Tom McKee
I watched with two horrified parents as their seventeen-year-old stood on top of her bed holding a butcher knife and screaming at us. The mother was crying; the father was so mad I thought he was going to get a gun. Somehow—I really don’t know how, except by the power of God—everyone got calmed down enough to go sit in the living room.
This was not the first time I had been called to actually negotiate peace terms in a home. Sometimes communication completely breaks down. Parents are ready to tell their children to leave because of a total disrespect for authority. Teenagers are ready to run away, or perhaps already have.
On the opposite extreme was a mother who called me just before a choir tour. Her daughters were mature, stable Christians, assets to our group. The mother expressed her concern over our planned beach trip while on tour. How would the girls dress on the beach? I could tell she was carefully weighing every word I said, trying to decide whether to allow her girls to go on tour.
She was a concerned parent. She cared about her girls and the youth ministry. Was her concern overprotective or not? Whether the question centers on an activity (should the group sponsor an all-night party, or a Christian rock concert?) or the influence of certain types of kids attending the youth meetings, the concerned parent will keep your phone ringing. Sometimes this person has failed to get the desired action from the youth sponsor or youth pastor and is trying an end run through you. Still, he or she deserves a hearing and honest consideration of concerns.
Parents are the oft-forgotten team members in youth ministry, the forgotten chapter in books about youth ministry. Frequently we leave them to struggle by themselves in a world where they need input and support. As a matter of fact, we all need each other’s support. We are all on the same team, supposed to be going the same direction. And the parent members include a variety of players. Here are some of them:
Parents in Need
Those with a teenager in love. One hundred young people had gathered at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday morning to leave for a week of choir tour. With all of the parents, too, they made a sea of people in the church parking lot. Fourteen-year-old Shelley suddenly came up as we were loading and said she couldn’t go, but she had come to say good-by to her friends. She was a quiet girl, and I didn’t think anything about it as we loaded suitcases and checked everyone else off. We prayed and left.
A week later, the same group of parents were waiting to welcome us home. Later that evening I got a call from Shelley’s parents.
“Tom, was Shelley on tour?”
I panicked as the story began to piece together. Shelley had spent the week camping with her boyfriend. She arrived as the bus came back, however, and greeted her parents normally. The trouble was, one of her friends came up and said, “Boy, did you miss a great trip!” Her scheme was exposed.
Shelley’s parents are fine Christian people who have been active in the church. They love their children and want to do right. They were stunned at this behavior as they tried to figure out what to do next.
Many parents have experienced the total change of behavior in a teenager because of a dating relationship. A son or daughter who was showing spiritual growth all of a sudden seems to become a different person.
The single parent. If this book had been written twenty years ago, this paragraph would probably have been missing. But the number of single parents is growing, and they present new concerns to pastors and churches. Somehow we must support the large number of women who are struggling financially, emotionally, and spiritually with their teenagers, and men who feel the terrible pain of a broken family.
Parents with an unresponsive rebel. Every time our young people are given a service in which to testify about a camp or mission experience, an unintentional stress results. The congregation is excited about changes in the lives of these young people—but at the same time, some parents sit in the audience (or stay home) wondering why their wayward child does not respond to God’s call. I don’t think anyone can understand that pain unless you have lived through it.
Dr. John White writes in Parents in Pain, “Although I am a practicing psychiatrist, my confidence does not spring from any psychiatric expertise. For I am also a practicing father, one who has made mistakes, who has struggled at times with a sense of hopeless inadequacy and who has grappled with the shame and the pain about one of his five children who went astray. I have known a sickening dread when police cars drew up to my house and men in blue walked up the path to the front door. I have known wakeful nights, rages, bitterness, frustration, shame, futile hopes being shattered and the cruel battle between tenderness and contempt.”1
As pastors we must do more than be aware of this tension. We must beware of easy answers and quick advice. Frequently we must serve as comforter, listening quietly to broken parents pouring out their heartache.
When a pastor friend of mine went to talk to a well-known Christian counselor some years ago about this kind of situation, he felt blasted. In just a few minutes the counselor had assessed the situation and began lecturing my friend about his failure to spend enough time with his children when they were young. The pastor and his wife felt more discouraged than ever when they left, angry at the oversimplification of a complex problem, guilty about their failures, and without any new insight or solutions.
This is particularly a danger if the pastoral counselor is younger than the parents and has young children of his own. I love Charlie Shedd’s prologue to Promises to Peter.
How to Raise Your Children
This was the title of one of my finest efforts. Like all good speeches it had unity, order, movement. It electrified, edified, specified! It grabbed them quick and held them fast with humor, pathos, drama! All over the Midwest I gave it. They paid me a handsome fee and they were glad to get me. “This guy will wow you!” That’s what they said, and the people came. With high hopes, they came for “How to Raise Your Children.”
Then we had a child!
That sound you just heard was the great elocutionist falling flat on his face. My majestic speech (honest, it was great) had been totaled. Those brilliant ideas had such a droll sound at 2:00 a.m. with the baby in full cry!
In my defense I want you to know this—I kept on trying. I changed my title to “Some Suggestions to Parents,” and charged bravely on. Then we had two more children and I altered it again. This time it came out “Feeble Hints to Fellow Strugglers.”
From there it was all downhill. The appeal was out of it. My drawing power moved to zero. (I forgot to tell you the honoraria went down with each revision.) But for another thing, I couldn’t stand to hear me.
So today I seldom speak on parenthood. And whenever I do, after one or two old jokes, you’d catch this uncertain sound … “Anyone here got a few words of wisdom?”2
In addition to the parents described above, most churches have overprotective parents, domineering parents, and I-don’t-care parents.
The Group Approach
What can we do to encourage and include these people? I have found that one of the most helpful methods is the support group. The beautiful thing is they can be tailored to any situation. For example:
The small impromptu group. Joanne was a pretty, cheerful young girl who showed much promise while in the youth group. She graduated from high school and attended Bible college. During the summer after her first year of school, she met a man who was divorced, not a Christian, and about fifteen years older. Her life radically changed, and in a few short weeks she dropped out of church, lost her smile, and drifted into a lifeless rebellion.
Joanne’s mother, Lucy, was a remarkable woman. I have never seen a mother do what she did. Lucy called two close friends, and together they banded together three times a week for an hour of prayer for Joanne. These women wept on their knees for a solid hour in specific prayer.
At first there was no change. Joanne seemed hostile to her family and especially any contact from the church. Anything we tried to do failed—except those prayer meetings.
Within one year, Joanne’s life changed. The relationship broke up, and she began to reach out for restoration. The prayer group and the church as a whole loved and sought to restore Joanne.
I have shared that story with many parents whose children are being rebellious, but I have found very few who are willing to give themselves to diligent prayer for the restoration of a child. I believe one of the greatest untapped potentials of a church is prayer. We go to seminars, read books, listen to tapes, join support groups, and complain a lot about our children, but too often we do not pray for them.
The Larger Organized Group. One of the most effective groups I have been a part of was a parents’ prayer meeting during the Sunday school hour. I met for a quarter with parents who were struggling with the typical questions. I, the youth pastor, was the group facilitator, leading the discussion and praying with them.
We found that communicating with each other about curfews, dating standards, music, and current trends became a great help to parents, who so often feel alone. Especially single parents felt that support, and couples often reached out and upheld them in their difficult decisions. But most of all, we learned there were no guarantees. We could not sit around and feel smug that if we did everything right, our children would be model Christians. We realized every child was unique.
When I think of the responsibility of parenting, I am reminded of the story of President Theodore Roosevelt. A friend noted the frenzied behavior of his daughter and asked, “Theodore, isn’t there anything you can do to control Alice?”
Roosevelt responded, “I can be president of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot do both.”
What parent has not felt that tension of responsibility between family and outside commitments? We all need support and encouragement, and we neglect an important aspect of youth ministry if we forget to include the parents of our teenagers.
John White, Parents in Pain (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1979), p. 14-15.
Charlie Shedd, Promises to Peter (Waco, Texas: Word, 1970), p. 7.
© 1986 Christianity Today
