So I vented to my senior pastor about a month or so ago about my #1 frustration in ministry being apathy among students toward the things of God. We have really been seeking the Lord for a breakthrough in the hearts of our kids. Last week I had lunch with a fellow youth pastor from the Island. I asked him: What is your biggest challenge/frustration in youth ministry? His response, totally unsolicited (I had not shared mine with him) … apathy. Today I had lunch with another fellow youth pastor from the Island and asked him the same question. His response? Once again, totally unsolicited … apathy. Over and over again I am hearing things like …
I just don’t understand kids these days.
It didn’t used to be like this.
What do they want? What are they looking for?
How can we capture their hearts?
I have been working hard, as have lots of my friends, to love and lead students to the cross. It is not easy. I don’t have all of the answers. I just know we need to love Jesus. We need to build relationships with students. And most of all, we need to depend on God without whom nothing is possible. So, here’s a prayer from my heart today …
Lord, there is a heavy, wet blanket of apathy over this generation in our area. Many of us are dealing with it, but we know it’s going to take way more than creativity and hard work on our part. It’s going to take a mighty move of your Holy Spirit. God, we know that you love these students even more than we do. We are depending on you to do what only you can do. Break through hearts of stone and lives filled with passivity and laziness, and let the rivers of your Spirit flow in the lives of our students. Fill them with passion and fervor and vision and mission. Lord, help your churches to unite as never before to embrace the work of the Holy Spirit in our midst. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
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It’s not the only reason (Jiverly Wong had a lot of bad things converging in his life all at once), and it may be downplayed in the media, but once again, early in the investigation it has been revealed that picking on someone was a core issue in them going on a shooting spree, this time in the Binghamton shooting that ended with 14 dead.
Apathy. It’s my number one frustration in ministry. Seeing people passive and indifferent concerning the things of God drives me nuts. I constantly have to hold this frustration before the Lord in prayer, asking Him to examine my heart and keep me humble in my dealings with others. Here’s a quote I just read in Brian McLaren’s book Everything Must Change:
“In this big world of ‘collective sin’ and complex, collective realities ‘beyond the individual,’ Duane Clinker realizes that ‘specific action is not required to wipe out vast sections of humanity, but simple apathy.’ To appropriate the words of nineteenth-century statesman Edmund Burke, all that is necessary for our contemporary global crises to destroy us is for enough good people to do nothing.” (p. 244)
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