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Monthly youth leaders column

Caring for the flock - part 1

It just didn’t look right. When your life is turned upside down by a catastrophic event like a rampant hurricane what you don’t need is two national guardsmen pointing their rifles at you and ordering you to leave the only home you know.

It looked so bad because it looked as though they didn’t care and they should have done. There is something in most of us that cares for people when we see a need — we are touched by orphaned children in the wake of the tsunami or people having to live in the stench-ridden waters of New Orleans.

Preach the word

Paul’s command to Timothy is clear in 2 Timothy 4.2 — ‘preach the word’, but it is clear from the following phrases that he expects it will change the lives of the listeners to that word. Do it to ‘reprove, rebuke and exhort with complete patience’. Lives will be changed when God’s word is taught — it is to be expected. But we all know most people don’t like change — they would rather stay in their comfort zone. We have all been frustrated by young people who turn up to our groups week in and week out yet seem to show very little change in how they live. We have taught them for weeks, prayed for them for hours, they have a lot of knowledge, know how to answer all our questions yet we know their lives are essentially schizophrenic. They live as Christians should when they’re with us but we know that doesn’t happen in other environments. They like to be around us but they are not true disciples.

Balance

Yes, we preach the word but do we care for the flock (1 Peter 5.1) as leaders are encouraged to do. We should be doing this ‘willingly’ and see it as a consequence of preaching the word. We teach, expecting life change, yet fail if we don’t give young people the chance to talk about changing the ways that we have taught them from the Bible. This kind of thing is not confined to youth groups. There are churches who think that once they’ve preached a couple of sermons that’s the job finished. Paul talks in 1 Thessalonians about this balance. In justifying his own ministry he says, using the analogy of a nursing mother (nothing much more intimate than that) that ‘we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us’ (2.8). Being involved with people’s lives is part of the dynamic of a biblical Christian community and certainly should be part of every youth group.

Caring for the flock

This is not a bolt-on activity — it is an integral part of what we should be doing. They need people who will ‘share their lives’ with them as they seek to make sense of their crazy world. It also should be a key factor in our outreach. Young people will come to our groups if we deal with real issues and where they meet people who will engage with them. Some would argue that you have to wallow in the culture to be effective — where’s that in the Bible? What people did in the early church was to engage the culture with the gospel — here is a way of life, they said, which makes sense because it has God at the centre not man. Culture puts man at the centre — gospel puts God at the centre and trusts that his word will do its work but it also demands that we do engage on the Areopogus (wherever that is in your town).

Next month we will take a more practical way of engaging in ‘caring for the flock’.

Dave Fenton

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