"It was great: Nobody was yelling at me, and nobody was hitting anybody."
As her words have rung in my ears and my heart over the past week, I have been reminded about how important a loving church family can be to a teenager who doesn't experience that kind of positive environment anywhere else in their life. For my friend, belonging to church who loved her was the first step in her journey toward a relationship with Jesus.
I've also been thinking of how to ensure our church and youth ministry is a place where teenagers walk through the door and feel at home, like they are family. I know that all too many of the teenagers who visit our church for the first time live in homes that are difficult at best and abusive at worst. I want teenagers to walk into our church and experience love in a way that they perhaps have never known at home. But as I've tried to figure out how to create that kind of environment, how to make sure we're doing what we need to be doing every week, I realized something:
You can't program a loving environment.
Don't get me wrong. Doing a great job in preparing your message or planning a well-run fall kick-off is important. But creating a place where teenagers are loved as my friend was doesn't happen in the same way that we plan a retreat or create a new small group ministry from scratch.
Being a church that loves teenagers isn't about creating a great youth ministry. It's about being a church that is ready to welcome anyone that walks through our doors--including teenagers who may smile on the outside but are carrying around a world of hurt on the inside. I think it's important to note that my friend didn't feel loved because there was a team of trained youth volunteers who were experts at working with kids in crisis. As far as I know, there wasn't a youth ministry in her church at all. Instead, a group of loving adults showed her that Jesus loved her through their actions. By her own admission, my friend wasn't exactly the model of a perfect kid as a teenager. I'm sure there were days when she pushed back against the love that her church tried to show her, as all hurting teenagers do in some way or another. In addition, it would be years before she finally and fully embraced her Savior that her church first told her about. But she was loved nonetheless, because that's just what her church did.
I want to be a part of a church and youth ministry that loves teenagers like the church that loved my friend when she was a hurting teenager. I want students who become a part of our church to see that it's possible for people to really love each other--even if that simply means for a hurting teenager that no one's hitting anyone else. At the end of the day, I pray that all of our planning, all of my message preparation, and the money that we spend on fun events would be second to one goal: That we love teenagers with the kind of unconditional love that Jesus first loved them with.
Because that's the only way we'll really make a difference.
