6
sticky justice
My parents are both very serving people, both in the church and outside of the church. When I see that example, I see the kind of Christlike service that they hold.
— Missy
My parents have always been involved in some ministry at church and they’ve always had a revolving door at our house to let people come and go. Their lives themselves have been a good witness to me growing up.
— Albert
If I asked your kids, what would they say is at the heart of what it means to be part of your family?
In other words, how would your kids finish this sentence: “Our family is …”?
My (Kara’s) husband grew up with a very strong sense of what it meant to be a Powell. Both by their example and by their words, Dave’s parents instilled in him that being part of the Powell family meant you were hardworking and looked for ways to humbly serve others.
Dave and I are trying to instill a similar sense of family identity into our own kids. We even use the language of “In our family, we …” or “In our family, we don’t …”
We’ve also tried to define this family identity through our prayers. When our firstborn was still in the womb, we settled on four phrases that summarize our deepest desires for who our family is and will become. We pray these four phrases over our kids every night, and they are part of how we pray for our kids as a couple too. In fact, they capture who Dave and I want to be.
We pray that the Lord will make us:
leaders and learners.
people of gentle strength.
content risk-takers.
folks who love and serve God and others.
This last phrase is the uber-prayer. It’s the linchpin from which the other three flow. If we had to pick just one phrase to pray, it would be that we Powells are folks who love and serve God and others.
In many ways, that’s what this entire book is about: how can we be parents who love and serve God and others, and who raise kids who do likewise? But in this chapter we’re going to focus on one slice of that phrase: how do we raise kids who serve? In other words, how can we plant a vision for kingdom service so deeply in our kids that they can’t help but offer love and hope to those in need?
Last month I met a family that shares this longing that their kids have a heart for service. They have made a commitment as a family to help folks who are homeless not by giving them money but by buying them a bag of groceries instead. As their three daughters were growing up, the parents consistently explained, “Our family does not give money when we are approached on the street. We buy food instead.” When approached by someone who was homeless, the parents would run into a nearby supermarket and buy a bag of groceries for the person in need, often with their daughters in tow.
Recently their seventeen-year-old daughter, Kristen, was heading alone into a grocery store when she was approached by a homeless man who asked her for money. Even though Kristen was alone, she repeated the family mantra to him: “Our family does not give money. We buy food instead.” She walked into the grocery store and spent $17 of her own to buy him groceries.
As Kristen retold the story to her mom, her mom waited with bated breath, wondering if Kristen would ask her to reimburse her the $17.
Kristen didn’t.
In that moment, Kristen showed Sticky Faith.
I love this story and applaud this family. I hope that my kids someday use their own money to buy groceries for someone who is in need. I believe Jesus wants us to meet the immediate needs of others.
These days I’m meeting more families who realize that giving someone $17 worth of groceries is an important first step on the long path of long-term change. That vital first step needs to be followed by other steps, like talking with the homeless man to find out why he is homeless. Or understanding social-service and job-training resources in our city well enough that we can work with him to identify ways he could get his own food for weeks and months to come. It’s that sort of systemic approach to helping others that enables us and our kids (not to mention the homeless man) to turn the corner from short-term service to sustainable justice.
Service is giving someone who is thirsty a glass of cold water. It’s a noble act. And let’s be honest, sometimes that’s all we have the time or ability to do.
But justice goes deeper. Justice asks why the person couldn’t get their own glass of water, helps them figure out how to get their own glass of water, and works with them so they can help others get their own water too.
Is it harder? You bet.
Does it take longer? Unfortunately, yes.
But does it lead to deeper transformation? Absolutely.
As we dive into our Sticky Findings on how pursuing justice can make faith real for our kids, let’s begin by defining and describing biblical justice.
Sticky Findings
Justice Is a Biblical Value and Theme
Last month a leader told me that his church “freaks out” when he uses the word justice. Justice seems to trigger one of two images in his church members’ minds: radical druggie hippies from the 1960s or “liberal” believers who talk more about freedom and rights than Jesus or salvation.
I responded, “Then your church hasn’t read the Bible. The Bible talks about justice as one of God’s core attributes, and it’s a word that we have to reclaim.”
Just a smattering of Scripture passages reveals God’s deep concern for justice:
“Follow justice and justice alone, so that you may live and possess the land the LORD your God is giving you” (Deut. 16:20).
“Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow” (Deut. 27:19a).
“Arise, LORD, in your anger; rise up against the rage of my enemies. Awake, my God; decree justice” (Ps. 7:6).
“The LORD works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed” (Ps. 103:6).
“Blessed are those who act justly, who always do what is right” (Ps. 106:3).
“I will make justice the measuring line and righteousness the plumb line” (Isa. 28:17a).
“For I, the LORD, love justice” (Isa. 61:8a).
“But let those who boast boast about this: that they understand and know me, that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight” (Jer. 9:24 TNIV).
“But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (Amos 5:24).
“He has shown all you people what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Mic. 6:8 TNIV).
“And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off?” (Luke 18:7).
“God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood — to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his justice” (Rom. 3:25a TNIV).
Biblical Justice Meets All Sorts of Needs
Another word in Scripture closely linked with the term justice is shalom. We tend to think of shalom as “peace,” as in an individual’s subjective sense of peace (e.g., “I feel peace about meeting my upcoming deadline”) or as in the absence of violence and physical conflict (e.g., “We are praying for peace in the Middle East”).
Those are both accurate, but like our understanding of justice, our understanding of shalom is too small. In describing shalom and its relationship to justice, Dr. Nicholas Wolterstorff, professor of philosophical theology at Yale University, writes, “The state of shalom is the state of flourishing in all dimensions of one’s existence: in one’s relation to God, in one’s relation to one’s fellow human beings, in one’s relation to nature, and in one’s relation to oneself. Evidently justice has something to do with the fact that God’s love for each and every one of God’s human creatures takes the form of God desiring the shalom of each and every one.”1
Far more than just a warm and fuzzy feeling, God’s shalom means we right wrongs around us — both locally and globally — so that all can experience the holistic flourishing that God intends. There is no shortage of opportunities to right wrongs — for those in poverty, those who are handicapped, those who are imprisoned, those who are marginalized, or those who are entering a new country or culture. You and your family can offer shalom by personally interacting with these folks or by working to improve our political, economic, and educational systems.
Kids Want to Be Involved in Service and Justice Work
Here’s some good news: the students we surveyed have told us they want to extend God’s shalom to the least, the last, and the lost. We asked graduating high school seniors what they wished they had had more of in youth group. Of the thirteen options we provided, their number one answer was “time for deep conversation.”
Second was mission trips.
Third was service projects.
Last was games. (Granted, a survey of seventh-grade boys may have yielded a different hierarchy.)
Even MTV is realizing that justice is “in” with kids and young adults. While MTV continues to air shows that elevate decadence like My Super Sweet 16 and MTV Cribs, MTV is also planning to broadcast reality TV shows that showcase kids traveling across the country, making wishes come true for deserving locals who face debilitating diseases or are trapped in poverty.2 Wouldn’t it be great if someday MTV devoted an entire show to kids of faith engaged in Sticky Justice?
Short-Term Mission Work Does Not Lead to Lasting Transformation
Service and justice work — as we currently do them — are not sticking like we’d hope. More than two million US teens go on mission trips annually.3 While that’s something to applaud, for five out of six of them, the trips don’t have much impact on their lives.4
Various research projects conducted by two friends and colleagues from other schools, such as Robert Priest from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and Kurt Ver Beek from Calvin College, suggest that our current service experiences might not be producing the spiritual and relational bang we would hope for — at least not in the long term. For example:
The explosive growth in the number of short-term mission trips among both kids and adults has not translated into similarly explosive growth in the number of career missionaries.
It’s not clear whether participation in service trips causes participants to give more money to alleviate poverty once they return to life as usual.
Service trips do not seem to reduce participants’ tendencies toward materialism.5
To paraphrase the Field of Dreams mantra, if we send them, they will grow. Maybe.
Service Is Stickier When It Hits Close to Home
A few years ago, MTV conducted a nationwide survey in order to understand how and why youth in America are active in social causes.6 The top five reasons kids are not involved are:
1. It’s just not for me (18 percent).
2. I like to hang out with friends (15 percent).
3. I don’t have enough time (14 percent).
4. I don’t know how to get started (14 percent).
5. I want to see concrete results (8 percent).
Sixty-two percent say the issues that matter most to them are those that have touched them or someone they know.
Seventy percent of kids involved in activism report that their parents’ encouragement played a major factor in their choice to get involved.
The top two factors that would motivate kids to be more involved are:
1. If they could do the activity with their friends.
2. If they had more time to volunteer or more convenient volunteer activities.7
As we think about our role in creating space for our kids to experience sticky service, one theme emerges from the MTV findings: justice will be stickier when it hits kids close to home. It needs to be in their home literally, as we as parents exemplify, encourage, and actually participate with our kids in righting wrongs around them. It needs to hit close to home thematically, as we help our kids understand how particular injustices relate to their lives. It needs to hit home personally, as we expose our kids to actual people who have been oppressed, thereby giving injustice a face and a name. And justice ministry needs to hit home relationally, as we help our kids serve others in partnership with their friends.
Sticky Faith Made Practical
Find Sticky Causes That Matter to Your Kid
The parents I’ve met who are best at engaging their kids in Sticky Justice are those who connect their kids with sticky causes — causes that hit kids close to home.
Recently I heard about one family that has found a sticky cause through their church, Frontline Community Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In October 2009, a team from the church did a short-term mission trip in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In Port-au-Prince, the team met Kelencia, a two-year-old who wore size-one diapers.
The church team was told that Kelencia had a hole in her heart, and Haitian doctors reported that if she didn’t have surgery, there was a very good chance she would die within the year. The team called hospitals all over Michigan, and a hospital in Ann Arbor agreed to do the $100,000 surgery for free. All the church had to do was raise a few thousand dollars for a round-trip plane ticket and other expenses like visas, clothes, and food for Kelencia while she was in the US.
The church’s teenagers volunteered to raise the funds. Working in small groups, the kids poured every ounce of their God-given creativity into their fundraising. One group of high school girls learned how to knit, and they spent two straight weekends knitting washcloths and dish towels, which they then sold, raising $200.
Another small group of kids bought a bunch of jelly beans and created a poem based on the different-colored jelly beans and how they related to Scripture. They packaged them in small baggies with the poem and Kelencia’s story attached and sold them to friends, family, and complete strangers. They made $250.
One tenth grader, Ian, worked with his small group to collect soda cans. But Ian’s interest in Haiti didn’t end at can collecting. Ian wanted to meet Kelencia and see Haiti firsthand, so he submitted an application to go with the churchwide mission team back to Port-au-Prince. When Ian’s application was accepted, Ian’s dad, Pat, realized that if he also went on the trip, he and his son would have a common touch point that would last for life.
So Pat asked his son if it would be all right for him to go on the trip too. Ian’s reply will sound familiar to parents of teenagers: “All right, as long as you don’t crowd me.”
Pat wisely replied, “I’ll do my best and if I get out of line, just correct me, and I’m sure we’ll get along fine.”
Ian and the other students ended up raising $2,200 for Kelencia’s expenses, which was more than she needed. The entire church celebrated the exciting news that four months later, Ian and Pat and others from the church would visit with Kelencia in Haiti. Three months after that, Kelencia would fly to Michigan for her lifesaving surgery.
Three days after the church celebration, the major January 12, 2010, earthquake hit Haiti. The church didn’t know for twenty-four hours whether Kelencia had made it. Finally the church received a phone call and news that Kelencia’s entire town was leveled, and she didn’t survive.
The church’s Now Generation pastor, Matthew Deprez, describes what that experience was like for the teenagers. “That night we made an announcement to the kids who had just raised all this money for her. Words can’t describe what that night was like. Students wept for hours. It was horrible.”
Ian’s response was a little different. He went to Matthew and asked, “Are you 100 percent sure that Kelencia is dead?”
Matthew’s honest answer was, “No, but we are 99 percent sure.”
Ian replied, “I won’t believe it until it’s 100 percent. I am hanging on to that 1 percent.”
Ian’s optimism was well founded. Twenty-four hours later, the church received another phone call from Haiti saying that Kelencia was alive, and she barely had a scratch on her.
In four months, Ian and his dad were at the orphanage with members of their church and met Kelencia face-to-face. Ian’s time with Kelencia and the other needy children at the orphanage strengthened his interest in studying to be a teacher.
During the trip, the team closed out each day by answering a simple question: “What was your ‘moment’ of the day?” Usually Ian answered before Pat, and Ian talked about who he met, or orphans he played with, or what he had learned about Haiti. Pat recalled after the trip, “When it was my turn to describe my ‘moment,’ my honest answer would have been that the highlight of my day was seeing my son describe his highlight. I knew that would embarrass Ian, so I never gave that as an answer. But that was the ‘moment’ of each day for me.”
You might not be able to go to Haiti. But I’m guessing that every day, you and your son or daughter hear news that reminds you of what’s wrong with our world.
For example, I was stunned last year when an article in the New York Times profiled segregated proms.8 I had no idea such proms still existed, but at a few public schools in Georgia and Tennessee that offer only one official prom, parents have banded together to offer an unofficial “white” prom and “black” prom. (By the way, did you catch that it’s the parents who are behind these segregated proms?)
I’m not sure if I am more mad or sad. But I do know this: if I were a parent in these areas, I’d be talking about this close-to-home injustice with my kids, brainstorming ways we could right this wrong.
If your child has had a bumpy academic road during middle school or high school, they might be burdened to tutor or mentor elementary school kids.
If you have teenage daughters, you might find that they have a special connection with victims of sex trafficking.
What is it that strikes close to home for your children? If you don’t have an answer to that question, get one by asking your kids.
Serve Together as a Family
Perhaps your kids are serving through your church’s youth ministry and you are volunteering in a different ministry. While that’s good, you might be missing out on the great impact of serving together.
Based on her extensive study of thirty-two congregations from diverse denominations and geographical regions in the United States, Diana Garland has seen the impact of family members serving together instead of separately. She has found that “unlike family service, individual projects can actually be a strain on family life, pulling family members away from one another rather than together in shared activity.”9 Family projects and service opportunities, even if just for a few hours, give families common experiences and common memories. Families can serve together any number of ways, from packing lunches for the homeless to going on mission trips together.
Rob is a parent of three young children whose own commitment to serving the poor was launched by his parents’ passion for missions. Rob remembers, “My parents always had a focus on missions; growing up, my dad went on a lot of trips on his own to serve in different places. When I was in middle school, my dad came back from one of those trips and said he wasn’t going to go again until we could all go as a family.”
When Rob was a ninth grader, his whole family spent ten weeks serving at a missionary-run farm school for two hundred boys in Honduras. The family worked on the farm for half the day and attended classes the other half.
Rob’s dad had been to this location before, so he was able to share ahead of time what to expect and the intent of the trip. While they were on-site, Rob’s parents reminded them, especially in the midst of hard work or Rob’s missing his friends and activities at home, “This is why we are here. This is what God has called us to do.” This trip deeply impacted Rob’s faith and that of his brothers, two of whom had been adopted by the family from another Latin American country.
Now Rob is thinking about how to replicate those kinds of experiences with his own kids. He notes, “That’s definitely an outflow of the priorities of the home I grew up in. Those seeds were planted a long time ago.”
That’s justice that sticks.
Make Justice Work not an Event but a Process
Our research indicates the good news that kids want to serve. But as we’ve seen, the bad news is that we’re falling far short of the fruit we could be yielding from the justice vine. Justice work is more likely to stick when it’s not an event but a process.
Over the past few years, we at FYI, in collaboration with Dave Livermore of the Global Learning Center at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary and Terry Linhart of Bethel College (Indiana), have convened two summits of short-term missions experts for honest discussions about what research says we are — and are not — accomplishing through our mission work.10 One theme repeatedly emerges: we need to do a better job walking with our kids before, during, and after their mission experience.11
The Before/During/After Model
As a result of our summits and our surveys of kids, we at FYI recommend an experiential education framework originally proposed by Laura Joplin12 and later modified and tested by Dr. Terry Linhart13 on youth mission trips, called the Before/During/After Model.14
The Before/During/After Model
Step 1. Before: Framing
A sticky service or justice experience starts when we help our kids frame the sometimes mind-blowing and other times menial experiences that await them. If your kids are going to be interacting with folks who are homeless, ask them to imagine what it’s like to live on the streets. If your son is interested in a short-term mission trip, sit down with him, find out why he’s interested, and help him think about how the trip might open his eyes. No matter the experience, think ahead with your kids about the people with whom they’ll be interacting and what they can learn about themselves, others, and God during their justice work.
For more on the Before/During/After model, as well as Sticky Justice, visit www.stickyfaith.org.
Step 2. During: Experience and Reflection
The main component in students’ learning during their actual service is the cycle of experience and reflection. The barrage of experiences on a typical service adventure comes so fast and furious that our kids often feel as if they’re sprinting through a museum, barely viewing its masterpieces out of the corners of their eyes. Even if we as parents aren’t with our kids during their service work, we hope their adult chaperones are committed to giving our kids space to catch their breath and ask questions to decipher the sticky meaning behind their observations, thoughts, and feelings.
Some questions that might help your kids process their experience include:
• What was your favorite part?
• What was the hardest part?
• What did you do well?
• What mistakes did you make?
• How did you see God at work?
• How did you see others being used by God?
• What questions did you have that you’ve gotten at least partial answers to?
• What new questions does your experience raise for you?
Step 3. After: Initial Debriefing
The goal of the third step is to talk with our sons and daughters soon after they return home to help them identify what changes they hope will stick long term. If you have the chance, sit down with your child and ask questions like:
• How did God work through you? What does that say about how God might want to work through you now that you’re home?
• How has your experience shaped your view of service and justice? What difference might that make now?
• What have you learned about people who are poor or who are different from you? How do you want that to shape you now?
• What ideas do you have to help this be more than just a onetime experience and instead be something that impacts your life?
Step 4. After: Ongoing Transformation
In the fourth step, we as parents over the next several weeks help our kids with ongoing transformation, like connecting the dots between having lunch with a homeless man in Baltimore and having lunch with a new kid in their school cafeteria the following month.
In her survey of more than fifty churches from various denominations and regions in the United States, Diana Garland found that families who serve “want somehow to ground what they are doing in their lives of faith. They want their service to make sense as Christians.”15 This before/during/after approach to service can help your entire family move your service and justice work from the shallow end of mere activity to the deep end of discussion and growth.
One parent who’s also a pastor shared the importance of talking with his four kids before and after their justice work. He said, “Both before and after our kids go to serve someplace, we look for opportunities to process with our kids in conversation. We need to be very intentional and attentive for opportunities, but not force anything. It is counterproductive when my kids ‘smell’ us trying too hard.
“My wife, Suzanne, puts it this way: ‘We carefully listen and look for doors that might be open. We push very gently and if they open, we walk in.’ For each child, the doors and the times to knock are different. For one, a direct question will shut the door hard, while another is delighted to be invited out for a soda and a long discussion. One child needs gentle prodding and lots of time and space; another needs only some focused attention and a single question. For one, the discussions happen along the way; for another, they are the main event. For one, they happen on a slow weekend afternoon; for another they are strictly a late-night affair.”
He continued, “We believe these conversations are huge in their lives. God gives us the privilege, if we will, of walking with our kids as they process God’s leading and transformation. These discussions don’t just magically happen. We can’t quantify or compartmentalize what is accomplished as we listen, as we ask open-ended questions, as we discover together, and as we pray. But if we abandon the effort to participate in these discussions, we risk the unintentional consequence of communicating that God works only in the service event and not in our daily lives.”
He cautioned, “If you don’t take these opportunities to talk with your kids seriously, you are a poor steward. But be warned … if you do, they will challenge you at some pretty deep levels. Processing mission trips with our kids has meant taking a hard look at our family budget and how we spend our money, our choice of where to live, what church activities become a priority, and whether the Lord wanted us to open our family up to foster care and/or adoption. It has meant sending a child overseas in between high school and college, eliminating the opportunity for some scholarship aid. It has changed the college dreams of one child as he has wrestled seriously with the debt and accompanying restrictions incurred by an expensive private school and God’s call on his life. As parents, it has meant continuing to grow in our own engagement with these issues and not allowing ourselves to believe that we have arrived at an understanding of how to live out the heart of God in our culture.”
This family takes seriously their responsibility to process mission trips with their kids. We’re inspired by them, and we hope you are too.
Develop Ongoing Relationships with Those You Serve
Viewing justice as a sticky before/during/after process also allows your family to develop real and ongoing relationships with people of different cultures and socioeconomic statuses.
One family shared their story of engaging their kids at a young age in relationships with kids in poverty. What started as participation in a simple Christmas outreach turned into long-term engagement with members of a community in Baja, Mexico. When Cal and Hayley saw their church was going to support families in Mexico through supplying Christmas gift boxes, they picked up a photo of a girl named Karina, who is the same age as their daughter Sofia. Sofia was just two at the time, but the family decided not only to donate the requested gift box but also to keep praying for Karina throughout the next year. Sofia often reminded her parents to pray for Karina and made sure the family kept her picture in a prominent place.
Two years later, Cal and Hayley’s church publicized a trip to the same church in Mexico, to deliver Christmas boxes and to serve in the church and community over a long weekend. Cal and Hayley decided to take their family (which now included another daughter) along on this churchwide trip. Based on a foundation of two years of prayer with Sofia, this trip opened up the possibility that their family would actually meet Karina and her family. As it turned out, Karina was not only still part of the small community but actually lived across the dirt street from the church. Sofia was delighted to meet and get to play with the friend she had been praying for with her parents, and Cal and Hayley were also able to meet and befriend Karina’s parents (with the help of a good translator). Gifts were exchanged both ways as Karina’s mom shared candy from her small roadside stand with the visiting kids.
This was the beginning of a relationship that has continued over many years. The family continues to support their church’s ongoing relationship with the church in Mexico, and as often as possible they participate in church trips to the community where they again connect with Karina and her family. In fact, Cal and Hayley now run the Christmas box outreach with help from their kids. In between trips they send letters, photos, and kids’ artwork back and forth with Karina. Cal and Hayley have discovered that their relationships with Karina and her family, as well as the local husband-wife pastor team and their family, have shaped their children’s perspectives on poverty, materialism, and cross-cultural relationships. In fact, they point to their involvement in Mexico as one of the most significant markers in their family’s spiritual journey. In their dining room hangs a photo of their children playing with Karina as a tangible reminder of the ways their everyday decisions as a family impact the lives and faith of people around the world, and specifically those of their friends in Mexico.
Make Justice Part of Everyday Life
Many (maybe even most) teenagers will show way more enthusiasm for rescuing a girl from Haiti or visiting Honduras than they will for turning off their lights to save electricity or for being more kind to the homeless guy they pass every day on the way to school (both of which are also justice issues). What can you do with your kids to help them live out justice in their everyday decisions?
One family at our church has decided to serve by making their home a safe place for other kids. The two teenage daughters know that they can bring friends home, whether they are friends who want to have fun (the parents make sure to have lots of snacks on hand) or friends who need to talk. If the latter, the parents, Jackson and LaRosa, rearrange their work schedules so that they can sit on their living room couches and lend a listening ear. LaRosa reports that their daughters seem more comfortable talking with them about their struggles when they see their friends sitting on their sofas and doing so too.
While the girls were in middle school, Jackson noticed that Sam, one of the guys who came over regularly, was starting to party and hang out with gangbangers. Jackson is a police officer, so he decided to take Sam under his wing and give him a tour of local gang sites and the nearby jail. During the tour, Jackson warned him, “This is where your life is heading. Is this what you want?” Realizing it wasn’t, Sam chose the narrow path of life instead of the wide path of destruction. Six years later, Jackson is still mentoring Sam as he pursues a job as a firefighter.
Feeling called to make a difference in the local public high school, another couple I know has mobilized their family to change that school’s climate. Just before their oldest entered ninth grade, Tim and Kathy learned that the school’s test scores were so low that it was on the brink of being taken over by the state of California.
Desperate for help and input, the new school principal held a series of summer town-hall meetings. One of the top needs emerging from those meetings was the school’s physical environment. The drab exterior of the school was sending a sad message to kids: we don’t care much about this school, so you don’t need to either. The entire campus needed a face-lift.
Tim and Kathy volunteered to fix up the school over the summer so that when students, including their own daughter, showed up that fall, they would know the school was now on the path to success. Thanks to donations of two thousand people hours as well as $75,000 worth of paint and greenery, Tim and Kathy accomplished their goal, and the students — including their daughter — knew something was different that September.
Since then, Tim and Kathy have served on the school site council, created weekly email notices in both English and Spanish for parents, and worked to secure funding for a part-time outreach coordinator at the school. But even more important, they have built relationships — usually cross-cultural relationships — with other kids and families.
Upon hearing that one of their kids’ friends who lived with his mom and brother was being evicted, Tim and Kathy asked their kids if it would be all right for this struggling family of three to move in with them. The kids agreed it would be, and the threesome moved into their living room. Unbeknownst to Tim and Kathy, the mom had terminal cancer and had only a few months to live.
Over the next five months, this mom’s body was taken over by cancer to the point, Kathy recalls, that “she basically just lay on our couch, groaning all day. Our kids saw that; they saw us care for a dying woman on our couch.” Those memories stuck with the kids and showed them the power of serving someone in their ultimate time of need.
This family’s unpaid, part-time devotion to the school has come at a price. Both self-employed, Tim and Kathy have devoted hours that could have been funneled into their business. While their kids have for the most part been supportive, they have at times grumbled about their parents’ busyness. Perhaps hardest of all, Tim and Kathy have understandably wondered if a school with more resources would be not just easier but better for their kids.
But then they think of their son, Luke. Luke is now a college student who is majoring in elementary education and African-American studies because he wants to be a teacher in an inner-city school. As with all of their kids, Luke’s faith was shaped by the family’s commitment to live out Sticky Justice every day. Kathy summarizes, “There has been much pain, but there has also been much, much joy.”
You may be reading this chapter and thinking to yourself, “All these ideas work when your kids care about the world around them. My kids seem so self-absorbed. What do I do with my kids when they don’t seem to care?”
The most important thing to remember is that even more important than how deeply or even actively our kids care now is that their faith eventually moves toward justice as a core and expressed value. Adolescents are by nature somewhat self-absorbed. Our role, then, is to help our kids move in a steady and direct path toward caring for others.
Our best shot at helping our kids in this is by modeling our own care for others — not just the poor but also the different, the hurting, and the weak. How we talk about others, even those who don’t necessarily “deserve” our care, says a lot to our kids about our understanding of Jesus’ message about loving others.
With our own kids, Chap and I (along with our spouses) try to do two things: First, we pray and serve others together as a family as much and as often as we can. Second, we take every chance we can to get our kids out there on the front lines of mercy, justice, and service. We strongly believe that the more our children can come alongside those who are poor, broken, or weak, the more they will recognize how much the “least of these” have to teach those of us who think we are rich, whole, and strong. Over time, community builds compassion.
Be Creative in Your Pursuit of Justice
Recently I presented our research findings about Sticky Justice to a gathering of parents at a family camp. When I asked parents to share their own creative ways to engage their kids in justice, one dad offered that he keeps an envelope in his wallet with some cash in it. His wife does the same in her purse. Their kids know this, and they’ve decided as a family that the cash goes to people in need. Their job is to be on the lookout for folks who could use a bit of help. After they find someone and agree to give them the money, the family replenishes the envelopes and remains on the lookout.
Another family wanted to instill in their kids a vision for generous and sacrificial giving. Instead of pocketing the profits from their Saturday yard sale, they gave every cent to an international missions organization. When others heard about this yard sale, they donated some of their belongings too. The family worked hard together all Saturday, knowing that children in Africa would be the ultimate beneficiaries of their labor.
Priceless. I love the creativity of families when it comes to justice. They are sticking with it.
sticky reflection and discussion questions
1. How do you think your kids would fill in the blank of what being part of your family means? What would you want them to say?
2. How would you define the difference between service and justice?
3. When has a service experience not produced the spiritual “bang for the buck” you hoped for and expected?
4. Think about the next time your kids will be doing something to serve others. What could you do before the event to help prepare them for what they will face? What could you do afterward?
5. Think about a few things your kids love or are good at. How can you help them connect their areas of interest with their skills and creativity to pursue justice in some area?