Fear.
Risk-taking. Change. Becoming. All words in popular use right now. All words I use a lot in this blog. Words that, on this day after Father's Day, I want to put into the perspective of parenting.
I
can't say my parents were the overprotective sort. As the parents of
seven kids, they considered crowd control their main activity and
lack of injury on any given day a bonus.
As the last of those seven,
I basically flew under any radar that remained. I could have done
just about anything. But I didn't. Like Binkley, I lived with a
closet full of fears that didn't make a lot of sense if one examined
them, but I never did.
Naturally,
with that background, I followed the masses who tried to make certain
no nasty beasties harmed my wonderfully special children. I covered
their ears; I fought their battles; I slapped helmets on their heads
and blinders on their eyes. It made sense. Then. (And bicycle helmets
still make sense—let's be quite clear on that, my children.)
Now,
I have children who want to skydive and take flying lessons and go on
archaeological digs in the Middle East (and that's only one of
them).
I
have a theory. Maybe this regeneration of thrill seeking and risk
taking is a result of a generation that has been trussed in bubble
wrap and carefully structured from sunrise to bedtime since the day
they were born. It's their rebellion against the can't-be-too-safe
paranoia of their parents. I don't really blame them.
In
fact, quite often I've joined them. It's been terrifyingly freeing.
Honestly, you don't know what you're capable of until you're zipping
down a mile-long cable over the Costa Rican canopy.
I
wonder--maybe all the half-pipe skiers and shark swimmers are one big
reaction to American paranoid parenting.
And
now, we have studies like this one that surprise us by showing that,
when we allow kids to be kids and use their common sense around risk,
they actually do better. They are less bored, less violent with one
another, and more engaged learners. Maybe, we were wrong to take away
the slides and dodgeballs.
Might
I turn a corner and suggest this is also true spiritually?
With
three-fourths of youth leaving our churches and not intending to
return, we have to ask the reasons. And while they are probably
complex, I wonder if one of them might not be that we focused too
much on protecting said youth.
We spent too much of our time holding
their little ears lest they hear a bad word and too little of our
time opening their ears to the world around them and their place in
it as God's person.
Young
people are turning away because, according to Barna surveys, they
find the church too judgmental and too ingrown. Might that be code
for “You taught us to stay away from what was wrong but never told
us how to make those things right? You kept us in our sanitized
Sunday school rooms and homeschool classes but never accepted the
messiness of honest life? You kept us safe but pointless?
(I am NOT
blasting homeschooling here. Let us be clear on that. Only some of
the reasons people give for doing it. I believe it's a great
alternative for reasons other than protectionism.)
Our
kids want to go down giant metal slides and feel the wind and yes,
sometimes feel the concrete beneath. They want to get on the
dodgeball court that is the real world and see if they have what it
takes to play hard and long. They find our Holy Grail—safe—overrated.
They are leaving the church that has told them that safe is their
highest goal. I don't blame them. We lied.
 |
| And there's one of my terrors. Going up stairs you can see through. Many, many stairs. |
I
see two choices for the church and parents. We can equip them to take
on their yearnings with Christ, or we can retreat and let them go at
it alone. We can guide them toward the battles worth fighting and the
thrills worth seeking, or we can let them jump off cliffs for their
thrills, desperate for a feeling but devoid of purpose. We can smugly
watch them “get it out of their systems,” or we can point them to
the heart worth following, the one that took a giant risk to love us
and live among us.
They
will go at it. This is a generation that believes in blasting the
door off the anxiety closet. If we want them back in the church,
we've got to stop steering them away from the doors and instead put
the light sabers in their hands. And honestly? If we want to be taken
seriously in that, we've got to go through a couple doors ourselves.
Afraid?
Try ziplining somewhere. It will put you in the mood.
