Crash and Burn; You Ll Rarely See That Phrase Used in a Positive Manner in Our Society

211

Out of the Driveway and Into the Game

Protecting and Developing a Comprehensive Biblical Worldview in Christian Youth

Michael Burns

August, 2006

All Rights Reserved

Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 3

From Goo-to-Zoo-to-You? ...... 12

180 Days at the Temple ...... 31

Planting Your Feet in Mid-Air ...... 58

Putting on the Right Glasses ...... 76

Sloppy Agape ...... 103

Every High Hill and Spreading Tree ...... 122

Rare Jewel ...... 134

Loving Thing Air ...... 155

Mind Control ...... 169

Coming With the Clouds ...... 182

Conclusion ...... 204

Introduction – Out of the Driveway, Into the Game

Crash and burn; you’ll rarely see that phrase used in a positive manner in our society. No decent person likes to watch someone else crash and burn, especially a kid. Yet, I found myself in a position for eight years where I had to do just that. I knew it was coming every year and it was never pleasant. Nor did I ever really get used to it or hardened by it.

So, what was the position? It was that of a high school basketball coach at an inner city high school. Every year in the early fall, we began the process of forming that season’s basketball team. This was always a time of big dreams, high expectations, and big talk. Usually the biggest talk came from the new young players or the new kids who had transferred to our school.

As the process began, we would spend two weeks trying to get the kids to quit. We would run them more than most of them had ever run in their life. It was always fun to watch the returning players as they observed the code of silence on the first day of conditioning. They refused to tell the new players what we were about to do, but you could see the twinkle in their eyes. They knew what these new young bucks were in for. We took them to a very high and steep hill and had them run up and down the hill twenty-five times, and that was just on the first day. It got worse as the conditioning period went along. Some quit, most didn’t. Most of these new players were buoyed by the belief that they would be the next big star of the team.

Once the actual tryout and practice period began, shooting, dribbling and defensive drills were the order of the day. For a solid week we would run certain drills looking for good form and the hard workers. This is where an interesting phenomenon developed almost every single year. There were always several new players who would begin to shine during this time, but quite often, one of those players would look especially good. I am drawn to think of one year in particular and a player that we will call Nazir.

Nazir was a kid who spent his early years living in a very rough environment in the inner-city, passed from family member to family member. He had also spent time in foster care. The one person he had spent very little time with was his mother, and he didn’t even know his father. Then, at the age of ten, he moved to much nicer and quiet neighborhood with his grandmother. He began to struggle academically in his suburban schools and he missed the inner-city. He had lost any street credibility and wanted to get it back. So, he convinced his grandmother to send him to our school. Once here, he was going to be the next great player at our school.

As the drills began, Nazir looked incredible. His form was flawless, his concentration was impeccable. He was determined too. During conditioning, one of his shoes broke but rather than quitting, he took both shoes off and actually ran the hill another ten or twelve times in his socks. As the week wore on we were extremely impressed by this kid. When we began to participate in light scrimmage-like drills he looked even more impressive. He learned the offense quickly and could shoot like a budding star that he was sure he was. Even the older players were impressed and began to accept him as one of their own, which was very unusual that early in the process of forming a team.

At the end of practice on the second day of the week I told the team that the next day we would be having our first full-speed scrimmage. After practice, Nazir was extremely excited. This would be his chance to finally show off his entire game. It would be his time. We had a brief conversation, however, that began to deflate the balloon of high hopes that I was inflating about him. I asked him where he had played ball before this. He informed me that he had never really played in a league before this. There are no middle school sports in our town so that is not that unusual. What was unusual, though, was when I asked him what park he played at. He told me that his grandmother had not wanted him to go to any parks, especially not back in the inner-city. “Well, where did you play,” I asked him. This is when the vase fell off the shelf. He informed me that he had learned to play by shooting in his driveway. He spent hours every day shooting and dribbling next to his house, in the driveway, by himself. At those words, I wished him luck the next day, but in my heart I knew what was coming: crash and burn.

The scrimmage began and it went exactly as I had feared it would for Nazir. One of our senior guards, who wasn’t quite ready to step aside for this new, young, hotshot, arranged it so he could guard Nazir in the scrimmage. Everyone on Nazir’s team was confident, knowing how good he was. They knew all they had to do was get him the ball and he would carry them to victory. On the first play on his end, Nazir ran the offensive play beautifully, caught the ball and sent up a shot. This shot was different from his many other shots during the first week-and-a-half of practice. Rather than the perfect, eye-catching masterpieces he had been launching, this shot looked more like an injured Canadian goose trying desperately to keep up with the other birds. The shot didn’t even hit the rim; it unceremoniously banged off the bottom corner of the backboard. The senior defender smiled because he now knew what I had feared. Nazir was a driveway player.

The remainder of the practice season went for Nazir as it does for most of the players of this sort. He continued to fail in scrimmages and his confidence plummeted, despite our best efforts to encourage him. We put him on the team, hoping that his great potential might be realized at some point, but he never recovered. He limped through the season without ever making a contribution to the team and quit the team over the summer.

Nazir discovered what so many other hopeful young men had. Shooting in a driveway or a gym all by themselves is of some value, but it is of almost no value if they never learn how to play in real situations. Hitting a shot is one thing. Hitting it when you’re tired, sweaty, and have a determined defender hanging all over you is quite another thing. Nazir was completely ineffective when the real heat came. He looked great in the driveway, but he simply could not handle what a seasoned, gritty defender was going to do to him. It interrupted his flow, broke his concentration, and stifled everything he wanted to do. He simply didn’t know how to respond. Players that looked far inferior to Nazir passed him by in his scrimmages because they were calm and collected under the fire of a real game. Anyone can make basket after basket when they are by themselves in a driveway (My sincerest apologies to those who have tried and cannot yet master the fine art of putting the ball in the hoop), not everyone can do it when the pressure is on and the opponent is attacking.

So, what is the point of all of this? Simply this: this same phenomenon happens to teenagers every day on a spiritual level. There is a disturbing phenomenon that is far too common in the Christian world. Teenagers who were raised in a Christian home and seemingly begin to walk with Christ as His disciple, crash and burn right before the very eyes of their parents, youth workers, and spiritual family. How could this happen? Why does this happen so often? Kids who seem so spiritually mature and sound crash and burn during the test of the high school years and by college have completely walked away from their faith in Christ.

Is this just a normal phase of growing up or is this a problem that can be fixed? I am convinced that this all-too-common phenomenon is not just part of being a teen. It is a result of a well-thought-out plan of attack by Satan. Satan is a formidable adversary, yet he has already been defeated Christ. Anything Satan can throw at us, no matter how fierce it may be, can be overcome by following biblical principles.

What happened to Nazir is very similar to what far too many parents have done unwittingly to their children in the spiritual realm. We have not prepared them fully for what they will face in the world, yet we send them out there anyway. We have given them a false sense of security, mostly because we have a false sense of their security.

“Wait”, you might say. “That is not so. Most Christian parents in the churches of Christ do train their children according to wonderful biblical principles.” Whether that is entirely true or not is not to be considered in this book. Many parents are doing their very best to raise Christian children; children who love and obey God. Their kids can pray, they can rattle off memory scriptures, they sing with all their might, they hug fellow Christians, they volunteer their time, and they are the complete “disciple in training.” The problem is that they are shooting in the driveway. They are learning the art of Christianity in the safety of our churches and homes without the duress of the real world.

Parents are not aware that everyday their children walk out of our homes they are under attack. They are under siege on the way to school, at school, on the way home, while watching TV, while listening to the radio, while talking to their friends, just about everywhere. The world has declared war on our children. More accurately, Satan has declared war on our children and has enlisted the world as his minions.

What surprises most parents is not where the attack comes but from whom it comes. It would not shock many parents if I told them that one of the most dangerous spiritual environments for their children is at school. Most parents know all too well the dangers of peer pressure and bad influences. This is not, however the most dangerous aspect of a public education. The most dangerous spiritual aspect of a public education is the education itself.

Our kids are under a very intentional and specific attack that is aimed at their minds. Right under our noses, our Christian children are being sent to school and taught to think differently and view the world through anything but biblical lenses.

They are being taught that the idea of a creator God is an unnecessary and unscientific view that is little different from believing that the world rests on the back of a giant turtle. It is the same type of people, they are told, that believe in a Creator that once believed in things like the flat earth. Instead they are told that we are all here quite by accident. The blind forces of evolution are the real cause of life on earth. What one believes about the origins of the universe has an inestimable impact on the way one views the world.

With the belief that life is a mere accident, comes the moral relativity that is so common to the worldviews of secular humanism and post-modernism. I know of no Christian parents who would pack their kids a lunch and send them off to a Muslim or Mormon school everyday. If they were somehow in a situation where there was no other choice, they would be sure to do a great deal of work to discover what they were being taught. They would prepare them for it and do a great deal of teaching to counteract the worldview and beliefs that their children were being fed at school. What these same evangelical Christian parents don’t realize, however, is that they are, in fact, sending their children to schools that hold a religious view other than their own. Most public schools in America are firmly rooted in the religious worldview of secular humanism, post-modern secular humanism to be more exact.

Just as there are different aspects of Christianity such as Catholic, liberal mainline, evangelical, protestant, etc., so there are different aspects of secular humanism. The public schools in the United States of America have become temples of post-modern secular humanism.

The problem, however, is not so much the worldview taught in the schools. It is the fact that parents are largely unaware of this worldview training that their kids receive and so they leave them unprepared. The kids are taught a version of Christianity that will fail them in the face of the enemy that they are facing. Just as a basketball team must prepare specifically for the opponent that they are facing, Christian parents must prepare their kids for the test that lies before them.

Rather than preparing them for a world in which the real war is one of worldviews and the battlefield is in the mind, they are being spiritually trained in a way that will not properly prepare them for the real menace.

We, as a Christian community, are simply not preparing our kids for the pressure that the world will put on them. The world will tell them that everything they have grown up to believe is wrong. Sometimes this message will be obvious. All too often it is much more subtle and sinister. We are teaching them to be Christians, yes. But we are not doing so well when it comes to teaching them to be defenders of the faith.

The symptoms of this deficiency are clear. I see them in pre-teen, teen, and even campus ministries everywhere. The parents jump through all the hoops to ensure that their child will grow up to love God and be a disciple of Jesus. They pray without ceasing that their kids will not have to go through what they went through as non-Christian adults. And in fact it appears to work. Their kids sail through their childhood years. They are wonderful, respectful, God-fearing children. Then they hit the pre-teen years and cracks begin to appear. The parents see signs of disrespect, of poor attitudes, and even indifference. The parents shake it off telling themselves that these are just the normal struggles of a pre-teen.