“Someone went through my stuff!” It was the end of our Campus Life Kick-Off party at the Campus Life Center, and kids had just gotten up from their root beer float stupors to help grab trash. It was past dusk now, and in the chaos, nobody had seen the culprit. Another girl returned to the patio to find her backpack totally missing. A lady waiting at the bathroom had seen a kid go into it with a backpack, so we started knocking. There we found the backpack stuffed into a cabinet, riffled through but nothing was taken. Lost kids do lost things.
Were you a knucklehead before you met Jesus? How about after? Yeah, me too. It’s easy to blast kids these days for their electronic addictions, lack of social skills, chaotic humor, and for having a moral backbone of jello. And it would be “no cap” (as the kids say). Just like how my story is more than my sins, the story of Gen Z is more than these things, too.
There are kids like Josiah, the leader of Buchanan’s Campus Life Club and involved at Cross City Church, who led prayer for 1,000 kids at United Worship and Prayer this month. There are kids like Lexi who started going to LifeBridge Church all by herself after she met the youth pastor at her Campus Life Club at Garza High. Julian is another kid I met in September who has been going with his leader to Valley of Grace Church and wants to get baptized even though his family is dissuading him. And just this last week, a handful of kids prayed to receive Christ at our downtown teen center after a session of Faith and Fitness. We are seeing kids connect to Jesus and his body, and it’s changing the course of their lives.
There are plenty of lost people doing plenty of lost-people things: living wrong, driving wrong, and Lord knows voting wrong (come on, it’s ok to laugh!) That’s how it was in Jesus’ time, too. Levi was a tax-collecting traitor getting rich by selling his neighborhood out. Jesus called that guy to follow him and even went to his house for a hang with his lost friends. This is the same Levi who recorded Jesus’ words about what to do if your brother sins against you in Matthew 18:17: “And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” Unironically, Levi was a tax collector, and what Jesus did was evangelize him.
What do we do with lost kids doing lost things? We win them to Christ. We go where they are and suffer offenses and share the gospel, displaying grace and truth while persisting in love and prayer. We do it because we know that the light casts out the dark, not the other way around. We do it because Jesus did it for us.
Jameson