The Elusive Next Steps for Graduates

As a pastor and educator, I have noticed a trend among young men today.  They seem to endure their years of high school, dutifully grinding out the course work, only to graduate with no sense of direction.

I can't help but compare this generation with mine.  When I graduated in 1980, the paths after high school were clear.  One could go to college, or one could go to work.  I only remember a few of my classmates choosing to work straight out of high school.  Most went on to some kind of college.  But everyone could see the options for the next step.  I don't recall much hand wringing or confusion.

Now I certainly did not have a career chosen when I entered college.  I didn't even have a career chosen when I graduated from college.  But I had a confident sense of a next step.  After high school, I knew I was destined for college.  My parents told me so, long before I began kindergarten.  In some of my earliest memories I am putting nickels into a Hi-C can, saving for this thing called "college."  College was always my next step after high school.

After college, it was a little trickier.  I still did not not know what to do with my life, although I was interested in vocational ministry.  I considered going into banking or insurance, and interviewed with a few companies during my senior year.  Ultimately, I chose to hang around my college town for another year, working as an intern for my local church.  The low-paying internship experience would help me decide on a career path. Of course, the fact that my college girlfriend had another year of school might have slightly influenced my thinking.  I'm glad I stuck around, because we eventually got married.  After that year of ministry, I went on to graduate school.

Here's my point.  At each moment of transition, I saw some clear next steps.  After college, I could get a career-track job, a low-paying internship, or go to graduate school.   At no point did I ever feel completely at a loss.  I never made a definitive career choice until the end of my master's degree program, so I'm not saying that 20-somethings should have it all figured out.  I'm just saying that possible next steps were clear.

For today's students, graduation is an approaching waterfall.  It's coming, it's loud and scary, and it will be wet.  Beyond that, they have no idea what might happen.  Their next steps are about survival, not preparation.  Four-year college is no longer such an obvious choice.  There are more college-type options available today--community college, gap year schools, trade schools.  There are more internships available for 18-year-olds, with ministries and businesses.  Some graduates opt for two-year mission opportunities on other continents.

Next steps are not as clearly defined today, and it seems to hit our young men the hardest.  They feel pressure to choose a career and pursue it aggressively.  They are not ready to make such decisions, and so they seem to float in and out of school, in and out of minimum wage jobs.

Men in the church need to stand up and mentor these young men.  We need to enter their lives and help them seek God's direction for their careers.  We need to encourage them to take risks, and pursue opportunities of service, profit, and education.  We need to share our own struggles and regrets.

If we assume that young men will just figure it out on their own, we are missing a great opportunity to build relationships and shed light on productive next steps.  That would have been a great help to me, even in the day when the next steps were more obvious.

Imagine the spiritual power that will be released when this generation of young men pursues God's direction for their lives, confident that God's energy is flowing through them!

Hijacked by a Hootenanny

Spell check is the special feature that requires you to double check your typing.  I received a text from someone a few months ago, apparently describing accumulating ice in a parking lot.  It said, "Parking lit here has hootenanny awful in the last 20 minutes."  I still have no idea what word was intended.  It amazes me that  whatever the word was, spell check thought the writer meant "hootenanny."  Who uses that word in normal conversation, especially texting?

Then, when I want to wish someone Happy Birthday on Facebook, spell check always thinks I want to say "Jappy."  Why would I want to say that?  Shouldn't there be some outrage about such racist suggestions?

It is a risky thing to complete someone else's thoughts.  But we do it all the time.  As we listen, we tend to hear what we expect to hear.  We put our own hootenannies in the speaker's words.  We fail to listen, and then both parties wonder where communication broke down.

Listening is hard work.  Every day I catch myself failing to listen.  Then I try to reconstruct what the speaker must have been saying.  Whoa, that's dangerous.  I fill in the blanks with what the person must have said.  It's a wonder I can communicate with anybody.  There is no telling what ridiculous ideas I attribute to others.  I hope I'm not as bad as spell check.

Power, Depths, and Despair

I have been seeking to live in the power of Jesus.  He is full of power, more power than we can imagine.  Being with him through prayer, I can open my eyes to his power all around me.  I walked through the grocery store a couple of days ago, realizing that his power was flowing through me.  I have no idea how he used his power through me there, but I was tuned in spiritually.  That's how I want to live every day.

As I dive deeper into Jesus and come ever closer to his heart, I realize that I am also becoming a bigger target for the enemy to mess with.  It's like a secret agent:  the more you penetrate the enemy's organization, the more you have to watch out.

So, the enemy tries to frustrate me, make me fearful, and discourage me.  The more I dive into Jesus, the more of his power I experience and the more the enemy wants to take me out.  That means that I need to spend even more time in prayer to keep my mind tuned in to the truth.

I can count it all joy when I feel discouraged, because it drives me to Jesus, and he reveals the truth to me.  I become stronger and more alive in him.  It's getting dangerous and rewarding.

New Daily Habits

Yes, it can be done.  I can start new habits.  And, I can stick with them.  Hope I did not just jinx it.

Since last November our church has been praying for every person in our fellowship by name every day.  We have a team of about a dozen folks who pray daily.  I pray for about one-seventh of our congregation every day.  Have kept up with it fairly well.  I have only missed a few days, so this has now become a daily habit.

When I began my sabbatical on January 1, I committed to journal every day.  Even if I only write a line or two in my journal, I have written something every day.  When my sabbatical ended in March, I continued to write every day, and I have not missed a day all year.

So, it looks like I can actually start a new habit.  Now I need to tackle serious writing.  Maybe I can write something every day on one of my blogs.  I just don't want to publish junk.

The Time Between

Today is Easter Saturday.  It's the time between--between the end of Jesus' life (as it seemed) and the resurrection.  It had to be a time of confusion, frustration, disappointment.

Maybe your life is in the time between right now.  Your dreams seem dead.  That relationship is gone.  The job can't be found.  It looks like death abounds, and every hope has died.

But on Sunday, Jesus rose from the dead.  In order for him to defeat death, he had to die.  There could be no resurrection without a Good Friday.

Hang in there during the time between.  There is a resurrection.

"I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his suffering, becoming like him in his death and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead."  -- Paul (Philippians 3:10-11)

Pastor Suicide

Every time I hear about a pastor committing suicide, a chill goes down my spine.  I see the irony--that a spiritual leader under the authority and grace of Christ would choose to end his own life--but I know there is more to it.  Just last Friday a fellow pastor in Guilford County, Robert McKeehan of Community Bible Church in High Point, took his life. I never met him, but I grieve and pray for his family and his fellowship.  I know very little about his ministry or his personal life, but this occasion has caused me to reflect.

Of course people of all walks of life choose to end their own lives.  Yet pastors, we believe, should somehow be exceptions.  I have not looked up any statistics to see if the rate of suicide is any higher or lower among pastors than the general population.  That's almost beside the point.

What would contribute to suicide among the shepherds of the church?

There are some pastors who enter ministry as a self-help endeavor.  Because they are messed up socially, emotionally, spiritually, they enter a profession in which those difficulties are addressed.  Professional growth yields personal growth, and they triumph over the demons of their lives.  I'm certain that happens many times.  Sometimes it doesn't.  We--humans--all have our demons.

Some pastors expect too much of themselves.  We expect perfection in ourselves, while real perfection only comes in Christ.  We take personal failures personally.  We take professional failures personally.  We essentially fail to apply the gospel to our own lives.  We know that God takes the mistakes of others and turns them around for good.  But somehow we can't look in the mirror and say the same thing.

And then, today's church culture expects a lot from pastors.  With a few clicks, parishioners can hear the best sermons from the best pastors around the world.  Local pastors feel the pressure to be just as deep, relevant, personal, missional, humorous, insightful, applicable, delightful.  On some occasions we may actually have a real winner of a sermon.  Next week it will be better.  And even better the next week.  Then we serve the reputation of good preaching instead of serving Jesus.  And eventually it crashes somehow.  Rarely does a  prominent pastor make it through his career without some sort of notable sinful failure.  At least it seems that way.

Pride tells us that we can be just as good as the famous preachers, and so we strive for that.  Of course we want excellence.  We push ourselves.  And parishioners cheer us on.  Sometimes literally.  We harness social media, purely to get out our message--certainly not to fuel our own egos.

Much of this we can accomplish with our own strength and resources.  We know how to market.  We know what sells.  We know that we can explain Jesus.  We know that people need forgiveness.  And so we tell the truth and ask for commitment.  We encourage people to respond, in some cases to the point of manipulation.

What I find lacking here is the power of God.  So much of ministry is done in purely human strength with token prayer.  We pastors know we lack the power, so we use human means to accomplish spiritual ends. Sadly, sometimes it works.  It looks good.  And it feels good.

But God's power reigns supreme in the stories of the New Testament.  Preachers tell about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus in a few sentences, and the power of God comes upon the listeners.  People surrender to Christ.  There is no manipulation, no arm twisting, no guilt tripping.

Today when the simple presentation of the good news of Jesus fails to produce results, we pastors assume that we are not trying hard enough, that we are not clever enough, likable enough, relevant enough, techie enough.  We assume that it is all about us.  Wrong.  That perspective is wrong.  It short circuits the power of God.  It causes us to feel like failures and blame God.  Then we use more worldly means to do spiritual work.  We see how contradictory that is, and feel the incongruity in our souls.

Sometimes we quit ministry.  Sometimes we have affairs.  Sometimes we feed addictions.  Sometimes we stay in ministry and rot from within.  Sometimes we end it all.

And then sometimes we allow God to break through as we break down.  We see that it is not all about us.  We believe Jesus when he says that his yoke is easy and his burden is light.  We come apart under the gracious hand of our severe and tender God.  We let go.  We weep.
 We stop bearing the weight of our dozens or thousands of parishioners.  We let God be God.  We come to him for our self-understanding.  We believe him when he says that he loves us as we are.  We believe that the cross of Jesus is all we need.  We live the life of the resurrection.  We experience release, forgiveness and deep-down joy.  We stop preaching to prove ourselves.  We take time off.  We let chips fall.  We get to know Jesus.  He fills us with his power.  Life becomes good.  We live the gospel.  We don't have to be super-pastors.  We don't want to be super-pastors.

Then the power of God flows.  The kingdom of God grows.  We live what we preach, that it is all about Jesus.  We fall to our knees.

Connecting Questions

We are beginning an experiment at Crossroads.  We are going to make personal contact with everyone in the church, and see how they are doing.

Here's the purpose:

• Have a personal touch with every person in our fellowship
• Discover spiritual hunger and thirst in our fellowship
• Discover need in our fellowship
• Begin mentoring relationships
• Discover stories to celebrate

Here are the questions:

• How is God working in your life?
• What goals are you working toward?
• How can we help?

As we connect with each other, we see how God is working.  And he gets the glory!