. Staff associates had too many other priorities. And, frankly, they didn’t see me doing it!
Then, instead of trying to foist it on others, I finally tried it myself in concert with my wife, Gail. No bragging here because we probably did a C- job. But over the space of a couple of years we discovered something incredible. You can re-parent people. All you have to do is give them yourself and the Christ in you.
Re-parenting the re-birthed
Gail and I identified these re-parenting principles:
Re-parenting is selective. You pick people and tell them why you’ve picked them. You tell them that this is not a therapy group and that we are not going to be driven by problems but rather possibilities (“henceforth you will be fishing for men” is a biblical example).
Re-parenting is structured. “Don’t get involved unless you’re willing to be with us in our home for three hours every Wednesday night for a year,” we said. “Don’t get involved unless you’re committed to being there on time, prepared, and able to stay for the duration of the evening.”
Once the standards were set, almost no one ever missed. We learned that good people like to be pushed hard to higher standards.
Re-parenting is best done by a team. In our case the team began with Gail and me. It provided everyone a chance to see a husband and wife working together week by week—how we support one another; how and when we disagree, how we play to each other’s strengths and weaknesses. The young men saw how a man supports and honors the leadership and intelligence of a woman; the young women saw how to give appropriate respect to a man.
Along the way we added to our team other couples (our age). They opened their lives to the younger people. How? By telling stories. By owning up to mistakes, aborted dreams, and the messiness of living. By disclosing the fruit of lessons learned, the principles that have proved their worth, the blessings of obedience and sacrifice.
A new generation became acquainted with a matrix of healthy human situations in which Jesus was centerpoint.
Re-parenting gives people a vocabulary. We began by looking for ways to help them understand themselves and others. We found the Myers-Briggs Temperament structure a useful tool. It equips people to describe themselves and discover where they need to grow. Daniel Goleman’s books on “Emotional Intelligence” were extremely helpful. Into these categories of thought and observation we were able to pour Christian perspective.
Re-parenting teaches how to think. The process accelerates as you have people read, analyze, and discuss with one another what they’re learning. Enter: books and articles assigned on a weekly basis. We found the world of biography essential here, biblical and extra-biblical. We put a great emphasis upon the discovery of character, and spent long hours discussing what we were all finding. We got each person to adopt a “hero” and learn everything possible about the character and spiritual orientation of that person. Then each learner taught the rest of us.
We taught them to talk with each other (the art of dialogue) and knew we had accomplished something when they started talking to each other and not directing their conversations toward us. And we knew something was happening when they started arriving at our home early and staying later and then standing outside under the street light (still talking) after we’d booted them out and gone to bed.
Re-parenting means working together. We did projects together, learning to serve one another, to give sacrificially, to stretch oneself to do the inconvenient or the unselfish—even washing the windows of our home (smile) and pretending that it was a contest for quality and speed.
Re-parenting involves spiritual disciplines. We taught them and did them with one another. Learning to pray all over again; learning to value Scripture and put it to use; learning to hear God speak into life. We noticed that it took about three months of practice for them to start volunteering to pray for one another and to support one another in the various issues they were facing during the rest of the week.
Re-parenting means modeling. I invited each member of our group in turn to spend the better part of a weekend with Gail and me, following us around, eavesdropping on our conversations, listening to us pray for people, and responding to their questions.
I showed them how I constructed talks, planned meetings, edited my daily calendar. I might not have been the brightest or the most organized person they’d ever encountered, but I was among the first to invite them into the private sector of my life as a leader.
Re-parenting means affirming, and rebuking. Only when there is clear candor can change happen.
Let me be clear in saying that we were not manufacturing stamped-out cookie-cutter clones of Gordon and Gail. This can’t happen if you are urging them to discover their uniqueness in temperament, spiritual gifting, and Christian character. And cloning won’t happen if you make sure that they’re being re-parented not by just one or two people but by an entire spiritual “neighborhood.”
By the end of a year, each of us was had a new family. We’d watched a community of young and old, men and women, come together and form relationships that, in many cases, will last a lifetime. It was hard trying to tell them goodbye because we needed to get on to another group. Thus, we planned occasional “family reunions.”
Re-parenting is not a program; it’s a way of ministry. I have slowly become convinced that one-on-one discipleship may be less effective than development in a group. Others have pointed out that in the Gospels Jesus is never seen working one-on-one with any of his disciples. Even the personal conversations with Simon Peter are carried out in the presence of other people. Such group discipling provides context to what the leader says and does.
So as I sat in that wonderful worship and praise service and allowed myself to soar with the joy and enthusiasm of the music, I was careful to remember that this well-led, energy-packed event isn’t all there is to a great church. There’s the challenging work of building these people one by one, group by group—re-birthing them and re-parenting them in Christlikeness.
Gordon MacDonald is an author and speaker living in New Hampshire.
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