Nearly eight years ago I postponed posting to this blog. Things at work became crazy busy and the nature of my work made that aspect of my life off limits to blogging. My other life at church seemed to take a back seat to my professional career which I was trying to finish well prior to hanging it up for good. The youth ministry in which I served and had previously been headed by leaders with dubious character and/or qualifications was then being headed by someone of good integrity, experience and education. Not long before my last post, the final holdovers still in leadership from previous awful regime moved on and out of our church. Our youth group was significantly smaller, however a large graduating class of middle schoolers was coming up in 2013. The situation at church seemed hopeful and the future exciting. However, the "weeds" planted by the enemy are very stubbornly removed, even if new ones aren't being added.
The most nefarious weeds, I discovered, were the ones in which people pretended to be ones who cared about the spiritual welfare of others in our church when in reality, they sought control or power for their own selfish ambitions. The holdovers in youth ministry were one example of this, two of them had become involved with the group back in the days we had mistakenly hired someone who preyed on students for his own selfish desires. These two had their own selfish reasons to minister to students, none of which involved helping them learn to follow Christ. They instead looked to youth ministry to reconstruct their own self-described painful teen years into happier ones; they behaved not as responsible mentoring adults, but acted as giddy teenage peers wanting to hear the latest dating gossip. When the scandal over the leader's bad acts was revealed some months after he was terminated, their own participation in the coverup up of his deeds in order to stay in his good graces and remain in the group became known. Despite their role in the whole mess, they were allowed to remain in ministry and continued their divisive presence.
During that time frame, new people entered our church, some who had grand plans to turn our church into something that would be comfortable for them; it would be a church that had no room for "those people" - folks who looked differently with piercings, tattoos, or casual clothes, or who didn't fit into their fundamentalist ideal of what Christians should be. They were clever with these plans; they shared their goals only with others whom they believed were on the same page. Some wanted to be in positions of power in order to get their pet project or mission funded by the congregation. Others wanted a platform to showcase their skills. None of these people talked about wanting those who don't know Jesus to find Him.
These attitudes were also held by teenagers who garnered these thoughts from their legalistic parents. "Holiness" was gauged by how closely how others conformed to their standard, not how their heart reflected God's love and mercy. It helped to force out an honorable, but unexciting youth pastor when these same folks demanded "someone else" (a someone who was more like them - homeschooled, for example, and who would enforce certain rules determined by the "fundies.")
At this point, the "weeds" had now reproduced on their own since no one had yet recognized their growing danger to the healthy and young plants of our church family. More on these weeds next time.
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