A Place for College Students

Message Transcription

Cameron, that was a great introduction this morning. I appreciate you being willing to introduce for us and welcome all the college group. I don't know if we're going to continue to have a job after it, but it was a good try. It was a good try. So no, we really appreciate this. If you're joining us for the first time today, if you're visiting, I want to let you know right off the bat, like Cameron said this morning, I am not the preacher. I'm the college minister. And so if this is a terrible sermon, you don't have to worry because I'm only up here a couple of times a year. You can come back next week and Carl will be here and he'll inspire you more than I ever could. But I am excited to have an opportunity to speak on this topic. All in the Family, talking about college students and the nature of what it is to be a college student and college students at at Broadway, we actually meet off site. We have a different location right down the street called Atlas Campus Fellowship. We're one of the closest college ministries to Tech's campus. And so we wanted to be there. Broadway has always had a passion for college ministry, and so they bought a building as close as they could to Tech's campus to help make it easier for college students to connect with us. But part of the problem with this is that we are often down there and not down here. And so sometimes it can be a little difficult for the members of Broadway to connect and get to know college students. And since we're doing this series All in the Family, which is based on an old sitcom and we've been talking about all the different generations that are a part of the Broadway family, I thought it might be a good idea to introduce some of the college students to you in a classic 80s sitcom style. So here's just a little video introducing some of our college students, some of the people you might meet down there at Atlas.

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So now. Yes. Good. So now hopefully, you know, some of the college students, as you see them, that's not all of them. That's just a small percentage that I could find over the last week to get some footage of them. Hopefully, as you get to see them and meet them and greet them today and throughout the next couple of weeks. You already know some of the names and faces of people. And so I'm excited to talk about this series on college ministry and the purpose of it. And I want to start off talking about a story. I want to tell you a story from my childhood. When I was young, I had a friend, and I know that that will surprise some of you. But unlike Christine, who told this story this morning that she didn't have any friends growing up because she used to wear a bucket full of chicken around. If you weren't at Atlas, you'll have to ask her about it. But unlike Christine, I had a friend, one singular friend growing up. And my friend was he was an interesting guy. He was a very outgoing person. He was very funny. He was witty. And while we were growing up, he started playing football in high school and he got really into football. And so part of football became thinking about how he was going to become better and better at football. And so he got into exercise.

He started working out every day. He built his own workout plan. Part of that also meant that he developed his own his own special diet that he did. And so he got really into health and fitness, which, as you can tell by looking at me, was not kind of what I was into, but I was glad for him. He was a fun guy. And then my friend had an accident one day when he was hiking with his dad up in the mountains. They went on this annual trek that they used to go on and he would go on this hiking trip. They went out for a day, walk away from their campsite, and a storm rolled in. And as the storm was rolling in, they were getting more and more concerned for it. So they decided to cut their their their walk short and head back to the campsite. And as they did, it started to rain on them. And at first it started slowly and then it began to pick up more and more until it was pouring on them. Lightning started flashing. And so they were getting really concerned. So they started picking up the pace and started essentially jogging down this mountain, going back to their campsite in the rain. And if you've ever walked down a mountain, you know that it is very tricky that you can easily twist your ankle, that you can easily slip, and it becomes even more dangerous whenever you are doing this in the rain.

And it so happens that my friend slipped and fell and hit his head really hard and he passed out. And so he's up in the mountains, he's passed out, he's with his dad. And by the time his dad wakes him up, he can't recognize his father's face. And as they got him back to the hospital, it turned out he had amnesia. He couldn't remember anything about him. And it was it's really interesting because he still had all of his muscle memory so he could still walk and talk. But he had no no actual memory of who his father was, of who his life was, what stories he had. He couldn't remember anything. And so for the next couple of months, he essentially created an entirely new identity. He started to have experiences for the first time again. So he rewatched movies that he had loved before. He rewatched them for the first time. He he got to eat chocolate chip cookies for the first time. I mean, can you imagine experiencing something as good as a chocolate chip cookie and milk for the first time again? And essentially over the past month of having these new experiences, he developed a new identity. He became more introverted rather than extroverted. And maybe part of this was just the trauma of trying to gravitate and figure out everything that happened.

But he became a little more secluded. He tried jogging for the first time because his parents told him, That's what you used to love to do and he absolutely hated it, which is not a surprise to anybody in here who's ever ran. Like, why in the world would you want to do that? And he was like, I don't know what I was into. He was like, Why would I want to eat low carb meals whenever I could have chocolate chip cookies? And so he developed a whole new personality, a whole new identity. And then one day when he was sitting on the couch, he explains it as like a dam broke in his mind and water flow of emotions came back. His entire memories just started pouring in. A very emotional moment where he started to remember who he was. He remembered his dad. He remembered his his parents. He remembered the experiences that he had beforehand. And he said the hardest part about this whole experience was that moment when he had two conflicting identities now at battle in his mind and his life. And I tell this story because I think this is a good example of what adolescence is like. Adolescence is this period of discovering who you are. Erik Erikson was a famous psychologist who talked about adolescence. And adolescence is a modern phenomenon, which means that it did not happen. The term adolescence didn't appear before the 1600s.

It was something that only started appearing in the last couple of hundred years, and it was by the early 1900s, 1904, that it was finally classified as a distinct period of time between childhood and adulthood. Between childhood and adulthood. And it was in 1904 that it started to be seen as actually it has its own specific challenges that have to overcome. And Erik Erickson in 1960 wrote extensively about adolescence and the process of it. And Erikson talked about how at each stage of life there is a type of psychological crisis that has to be overcome. There's something that has to be done in order for you to move from from whatever stage of life you're in, into the next one. And for adolescents, he claimed that the process, the crisis was one of identity. Now, Erikson believed that adolescents would naturally solidify their identity if they were provided enough space to explore and engage. But if identity was pressed too hard on them, then they would develop what was called identity confusion, which would lead to identity crisis. And identity crisis is a term that Erikson coined. To explain the adolescent, the adolescent experience. It was one of this not knowing who you are. And adolescent crisis would lead to this trying out of different lifestyles, trying out different identities. And so today it's talked about as the wearing of masks where adolescents who aren't quite sure who they are yet will act one way at school they liked another way among these group of friends, liked another way amongst this group of friends, another way at church, another way in the family.

They're trying out these different identities, and the whole purpose of it is not just to figure out who they are, but to also figure out where they belong, who am I and where do I belong? And they're searching now. During 1960, when Erickson was writing this, he claimed that the adolescent process, this search for identity and the search for longing, is prolonging. He called it prolonged adolescence. Today, it's known as the extending of adolescence, where the adolescent process, the process of moving from childhood to adulthood is taking longer and longer to the point where now we classify it as early adolescence, mid adolescence and late adolescence. Three distinct stages of the adolescent process trying to figure out who we are. It starts with puberty as early as ten years old at puberty used to happen around age 14. Now it happens around ten years old, nine years old, and it can go as long as it used to go to age 18, adolescence whenever you were classified as an adult. But now it can go all the way until you're 30. 20 years of your life not knowing who you are or where you belong. I want you to imagine what that would be like to be a 30 year old who for two thirds of your life hasn't really doesn't really know who you are yet and where you belong.

One of the goals of this sermon is to help us sympathize and empathize with our young people today, to understand what they're experiencing and what they're going through. And I think part of the problem with this is that older people today, not everyone, but I think sometimes older people today we have a tendency to caricaturize young people and we don't fully understand. We don't sympathize necessarily with what they're going through. And sometimes, to be honest, we're kind of flat out ignorant of what they're experiencing. And this leads to some very dangerous stereotypes. There's a couple of stereotypes that you that you might have heard people talk about. For instance, if we have an unemployed 24 year old, we might assume that they're lazy, that they don't want to get out and get a job. A 19 year old who's taking a gap year before starting college might seem like noncommittal or or just not smart enough to go to college. An unmarried 26 year old is probably somebody who's a loser, who's kind of weird, and that's why they can't get married. Or a 28 year old living at home maybe has co-dependent parents. These might be some of the stereotypes that we caricaturize of young people today without fully understanding the experiences that they have.

And the way that I know that some older people don't fully understand and definitely don't sympathize with young people is because all you have to do is turn on the news. And when you turn on the news, you see art. You see news articles like this Gen Z Partypoopers have ruined after work drinks. Gen Z and millennials are disrupting the workplace as they're choosing to be jobless rather than work for a company they don't like. Millennials too lazy to eat cereal. That one kills me. It's like you've got nothing else to talk about in the entire world of everything that's going on. Millennials are treating pets like their firstborn child, and it's reportedly causing problems for some of the best known pet food brands. I know that if you have if you watch the news, you see articles almost weekly about how Gen Z or millennials are ruining the economy because of X, Y and Z. What this is, is a caricature. It's taking an entire generation and belittling them. It's not giving them a chance. It's not listening to their voice. It's not creating space for them. It is belittling them. Now, what's exciting about all of this is that I think the church has a real opportunity to be something different, that not only are we have this opportunity to create space to allow hospitality for our young people, but that we're actually called to do it.

That we are invited to do this. You see, stereotypes are not uncommon. During Jesus's day, there was a lot of stereotypes. And the reason I asked Cyprus to read all of the Samaritan, the story of the woman at the well is because I think that there are some stereotypes that come from from the woman at the well. For instance, in John chapter four, the Samaritan woman is considered a Samaritan, which whenever we read this today, or even Jews reading that in Jesus's day, they understand something specific about Samaritans. Samaritans are not Jews. They're a hybrid Jew. Which means that whenever whenever Israel was sent off into captivity and they were scattered, other people, foreign nations, came and inhabited the land. And then whenever Israel was brought back to the land, Samaritans intermingled and intermarried and interlaced their faith with other religions. And so Samaritans had a weird view of God. They not only believed that they believed in God, they had a different Bible than than the Jews did. They worshiped on a different mountain than the Jews did. They even had different holidays. And so everything about the identity of the Jewish people, the Samaritans pushed back again. And so they had this strange idea of what it meant to be a Jew of that time, to be a follower of God at that time. We read this story and we read about the Samaritan woman, and she had been married five times.

And if you were like me growing up and you read that story, you automatically jumped to some conclusions about her that maybe she's noncommittal at best. At worst, maybe she's a floozy. She likes to sleep around. Right. And that's why she's living with a man that she's not married to. It's because she doesn't like to commit. And she can't find. She can't hold a husband. And so it's her fault that she is in this predicament. And this, I think, is why when the disciples show up, they don't even acknowledge her. They don't even acknowledge the fact that Jesus is talking to her. They just completely avoid it. They walk into the room. It's an awkward thing and they're just like, Oh, okay. Good thing she left right afterwards. Maybe that's one of the reasons that she left. But the thing is, is that when we analyze this story a little bit closer to its historical context, we might see things a little bit different. For instance, being a Samaritan isn't exactly her choice. She grew up in Samaria. She's obviously doesn't have a lot of money. So traveling around, I mean, she probably knows about Jews, but what does she know about the Jews? She knows that Jews tend to walk completely around them and avoid their culture altogether. She knows that they have a different view of who they are.

She knows that Jews discriminate against her. So why in the world would she want to be Jewish anyway, even if she could, and that she's been married five times? We automatically assumed that this was divorce, but women in those days couldn't file for divorce. Only the men could file for divorce. And so. If at best she got divorced, it wasn't because she filed for it. It was because the men in her life wouldn't commit to her. And maybe she didn't even file for divorce. For all we know, all five of her husbands could have died. Women at that at that time. You're usually 13 whenever they married a 30 year old. That's pretty common. Average life span was probably 45. In fact, this is probably so common that the Pharisees actually try to trick Jesus with the exact same question. They go up to Jesus and they say, Hey, if a man marries a woman and that man dies and then the woman marries his brother and he dies, and then seven times on who's she going to be married to in heaven? And Jesus answers the question. He doesn't go, That's a ridiculous situation. That never would happen. It was probably pretty common. See, we don't know exactly about her, but yet we choose to sometimes assume the worst things. This is what I was guilty of. And the fact that she's living with a man she's not married to.

What was the other choice? Women in those days couldn't own property if she didn't have a family. It was either living with somebody she wasn't married to or being homeless. Maybe even starving. In fact, this is the whole premise of the Book of Ruth. Where Ruth and Naomi. Ruth marries Naomi's sons, and they both die. And so Naomi's, like, go back to your home. And Ruth says, No, I'm going to stay with you. And where does Ruth find herself in the field of Boaz picking grain that's been left over. That's what homeless people did. In fact, that's the whole reason why the law talks about giving, leaving 10% of your field. So that way those who are poor can have something to eat. And this is the story of Ruth. And what does Ruth do? She spends the night with Boaz and we honor her like a saint. But whenever we look at the Samaritan woman, I think sometimes we misread, we read into it assumptions that Jesus is just being a good person. But Jesus takes the time to notice. He notices her. He engages with her to the point where when she goes back to the town, she says, Come and meet the person who told me everything about my life. He took the time to know her and you know what's amazing about this story? In John's gospel. The Samaritan woman is the first missionary. She goes out and she converts an entire town and brings them to meet Jesus.

And she's not even given credit for that. The townspeople show up and they say they say, Oh, you invite us out here because of the story. But now we've seen and so now we believe she's not even giving credit for that. But it doesn't matter. The Samaritan woman is a powerful story about us remembering that not everybody we meet on a daily basis, we can just take at face value. For instance, I work at Atlas, which is right across the street from four bars. And every night our parking lot gets filled up with cars. And I could drive up here at 3:00 in the morning to tow him. But you don't pay me enough to do that, so I just let him park there. I could make my intern do it, though, since he's. That'd be good. Right. But so they parked there, and the next morning, we wake up and there's beer bottles around. They throw up in our parking lot. We have to wash it off. This goes on weekly in this event, and the tendency is to think to ourselves, it's Sodom and Gomorrah down there. These people are just giving in to hedonism and they need to be corrected and somebody needs to to preach at them. And that's what a lot of Christians do. If you've ever spent any time on tech, they'll stand up and they'll tell you about how wrong you are.

But instead, maybe something we could do is sympathize. I don't know about you, but when I think about getting plastered drunk, I don't. I don't often think about it. Just clarify that for a moment. When I think about people who get plastered drunk to the point where they're throwing up in a parking lot, I don't assume that that person is very mentally healthy or emotionally healthy. Or at very least, that that's the only way they know how to have fun. And so I think that maybe some of our people who who walk up and down our street who who go across the street at Atlas every week, we don't know their stories. We don't know why they're there. We don't know what they're looking for. But I would imagine that a lot of them are looking for some sort of connection. And the only way that they know how to find that connection, that belonging is maybe with a beer bottle in their hand. And to me, that breaks my heart. Because I have been blessed to find connection and love here in the church and in connection and relationship to God. And I think sometimes as a church, we often forget what it's like to be new. If you've grown up in the church, if you've been here, Andy Stanley has this saying that time in erodes awareness of the longer you're in a place, the longer it erodes away what it was like to be new in that place.

And have you ever thought about how absolutely strange communion is for somebody who's never heard the story? Like, imagine walking into a place for the first time and them saying, Hey, by the way, we're going to eat this body. So everybody get it out. Let's break it. It's broken for you. So eat the body. And oh, by the way, we're going to drink this blood and we're going to allow God to be in us. Like, that's pretty crazy if you've never if you don't know the story, if you've never experienced it. And in fact, the pagans of Jesus's day or the first century Christians, they claimed that they were cannibals because they heard these stories. And not just that, though. We have a lot of members who have been here a long time. Broadway is one of the oldest churches in Lubbock, which is an exciting heritage to be a part of. But sometimes we might forget what it's like to be a visitor. What it's like to be in here for the first time, to not know where to park, to not know which doors to enter. I had a friend once come, and he ended up in the basement because he didn't know where he was going. He came in a random door and ended up in the basement.

Right. Or maybe not even knowing where to sit. Like, I'm assuming most of you sit in the same seats every week, right? You have your assigned seating. But imagine walking in here and not knowing where to sit. It can be very jarring and very scary. And so the question is, how do we create space? How do we offer hospitality to our young people? And more importantly, how do. How do we as Broadway Church of Christ become a place of belonging for young people, significant belonging, not just some sort of figurehead belonging, where it's like, Hey, we really want you to be here, but we actually mean it. Now, one of the great things about Broadway is I think that we're already on this step. One of the things that Lee and I love about being here is how involved our young people are. You allowed young people, someone who's only been here three weeks to get up front and welcome you. That's pretty amazing. Most churches would not do that. I've seen young kids stand on the praise team. I've seen families with young kids go back and pray and our prayer times. This is what it means to be a family. And I want to give you just one other way that I think we can grow as a family. One other way that we can take the next step on this. There's a book out there called Growing Young.

It's written by Kara Powell, and it talks about six essential strategies for a church to grow younger, to not be older, but to grow younger. And what they did is they went out and they researched a bunch of churches that were actually doing this, and they came up with six points that these churches are doing that help younger people, help churches grow young and help younger people engage. And I want to give you one of them. And I'll end on this. The one that I think is one of the most important aspects is what they call unlocking keychain leadership. College ministry and I would say youth ministry. Young adult ministry is not just about doing ministry to college students. This is our tendency to think college ministry is about us doing ministry to young people. Rather, I would say it's about inviting college students to do ministry with and among us. Part of the problem is that we tend to objectify young people. We say we're the adults. We're the ones with the wisdom. And therefore, let me do ministry to you instead of helping them discover that their subjects of their own faith and one of the ways that they do this is by allowing college students, young adults, young people, youth group age people to be a part of the very fabric of the church from A to Z. That means allowing them the opportunity.

To be a part of the discussions, giving them a voice. And so one of the things that they write is one difference in churches that are growing young is that youth and young adults are given a voice, not just more work in other areas of the church, such as children's ministry, men's or women's ministry, seniors, adult ministry and church meetings. They're invited in to have a voice. To serve on committees. To be a part of the very fabric of what makes this place work. If you want young people to be a part of your small group. Ask them to help you coordinate it. What would it look like for your small group if your teens ran it? What would they decide to talk about? They're over here saying, No, I don't want to do that. Right. What would they choose to talk about? What would they choose to do? What if young people helped plan the service? What topics would they want to talk about? What would be the most important things for them to preach about, or what songs would they like to hear? I want to give a shout out to our missions committee because I don't know if I'm allowed to tell this, but I don't see Holly here, so I'll have to worry about it. Right? I don't know if this is public knowledge yet, but the missions Committee is forming little small subcommittees that are going to help with different groups.

And Holly called me the other day and asked if there was any college students that could help serve on the committee for short term missions. And I was excited about that. This is the way that we invite college students, young people, in to having a voice. And we need to remember that throughout our time, throughout Scripture, some of the most powerful things were done by young people. David slaying Goliath. Solomon whenever he became king was young. The disciples were probably between 18 and 20 whenever they were following Jesus and they were casting out demons. We've been given a really amazing gift here of having a lot of wonderful young people in our church. And opening the doors to allow them to be part of us. I think what will happen is that you will see that just like the Samaritan women, young people, when they're given the voice and given the opportunity, will be one of the most powerful movements the church has. They are passionate. They are driven. They are knowledgeable. They are smart. And they're excited. And we would be fools not to invite them in. And so I want to encourage us as a church to find ways to be creative with ways, ask them how they would want to be engaged, and let's find ways to open it up, because we are blessed with an amazing college group and we are excited that they are here and they can transform Broadway.