One of my daughters sent me Aaron Renn’s interview with David Murrow a while back. The subject of the interview is “Why Men Hate Going to Church,” which is also Murrow’s book title. There’s a lot to unpack there, and I encourage you to listen to it, but one particular thing jumped out at both of us: safety.
Murrow talks about how virtually every Christian radio station has a tagline that’s something like “listening that’s safe for the whole family,” which is obviously designed to appeal to Christian moms. That makes good business sense for the stations, since mom is the one who decides what to listen to in the car. Murrow points out that at the same time Mom is getting her safe listening option, little Johnny in the back of the minivan is getting catechized that Christianity is the safe option that appeals to his mom. By age 11 or so, testosterone is flooding his body and he’s looking for danger and adventure and the opportunity for hijinks…and we’ve spent his whole life teaching him that Christianity is safe. Then we wonder why he’s turned away!
My daughter is a teacher and youth minister, so kids abandoning the faith is something of a preoccupation for her, as it should be. “You were raised on Christian music,” she said to me. “How did you avoid this trap?”
As it happens, part of the answer is that I wasn’t really raised on Christian music the way she was thinking, not like Murrow is talking about. I grew up on a lot of old music: everything from old cowboy songs to bluegrass to classical to native American chants recorded on the reservations to the soundtracks of Victory at Sea and Hatari! (Yes, on vinyl, but not because it was cool; it was just all we had.) Contemporary Christian music wasn’t really in the mix much at home, although I certainly heard plenty of it at church.
But there’s a much more significant answer: I grew up around people on mission. I never thought Christianity was safe.
My parents weren’t missionaries (although they tried, to the point of attending candidate school once upon a time). My pastor wasn’t a missionary either, but he’d tried, hard. After getting rejected by around 30 mission boards, he concluded that the Lord was telling him to stay stateside, and accepted a pastorate. My pastor’s brother, however, founded a little mission agency called World Evangelical Outreach. WEO (pronounced “wee-oh”) was headquartered in my hometown, first on the church grounds and then in the same little office building as my dentist. I still remember walking into the office and hearing the secretaries answer the phone “Wee-oh, how can I help you?” (Later on they changed their name and moved to a bigger location, then ultimately to a KOA property outside Orlando. You would know them today as Pioneers International. They’re, ah, a little bigger these days.) A lot of their missionaries passed through our church, along with others with New Tribes, Sudan Interior Mission, Arctic Missions, China Inland Mission, Baptist Mid-Missions, Greater Europe Mission, Missionary Aviation Fellowship, and many more.
These people were not safe; they were badasses. Men who smuggled Bibles into Communist countries and evangelized whole villages on their way back out, who made contact with reclusive tribes in deep jungle, seeking to save them from extermination by loggers and oil workers, who spent nights on an Albanian warehouse roof with an AK-47 to protect the winter’s food supply for an orphanage, who flew in and out of tiny jungle airstrips to get someone to life-saving medical care. Women who saved abandoned twins in sub-Saharan Africa, brought girls out of sexual slavery in Saigon, defied apartheid to bring the gospel into villages that would never otherwise hear. Couples who travelled the Sahara together to find nomadic Tuareg camps, built houses in the New Guinea highlands to bring medicine, literacy, and Jesus to remote villages, ate and shared Jesus with Hezbollah fighters, their wives, and their children.
Of course we didn’t stay stuck in our own century either: we read tons of missionary biographies and all kinds of Christian history, too. I learned about Mary Slessor, David Livingston, Amy Carmichael, Corrie Ten Boom, Brother Andrew, John Wyclif, William Tyndale, Polycarp, the Forty Soldiers. So as I write these paragraphs, I have names and grainy photographs and artists’ renditions in my head for some, but I also have memories of men and women around my dinner table. One of them taught me how to play dominos; I showed another how my Transformer worked; a third explained to me how he lost his ring finger. The stories from centuries ago are real to me, part of an unbroken legacy that stretches from the Old Testament prophets through Jesus and the apostles and right on down to the guy sitting next to me at the kitchen table, asking me to pass another of Mom’s sourdough muffins (which are in fact delicious).
Some of them came back every four or five years to tell us how things were going. Some of them came back on medical evac flights. Some of them came back on medical evac flights and then went back again, and again, and again. (Ralph and Maridee Sauers, I’m looking at you.) Some of them didn’t come back at all; we’ll see them again in glory.
Obviously their Christianity wasn’t the safe, Mom-approved path. It was the biggest adventure in the world, far superior even to joining the Peace Corps or the military (which some of them had also done, before). Tourist travel was childish and self-indulgent by comparison — not even in the same league. For the longest time, I thought I was going to join them overseas. I did short-term hitches doing child evangelism in Spain, a building project in Trinidad & Tobago, teaching English and computer skills in central Russia. Closer to home, I served on street evangelism teams in the Atlantic Provinces of Canada, various locations in metro DC, and a series of places in the southeastern US, especially Florida. I knew that God could call me anywhere, and I was ready to go!
Imagine my surprise when He called me to California, of all places. We had a long argument about that, and I lost. After all, I did tell Him I would go anywhere! So I went. After I finished seminary, He took me into the desert for six years, and from there to the heathen wilds of Denver, where I’ve been ever since. I’ve been overseas, training pastors in Australia and such, but it seems likely that the majority of my calling is stateside.
These folks’ legacy of following Jesus anywhere He leads has informed my decisions my whole life, is with me today, and I’m pleased to pass it on in turn to my students, my daughters, my disciples. There’s another little kid I ate with last week, and I’m the guy at his kitchen table, asking him to pass another muffin while he shows me his Lego model. (And because God’s fun like that, his name is Timothy too. Wild.)
I’m not surprised when God calls me somewhere surprising, if I may put it that way. The darker the corner, the more it needs light. Some of the corners have been pretty dark, but that’s another post. The point for today is, your kids don’t need more vapid CCM; they need time with Christians doing dangerous things for Jesus.
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