Kids, Risk, Leadership and Outreach

I’ve been reading about the importance of taking risks in leadership.  If you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t taking risks.

However, we adults have a tendancy to think that we are the only people who can take risks.

Here’s the problem as I see it:

According to Barna, 43% of people become Christians before the age of 13, and 64% of people accept Christ before the age of 19.

However, when our kids start developing a relationship with Jesus, our tendancy is to encourage them to develop friendships with other Christians, and to avoid kids who are headed for trouble.

Consequently, we are removing the missionaries from the segment of people who are most likely to accept Jesus.

Why?

We are scared for them.  We don’t trust them to stand tall in their relationship with Jesus.  We are afraid they will fail.  What happens when you fail?

• You prove you are human.
• You figure out what not to do.
• You learn to hear God’s voice.
• You develop your boundaries.
• You learn.

Therefore, we are not only stunting our missionary force, we are also encouraging our children to not build their ability to hear God’s voice and walk in it until they are ‘old enough’.  By then, they have their lives firmly planted within the church, and the only way they know how to reach out to people who don’t know Jesus is through preaching.

What if we were to become prayer warriors, trust God with our kids, and trust them to listen to Him and walk in it?  What if we became mentors in how to walk with people who don’t know Jesus and maintain your faith?  What would difference would that make?