Becoming a Spiritually Influential Parent transcript
[00:00:00] Do you have children who've walked away from the church because they found it to be irrelevant? Do they not respond to the spiritual authority of the Bible, the church, or your pastor? Do you want to learn how to increase your spiritual influence with your kids? I designed this podcast just for you.
Greetings, everybody. My name is Pastor John Yoder, and I'm your host for the podcast series Cross-Cultural Parenting. Over the past years, I've come to know marvelous Christian leaders who are very gifted at making disciples of young adult American-born children of immigrants. These young people as teens and as young adults found the church to be boring and irrelevant to their lives.
But these Christian leaders learned [00:01:00] how to present the gospel in English, and in ways that related to their particular needs. They have been successful in guiding them to become fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ.
Some of these presenters are pastors. They have learned by hands-on experience how to preach worship and lead in ways that attract the American-born.
Some of these presenters are counselors. They have degrees in psychology, but they are completely committed to the word of God as truth. They know how to help young people address the common issues of the day, like anxiety, depression, pornography, video games, gender issues and more.
You can hear the voices of these presenters in our podcast, and you can engage with them and you can ask questions from them in our Facebook group. I will be inside that Facebook group, and I am glad to answer any questions you have.
So I want to ask you to do two things. First of all, I want to ask you to join our Facebook group. It's simply called Cross-Cultural Parenting. And I'd like you to click on the link to receive weekly emails to hear about new podcast episodes we have as they come out. And when you do, you'll receive a free copy of our Guidebook, “Spiritually Influencing your Adult Children”.
Let me tell you just a little bit about me. For several years, I was one of the pastors of the Beijing International Christian Fellowship. It's one of the most multicultural churches in the world. We had services in 11 languages. I've been to 17 Asian countries.
And now that we're back in Minnesota, I have had the honor of worshiping in more than 80 different immigrant churches, African, Latino, and more. The pastors are from Mexico, Liberia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Kenya, Belarus, and many other places. I have taken pastors to lunch and tea, and I have heard their stories--how they've come to the US, how they've planted churches, how they've done really amazing works for God.
I want to say to all of you who are born in another country, who grew up somewhere else and you've come here as adults: You are my heroes. I admire you.
I've discovered that there are three things you're amazingly gifted at. The first is winning to Christ, others who have come here from your homeland. The second is planting churches among them. And the third is doing missions among those who still live in your homeland.
But there is one area where most of you struggle, and that is communicating the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively to your children who were born in the United States.
I want to make it very clear, this is not your fault. The reality is your kids think and learn very differently than you do. First of all, they are English dominant. Secondly, they learn better by dialogue and interaction than by lectures and sermons.
And thirdly, they have a shorter attention span than your generation or mine.
In addition to that, by the time they reach middle school, they have learned more vocabulary to talk about mental health, gender, and race issues than most older Americans like me, and most of you who are foreign born. The primary issues that they are struggling with are often those issues of identity, mental health, gender, and race, which are frequently not addressed in our churches. And as a result, those young people find that Jesus and the church are irrelevant to their lives.
In the 13 years that Sherry and I lived in China. It wasn't enough for us to simply learn the Mandarin language. We had to learn how to eat with chopsticks. We had to learn to ride the crowded subways. We had to learn how to use the squatty potty. We had to enter the world of the Chinese people and not ask them to think and function like Americans.
Many times, I heard Americans come to China and give lectures and presentations that weren't wrong. They were biblical. But they did not understand the needs of the Chinese people, and so the lessons were irrelevant to them.
In the very same way, I have heard sermons in immigrant churches that were not wrong.
They were fully biblically accurate. And they resonated with the adults in the room, but failed to address the needs of the young people in the room. And for those reasons, those young people are checking out of church.
I am not saying these things to blame you. I know the barriers you face. Those barriers are quite formidable.
One of the biggest barriers you face is time and money. Most immigrant pastors I know have a full-time job outside the church. Their people have two jobs or more. They're starting businesses. They work 60 hours a week. There is no budget to reach their kids. That is why all of our resources are free. Our podcast, our Facebook group are free of charge.
They're not only free, they're convenient. You can listen during the commute in your car, on the bus, wherever it might be. You can engage in the Facebook group whenever you have time. All of our resources will fit into the cracks around your schedule.
A second barrier that many of you face is a knowledge barrier. There is no way to understand or control all the information your children are exposed to on the internet. There is also no way to understand or control everything they're exposed to in their schools, both among teachers and faculty, and among their classmates as well.
They are learning terms that you may have never heard of, such as ADHD, psychosis, body dysmorphia, intersectionality, and a whole lot more. You can feel totally overwhelmed trying to cope with this flood of information.
Our presenters understand this language. They explain it from a biblical perspective. And they help young people processing all of these concepts to bring them under the lordship of Jesus Christ.
A third and maybe even more difficult barrier is the barrier of isolation. You might be the only person in your church addressing these issues. I know so many church leaders who do not feel that the church is an appropriate place to discuss sex or emotions. And as a result, the church stays silent on those issues. You may feel totally unsupported, but you do not need to walk alone. You can listen to our presenters in our podcast and you can engage with gifted ministry leaders in our Facebook group.
A fourth barrier that many face is trust. People from Western cultures are ready to trust others they have never met, if they have the right credentials. So if you visit our website, you will learn that I have a Master of Divinity degree from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary. You'll learn that I am an ordained minister of the Evangelical Free Church of America. Many Westerners would conclude John's a good guy. We can trust him. We can rely on the resources on his website.
But in many global cultures, trust is not gained by sharing one's credentials or accomplishments. Trust is gained by face-to-face conversations. Having tea. Sharing a meal together. And until that conversation has happened, trust has not been earned to speak into the life of that congregation.
Here's the problem. In the Minneapolis/St. Paul area alone, there are more than 700 immigrant churches. Most are small, with an average size of 30. It is impossible to bring somebody like our pastors, our counselors, our presenters into every one of those churches to have tea, to share the hug, and to do what it takes to earn that relational trust.
What needs to happen? There needs to be a gateway person who has already earned the trust of that community, someone they listen to. That gateway person could be someone else who's come to the US as an adult. It could be someone in their second or third generation in the US. Or it could be somebody like me whose family has been in the US for multiple generations.
Whoever that gateway person is, they have gained credibility by face-to-face presence. A person like that can share our resources in a way that is far more likely to gain a positive reception than simply pointing them to a website.
Friends, I realize how hard this is. You're dealing with issues you've never dealt with before. You're dealing with issues that make you uncomfortable. They make others uncomfortable. They might even make others be opposed to what you're saying. You're working in your second language. And you might be doing this alone, without anybody else's support. It's so much easier to keep doing what you've always been doing, because those things are still very effective at reaching the first generation.
I'd like to encourage you to think about this from the perspective of eternity. A hundred years from today, when you and I are in heaven, you will not care what language your children spoke on earth. You will not care which church they attended. You will not be concerned about their citizenship, their education, or their marital status.
You will be concerned about one thing and one alone, and that is, Did your children know Jesus Christ and did they enter heaven? Brothers and sisters, please do not let language, culture, isolation or personal comfort hold you back from presenting the good news of Jesus Christ in a way that sounds like good news in the ears of your children.
Let me encourage you once again to click on the link to join our Facebook group, and to click on the other link to receive notification of new weekly episodes, and to receive a free copy of our Guidebook "Spiritually Influencing Your Adult Children.
The Apostle John said in Third John verse four, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth”. Brothers and sisters, may each one of you experience that joy of seeing your children walk in truth. May God guide each one of you into unexpected ways of sharing Christ effectively with your next generations.
