It was my first summer on staff at my church as the student pastor. I had started just two months before our annual summer camp. Our ministry had been going to this camp for 13 years, so I couldn’t wait to see what it was all about!
The first night of camp, I felt a bit like a teacher in the first week of school. There was a sense that some of the students might try to test me, to see if the new guy would be the adult in the room. Then I heard that someone had brought hair clippers—yes, like a razor and scissors specifically made to cut hair. You might think differently than I do, but I was quick to say “there will be no shaving of heads at camp.” For me, it’s important to bring students home to their parents in the same state in which they were dropped off!
While I don’t regret this rule (in fact, it still exists today), I would communicate differently if I had the chance to do it all over again. Stating the boundary quickly made the existence of hair clippers feel like a joke. Instead, had I been more intentional in simply explaining why I didn’t want students to cut their hair, maybe things would have gone differently.
Back to that first night at camp: A few hours passed and I received word that there has indeed been the shaving of heads. I came to our cabin of recent graduates and rising seniors, surprised to find three boys have full buzzcuts. Funny? Yes, but I couldn’t let them know that. A direct disobeying of the rule I had just established? Also yes. The normal authoritative threat at camp is “I don’t want to have to call your parents and send you home early.” Sometimes it is necessary to send a student home for the wellbeing of the group, but rarely is that the first step.
There are times when we travel with students that discipline will be an important and necessary part of our relational discipleship efforts. Below are four things I keep in mind as I seek to love my students to Christ, even when it involves correction.
Understanding the Heart of Discipline
As ministers, may we always remember that God entrusts our students’ souls to us to steward and shepherd. This means we can look to him as our example in how to care for our students. When parents drop off a student for an overnight event—for example, a week at camp—the youth minister takes on full responsibility of caring for that teenager. While youth ministers aren’t the parents of their students, parents are trusting youth ministers to look after and care for their students. As a result, that shepherding will sometimes include discipline. Proverbs 3:11-12 says, “My son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline or be weary of his reproof, for the Lord reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.”
Scripture reminds us that all of us have fallen short of the glory of God, all of us have sinned. As a result, the Lord often needs to discipline us in our shortcomings. Solomon reminds us of the heart of God, the heart of discipline—love. God disciplines us because he loves us, like a father or mother might seek to discipline their children (albeit imperfectly).
I have a 10-month-old daughter. It’s safe to say there isn’t a lot of discipline at this moment, but there are small glimpses! She LOVES to splash her hand in the dog bowl…Mom and Dad don’t love that. It’s also dangerous for her as a crawler. If she goes to crawl on our wooden floor with wet hands, she could slip and hit her head. Out of love, we tell her “no.” Out of love we pull her away from the dog bowl. She feels frustrated and cries, but the momentary discipline will benefit her in the long run. The author of Hebrews helps paint this future-focused picture of discipline for us: “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it,” (cf. Heb. 12:4-11).
Ultimately, every disciplinary situation presents an opportunity for the gospel because a soul rebelling is a soul in need of Christ’s saving work.
Casting Vision for Your Students
Enforcing boundaries with students is especially challenging when students don’t trust you or your heart. For whatever reason, they may have drawn their own conclusions about your motives, which leads them to have motives of their own. It’s important to cast a vision for your students. Vision helps you go from the “rules guy who doesn’t want students to have fun” to the “leader that cares about me.”
Why do rules exist at camp? For our ministry, rules exist to set students up for an encounter with the Lord. I repeat this over and over and over again. Many of my students make fun of me for it or finish my sentences. Here’s the deal: you know they get it when they start to tease you about it.
At the end of the day, we can’t force anyone to want God, but we can do everything in our power to set up an environment that facilitates an encounter with him. Rules with a clear vision contribute to that environment by helping students know what we expect of them and why.
Standing Your Ground
No one can spot a fake person better than a teenager. Inconsistency is your biggest enemy as a leader. Students respond to consistency of word and deed, character and expectation. “Is he setting these rules to avoid trouble or does he actually mean what he says?” “He won’t actually give a consequence if we cut our hair, right?” My first summer at camp was a test run. Not for all of my students, but for the ones who like to push boundaries. Did I send anyone home for cutting their hair? No, but I was willing to.
In this instance, I pulled each individual out of the cabin, one at a time, and asked them this question: “What was it about ‘there will be no shaving of heads at camp’ that you didn’t understand? I believe you’re a man who respects authority, but you directly disobeyed me, so how could I have been more clear?” I remember that moment like it was yesterday…each of them stood there in silence.
Standing firm in your decisions allows you to offer grace and mercy. Grace and mercy open the door for the gospel. For example, my conversation that night with John (not his actual name) wasn’t easy and it wasn’t fun. I shared with him how I could send him home.
Then I told him that I didn’t want to do that. I made sure he heard directly from me that my heart was for him to encounter God this week. That if I sent him home, I felt I would be removing that opportunity—an opportunity that could be life-altering! Since I cared for him and wanted what’s best for him, I forgave him for directly disobeying the rule I had set. I asked him to take advantage of this second chance, to embrace camp for all that God had for him that week.
Here’s how John describes this conversation today, “Seeing you demonstrate grace to me was something I was relatively unfamiliar with. I was so used to the worldly way of discipline, marked by anger. When you approached me, you treated me with kindness. I felt like you truly just wanted the best for me. That was something I’d never really seen before, and it truly convicted me.” To this day, he would tell you it was a turning point in his life. It was nothing I did, but it was everything God did through this moment of discipline. That very summer, John heard the gospel by word and experienced it by deed. That very summer, John was baptized and has since been forever changed.
Inviting Student to Rise to the Occasion
One of the tensions with discipline is discerning what rules to make and not to make. However, the more time I spend with students, the more I realize how capable they truly are. While rules can be limits or boundaries for students’ behavior; rules also provide opportunities for us to watch students rise to the occasion.
Paul encourages Timothy in saying, “Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity,” (1 Tim. 4:12). Now, Timothy was not a teenager when Paul wrote this, many believe him to be in his thirties. The point however, remains the same—what others think about you due to your age does not define who you are. The world tells our students who they shouldn’t be and what they shouldn’t do. Maybe the biggest thing we can do for our students is to call them higher and then watch as the Spirit sanctifies them, molding them into the image of Christ day by day, until he returns to make all things new.
Showing Students Jesus
Stepping into moments of discipline with our students is never easy. It’s certainly not the fun part of the job or the reason we went into youth ministry, but it is an important way we show them Jesus. Paul shows us what happens when mankind operates without boundaries in Romans 1. The phrase he uses is “God gave them up,” and the result is clear: when man is left to himself, he always chooses sin (cf. Rom. 3:10-12).
Understanding our own sinful nature is at the core of the gospel, but so is grace and mercy. Rules and discipline that are motivated by God’s unmerited grace and mercy can be the means by which God helps a student turn from his or her sin and run toward Christ. God can use discipline—as one part of our discipleship efforts—to make the difference for eternity in a student’s life.
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