Can we take the risk?

I've been thinking about something Aaron, our youth intern, said Sunday morning just over a week ago when speaking about that turbulent time of life that is the teenage years. He encouraged parents and other adults to take risk in extending trust to teenagers even, and perhaps especially, when they're likely not to live up to the trust we place in them. The point is not that they necessarily deserve that trust, but that they need it in order to mature into adults.

Teenagers need boundaries to be sure. They need guidance. But they also need trust &mdash and enough space to allow them to try something and fail, and still be given another opportunity. Perhaps part of the great difficulty that many in this current young generation has in maturing into adulthood is that their parents have been far too aware of all the dangers out there in the world that they haven't been able to risk giving their kids the trust needed to try things on their own. And no doubt too, the parents haven't really taken the time to invite their kids into their own work in a way that lets them see how problems are approached and resolved.

I wonder if perhaps it is not just teenagers that need to be given trust in order to mature. In the church we often lament that people aren't taking ownership and responsibility for ministry, for service, for reaching out. So we preach at them, we build systems to track them, we impose methods of accountability on them. But perhaps the bigger problem is that we haven't really extended the trust necessary. We haven't extended the trust necessary to invite immature people into our own, oh so important, work of ministry — partly because we think we're too busy and they'd just slow us down, but also partly because they could never do the job well enough. And we certainly haven't extended the trust necessary to just paint the vision of ministry and risk having untrained and unsupervised neophytes charge in and take a stab at it on their own.

Maybe we've put too much trust in our systems and programs and structures and training, and not enough in people — or rather not enough in the God who calls those people into His ministry.

I don't know. I'm just wondering. God sure seems to be prepared to risk an awful lot on us.