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October 23, 2011
For most of my adult life, I considered successful parenting to be little more than a crapshoot. It starts as a roll of the dice in the gene pool, and out comes a baby. Sometimes it’s 7 or 11 on the very first roll, and you win. But sometimes it’s 2, 3, or 12, and you “crap out.” (That’s technical terminology for losing on your come-out roll, so don’t get upset with me for thinking I just said something ugly. I didn’t. It’s a technical term.) Sometimes there’s not an immediate win or loss, but you just keep on rolling and rolling—4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10—without winning or losing either one. That’s pretty much how I’ve looked at parenting for most of my adult life. Sometimes you win; sometimes you lose; most of the time you just keep on rolling.
Now, I’m very much aware that the image of a crapshoot for the parenting experience doesn’t line up especially well with the famous biblical proverb of fail-safe parenting, “Bring children up in the way they should go, and when they are grown they will never depart from it.” The problem of course, is that there is no such thing as “fail-safe parenting.”
Almost every one of us could identify an example of an unexplainable parenting failure: “How did that child from this family turn out so poorly?” “Those parents brought that child up in the way she should go, but she sure departed from it.” Most of us could also identify at least one unexplainable parenting success as in “How did this child turn out so well from that family?” “Those parents did nothing to bring him up in the way he should go, but he found it anyway.” The biblical proverb is not prescription for fail-safe parenting. There’s no such thing. Instead, it is a description of tilting the table, tipping the odds, in a young person’s favor for turning out well.
Now, you might think that by speaking of “tilting the table” that I’m using yet another unsavory image of a game of chance, and maybe I am. But let me tell you where that image comes from in my family. I first heard it at the dining room table in my maternal grandparents’ home when one evening at dinner I asked for a second helping of meatloaf and mashed potatoes and more gravy, please. And as my grandfather reached for the gravy boat, he said, “Tilt the table toward Jeffrey.” They didn’t tilt it literally, mind you; but here came the meatloaf and the mashed potatoes and the gravy all in my direction. And my grandmother added the green-bean casserole for good measure, even though I hadn’t asked for that. Over the years, I heard the expression many more times, and in retrospect, it was about the time the grandsons hit their preteen and teen years that the table started to tilt toward them. “Tilting the table,” then, is about seeing to it that young people are nourished and fed by what they need to grow into the healthy, strong, and faithful adults that God has created and called them to be.
What if I told you that it is possible to significantly reduce the likelihood that young people will engage in high-risk behavior such as problem alcohol use, violence, illicit drug use, and sexual activity? What if I told you it’s not a crap-shoot at all, that in fact we can reduce those behaviors among our young people to single-digit incidences—3% on problem alcohol use, 6% on violence, 1% on illicit drug use, 3% on teen sexual activity. Would you be interested? Every one of us would. The handout in this morning’s order of worship provides a blue-print for tilting the table, for tipping the odds, for feeding and nourishing young people with the social and emotional and spiritual diet they need to avoid negative behaviors and engage in positive behaviors such as succeeding in school, maintaining good health, exhibiting leadership, and valuing diversity.
Search Institute, which produced this free handout has studied more than 2 million young people and children since it was founded in 1990. Search Institute has found that in bringing up youth and children, there are statistically reliable outcomes based on 40 different inputs or “developmental assets,” as they call them. Search Institute research shows that a young person who accumulates 31 or more of these 40 assets reaches a statistical “tipping point,” if you will, toward the avoidance of high-risk behavior and engagement in positive behavior. Unfortunately, the data also show that only 8% of youth and children reach the number of 31 or more that tips them statistically in the right direction. But we can do better than 8%. We can do a lot better than 8%.
That’s why this morning’s sermon comes with a homework assignment for the adults and the youth among us. What I want you to do is to take this insert home with you. Adults, your assignment is to identify which of these assets you can see that each of your children or your grandchildren or your First Baptist youth and children have available to them as they are growing up. Mark them and count them up. And then begin to identify which assets they don’t have that you might be able to help bring to bear in their lives to get them to 31 or more. I want you to look at how you can do that in your family and in your church, and when you’ve finished in your family and your church, move on to your neighborhood and to Orangeburg at large.
Youth, I want you to mark on this page which of these assets you have now, and then I want you to circle the ones you don’t have that you could add either by your own effort or by getting other people to help you in order to get to 31 or more. If you want help, sit down with your parents or your grandparents or your minister or your teacher or a friend and talk about which ones you have and which ones you don’t have and which ones together you could add to your assets.
At Search Institute's website, each of the 40 developmental assets is accompanied by a link to a pull-down menu titled “Take Action” that suggests practical things you can do to cultivate that asset. We can tilt the table, tip the odds, in favor of our young people avoiding negative behaviors and engaging in positive behaviors.
Nowhere in the Bible is tilting the table any better illustrated than in this morning’s gospel lesson. The parents of Jesus leave Jerusalem for their home in Nazareth assuming that their preteen son is in the company of family, friends and neighbors who had traveled together from Nazareth to Jerusalem for the annual Passover festival. A day’s journey later, we read, they realize that he is nowhere to be found among the villagers from Nazareth. Can’t you just hear the panic and the accusatory tone in the parents’ questions to each other: “I thought he was with you!” “Well, I thought you had him!” “Some father you are, Joseph, losing your own son!” “Me? My son? Holy Mary, Mother of God, how could you not know where he is?” So, in a panic, Mary and Joseph rush back to Jerusalem to find Jesus of all places “in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.”
What mother or father among us has not at least thought the question that Mary asks her son in v 48: “Child, why have you treated us like this?” And what parent hasn’t heard back some variation or another on what sounds like a typical preteen, self-possessed, smart-aleck answer, “Don’t you know I must be about my Father’s business?” If I were Joseph, right about then I’d want to throttle him even if he was the son of God.
The first thing we should see in this amusing—and for parents, terrifying—little episode in Scripture is that Mary and Joseph are not trying to bring up their youngster all alone. They are bringing him up in the company of a “group of travelers,” verse 44 says, an entourage composed of “relatives and friends.” Mary and Joseph are surrounded in their parenting by people whom they trust enough to know that their child is just as well off with them as with themselves. This morning’s gospel lesson illustrates the point that it takes more than parents to rear a child successfully.
When I was in high school, my mother would routinely infuriate me on Saturday mornings when she would ask—as though entirely innocently—some question like, “How was your pizza last night?” “Pizza?” I would say. “What pizza?” “At the Village Inn Pizza Parlor. How was your pizza?” “Who told you I was at the Village Inn last night?” And she would always answer, “Oh, a little bird told me.” It’s probably no coincidence that the only kind of hunting I’ve ever done in my life is bird-hunting. Shotgun in hand, I’ve gone after those feathered fiends in retribution for all the surveillance and intelligence they provided my mother.
Search Institute research shows that a young person who “receives support from three or more nonparent adults” has an asset that contributes to the likelihood that she or he will avoid negative behaviors and engage in positive ones. It’s asset #3 in your handout. It doesn’t say anything about surveillance, but it does say that having at least three supportive nonparent adults in a young person’s life—a teacher or coach who takes a special interest in them, a minister, a choir director, an uncle or aunt, a Sunday School teacher, a mentor—tilts the table in the direction of a positive behavioral outcome for a young person. Never underestimate how important it may be in the life of a young person when you take a supportive interest in a young person’s life as a non-parent adult. Let me put it this way: you have no business grousing and complaining about how bad today’s youth are if you aren’t doing anything about it by supporting, befriending, coaching, teaching, or mentoring a young person or two.
In this morning’s gospel lesson there are adults who allow a preteen boy to sit with them and listen to them, and they listen to his questions, and they listen to his answers (Luke 2:46-47). You can talk about the miracles in the Bible all you want, but that may be one of the biggest miracles of all time right there: adults who actually spend time with a preteen child not their own talking with him and listening to him. It’s not surprising that Jesus of Nazareth is said to have “increased in wisdom as he increased in years,” surrounded as he was by adult relatives and friends of his parents and by teachers who took an interest in him.
A second thing that can tilt the table is regular participation in a religious community. Luke 2:41-42 tells us, “Every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival.” Now, we can’t tell from this passage how involved Mary and Joseph were in the life of the synagogue back home in Nazareth. Luke 4:16 tells us that when Jesus was an adult, it was his weekly “custom” to attend synagogue, so it makes sense to think that Mary and Joseph had taught him that by taking him there weekly when he was young.
Search Institute research shows that being regularly and actively engaged in a religious community is a developmental asset. It’s asset #19 on your handout. More specifically, though, the religious-community asset entails that a “young person spends one or more hours per week in activities in a religious institution.” Notice that the asset says, “spends one or more hours per week.” Not one or two a month. Not one or two a fall or winter or spring or summer. Not one or two a year. That’s not an asset. That’s a flirtation. The research suggests that engagement in a religious community rises to the level of an asset when it reaches “one or more hours [or times] a week.” That’s one of the 31-out-of-40 assets that young people need to tilt the table in a positive direction, and it shows up in Luke 2.
One more. Look at asset #39: “Sense of purpose: Young person reports that ‘my life has a purpose.’” That brings us back to Jesus’ question to his parents: Did you not know “that I must be about my Father’s business?” as the King James Version translates it. Jesus’ parents did not understand what he meant by that, verse 50 tells us, but Luke 2 suggests that as a youngster, Jesus had a sense of purpose in his life, a sense of a calling on his life. Whether they realized it or not, Jesus’ parents and his synagogue and his relatives and his parents’ friends and his hometown of Nazareth had planted and cultivated in him the seed of a sense of purpose and calling in his life that is one of the 31 out of 40 developmental assets that tip a young person’s life in a positive direction.
When young people in the youth ministry of First Baptist Orangeburg identify and explore their gifts, when they are introduced to and nurtured in God’s call on their lives, the table is tilted toward them: the spiritual and emotional and psychological equivalents of meatloaf and mashed potatoes and gravy and green-bean casserole—are all coming to them. In fact, no institution or agency in all of contemporary American society provides as many or as wide a range of opportunities for youth to expand and enhance their developmental assets as a church like First Baptist Orangeburg does. Just look down that list of assets and think about at the things we provide and teach through the youth ministry and wider ministries of this church.
Under “Support,” I’ve already mentioned #3: “Other adult relationships.” Under “Empowerment:” #7: “Community values youth.” #8: “Youth as resources.” #9: “Service to others.” Under “Boundaries and Expectations,” #14: “Adult Role Models.” (Now, I’ve been around churches long enough to know that not every adult in church can be classified as an “adult role model,” but plenty of you can be!) Under “Constructive Use of Time,” #17: “Creative activities” such as children’s choir, #18: “Youth programs” such as Wednesday and Sunday evenings, #19: “Religious community” such as Sunday mornings an hour or more a week.
Look at the “Positive Values” list. Those are biblical and gospel values, folks: #26: “Caring,” #27: “Equality and social justice,” #28: “Integrity,” #29: “Honesty,” #30: “Responsibility,” #31: “Restraint.” We teach those things in spades around here. Under “Social Competencies,” #33: the “Interpersonal competence” of “empathy, sensitivity, and friendship skills.” #34: “Cultural Competence.” Sarah mentioned that developmental asset as something she had gotten from the student ministry here when she introduced the video: “Young person has knowledge of and comfort with people of different cultural/racial/ethnic backgrounds.” #35: “Resistance skills”; #36: “Peaceful conflict resolution.” Under “Positive Identity,” at the very least, #39: “Sense of purpose.” Without even stretching, we can identify 19 out of the 31 assets needed to reach the tipping point that turns young people away from negative behaviors and toward positive behaviors. Through our youth ministry and music ministry and missions ministry and educational ministry, along with the gospel of Jesus Christ, we are delivering proven developmental assets to young people.
Now, remember, even for an entire church, there’s no such thing as fail-safe parenting. And it’s our responsibility as parents to get our young people here where they can develop their assets, whether they want to come or not. When our young people get up on Monday morning and say, “I don’t feel like going to school today,” we parents typically say, “You know, I don’t feel like going to work today either. Let’s just stay home.” That’s what we say on Monday morning, isn’t? So why is that exactly what we say on Sunday morning? Excuse me, that’s not parenting; that’s behaving like a teenager instead of an adult. When we exercise our parental responsibility and see to it that our youngsters are where they need to be, the ministries of First Baptist Orangeburg are delivering multiple developmental assets to them.
All those years I had it wrong. It’s not a crap-shoot at all. It’s true that there are unexplainable failures and unexplainable successes. But it is also true that you and I and all of us together can tilt the table toward our young people to feed and nourish and cultivate them to grow into the healthy, strong, and faithful adults that God has created and called them to be. Adults, you have your homework assignment. Youth, you have your homework assignment. Take it home with you and do it. It’s passing the meatloaf and the mashed potatoes and gravy and the green-bean casserole. It’s tilting the table toward our youth. Let’s do it so that they too will increase “in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.”
Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.
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