By Heidi Shott
In the mid-1980s, when my husband Scott and I were first married and living in his hometown of Bluefield, West Virginia, we were asked to take on the junior high youth group at the big Presbyterian church where he had grown up. Today, if you were to shine lights into our eyes and ask us to name the kids we worked with over that year or two, we could name about five of the 15 to 20 kids involved in the program.
I particularly remember Daniel, a seventh grade smart aleck, who once, when chastised for his annoying behavior, said, “Hey, it’s a free country.” To which Scott, perhaps a tad imprudently, replied, “Not if you’re dead, Daniel.”
We would meet every Sunday in the youth room at 5 p.m. having begun to consider the evening’s program just a few hours earlier. Scott surely played his guitar, and I’m certain we played silly games to start. I vaguely recall one serious conversation about some contemporary issue and have a dim memory of working our way through the Gospel of Mark. We always concluded the evening with a boisterous visit to the Dairy Queen on Cumberland Road.
Sometimes a group of kids would come over to the little house we were renting to play games and watch videos. The girls and I made an unsuccessful attempt at constructing and decorating gingerbread houses one evening, but we ate a lot of candy and laughed hard at our lopsided handiwork.
The fact is that we were terrible youth leaders. When I started working for the diocese ten years ago and saw the amount of thoughtful planning and preparation that goes into each diocesan youth event, I felt ashamed for having been such a blithe and knuckleheaded youth leader. Scott and I had no plan but we genuinely liked the kids even though they were tiring and seemingly impervious to anything we had to say about walking humbly or otherwise with their God. At that time in a small southern city like Bluefield there was – probably still is – a cultural component to being a part of a church youth group. Just about all the kids had some kind of church connection. These kids kept showing up every Sunday night and so would we and whatever happened, happened.
So when, early one recent morning, I opened an email from a friend saying that someone named Steve from Bluefield had contacted him after seeing our photos on his web site, I was nonplussed. Steve who? I bounded upstairs and shook Scott awake.
“Did you go to high school with a guy named Steve M—?”
“Whaaa?”
By noon, after a few mistaken identities, we realized that Steve had been a member of our junior high youth group and he was now 35 years old. Suddenly I remembered him: a little guy with dark hair and bright red lips. He was cute and well-behaved, which is probably why I didn’t recall him at first. Steve, it turns out, is a full-time middle school ministries director at a huge United Methodist church in Tennessee. He said he has tried for years to find us.
He wrote to Scott, “I want to thank you and Heidi for all the time spent with me during my early junior high years. Who would have thought that playing Monopoly and watching old zombie movies with a junior high kid would plant a seed in his life?”
Whaaa? Dude, we would never have thought that. Surely you’re mistaken. Surely it wasn’t anything we did.
But as I’ve mulled it over for the past few days, I guess it was something we did. We had blindly, unthinkingly really, said “yes” to a call. We didn’t do it well; we weren’t gifted youth leaders, nor could we be ever be described as dedicated. Steve obviously had other, more skilled people who mentored him and helped shape his vocation and spiritual journey along the way.
We just took him bowling, bought him ice cream at Dairy Queen, laughed at his jokes, and gave him a ride home. Holy cow! Can ministry be as simple as that?
Can ministry be as simple as a couple of knuckleheads saying “yes” when asked serve and then letting the Holy Spirit do its mysterious thing? I’ve been mulling it over, and it seems the answer to that question is “yes.”
Heidi Shott is Canon for Communications and Social Justice in the Episcopal Diocese of Maine.