Impenitence (or “people not hating sin”)

The impenitent heart is the calloused, barely beating, often scarred, rotting lump of flesh found in the chest cavity of those who have grown cold toward the Holy Spirit. To pastors, it is a black hole, a mysterious joy-sucking vortex found within far too many of his congregants. Impenitent hearts are people who have been taught truth, claim to believe that truth, but live indifferently to it. It’s the Sunday School teacher who can educate his or her 4th grade class about tithing, but their home budget doesn’t include the church. It’s the Youth Pastor who teaches purity two hours after viewing porn in the church office. It’s the church-goer who listens to a sermon about being the salt and light of the world then goes to work where not one person knows he or she even goes to church.

The byproducts of marrying knowledge with indifference are hypocrisy and judgmentalism. Niel Cole once stated that “we in the Western church are educated beyond our obedience.” How many pastors make this same observation every single week? Our congregations know truth, we teach it to them week after week, sermon after sermon, study after study, and yet where is the life change? Where are repentant hearts? Where are the called ones rising up?

When I discovered my students’ Twitter feeds it hit home for me: My students were hearing/memorizing/teaching God’s Word, but it’s impact was nowhere to be seen in the godless logs of their lives among the F-Bombs, OMGs, party pics, and cyber-bullying. I had to ask myself some difficult questions: How do I go about facilitating the transformation from impenitent hearts to repentant hearts? How much responsibility do I have for my students behavior? Do I call my students on their godless behavior? Can I start drinking now, too? What exactly is a S/O and a RT?

Still working on the answers.

The Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back (or “twitter broke my heart”)

It begins with a monster disguised as a little bird. I’d made my obligatory Twitter account a couple of years ago, but at some prompting or another decided it was time to take it for a test flight. Three hours later I was down in flames. The public profiles of my students revealed their keen ability to communicate bitterness, hatred, vileness, and immorality in a never-ending barrage, each one efficient to 140 characters or fewer. Each post left me deeper in despair. This is no overstatement, I was moved to tears, an anomaly, as I soaked in their bile.

I was just coming off a seemingly powerful weekend youth retreat, one of those “mountaintop” getaways described in such impressively exaggerated summaries: “God really showed up!” “The students were moved!” “Life-changing!”  In Youth Pastor currency I was a very wealthy man; certainly Pride and Ego, those ever-hungry beggars of the mind, were momentarily sated. Oh, the good I thought I had accomplished.

Then the little bird, that logo of the site of hatred, the dump site, where my students had been publicly displaying their projected selves while I was blissfully ignorant and thinking myself effective, tool of God.  Tool, alright.

I read for three hours.  I looked up weeks when I knew we were on some big youth trip.  I studied.  I searched.  Eventually I became desperate to see one tweet, one casual side comment, one single mention of truth, wisdom, love, purity, godliness… all the things I thought I had been effectively teaching!  They certainly mentioned God, but in acronym form and certainly not honoring, especially when my Student Leaders had room to employ the ‘F’ character.  One student had retweeted a few Bible verses (one student out of many, we are a somewhat larger youth group, though not huge), but none of her self-written posts mentioned God with anything resembling honor.  Soon my students noticed I was ‘following’ their posts and began to block me, some before I even got to their profiles.

My heart sank, shriveled, and partly died.  Some would say I took it too seriously, kids will be kids, and teens will be monsters, but this was my life! I was ten years into ministry, and by modern evangelical standards I was a success! My identity was wrapped into this ministry, I had sacrificed so much time, so much effort! What had ministry already cost my family? And I had thought things were going so well!  Just a week earlier I had written my annual report, declaring the youth ministry to be healthy, growing, and effective. Everything I thought I was accomplishing, all that I thought God has blessed and touched through me, was false. We are known by (identified by, judged by) our fruits, and my garden was full of manure and weeds wrapped in falsehood, like rotten pumpkins.

I prayed.  I vented, then humbled myself as recently read words came to heart. Ann Voskamp’s book was my judge/guide: There is God in it, there is something here to be thankful for, God is at work even in this. I cried to God, I pleaded for eyes to see His fingerprints even in this, the realization of my failure. I’ve just lighted on the pile I’ve received from God in response to this prayer, this blog will be my searching through, cataloging, marveling at the pile.