The Slow Way: Formulas, Young People, and Spiritual Harm

Considering Cara Meredith's new book "Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, And How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation"

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

At some point my senior year of high school, after I’d spent the few years of my faithful teenage life reading scripture for ten minutes every morning, just as my youth pastor had taught me to do, I came to a surprising conclusion, one I wasn’t sure what to do about: Jesus never presented the Plan of Salvation in his teaching! And actually, the Apostle Paul didn’t really either.

Could this be possible? The most important part of every church service? The very point of my being alive, as so many of the spiritual guides had taught me! My first task when sitting on an airplane, or meeting a new person at a sporting event! I was to take a deep breath, throw out the part of me that longed to be normal, and live for something bigger and harder. I was supposed to always be ready to talk about the meaning of the universe, to present how to overcome eternal separation from God in three simple steps, explained through a few clear verses in Romans. This, I’d been told, was the point of being alive. Everything else—beauty, work, passions—they were gravy, distractions if we didn’t get our stuff together.

All of this was confusing. And as I got older, I began to see that very few of the adults I knew actually lived their lives this way, even though everything at church said we were supposed to. Saving other folks’ eternal souls was supposed to be the most important thing in our lives. Why wasn’t it? It didn’t all compute.

So I did what I’d been taught to do when I didn’t understand what the grown ups were telling me to do with my faith: I read the Bible more.

If I ever write a memoir about how I left the evangelical tradition, I think I’ll call it: They Told Me To Read My Bible. The Bible is a dangerous and powerful tool. And far more complex than ten verses synchronized and shaped into the cross shaped tract I passed around during recess in 5th grade. The more I read the teaching of Jesus, and the interpretation of Paul, the more I wasn’t so sure that “being saved” was what all the grown ups had told me it was.

Jesus taught something pretty different. He seemed to care a lot more about the Kingdom of God than about individuals completing a ritualistic one-two-three plan for relationship with God.

He taught that the Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field. It’s like a merchant looking for fine pearls. He said, life with God is like a man who scatters seed night and day…whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. Jesus said this kingdom, this way of being alive with God, is like a mustard seed...the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree.

Jesus was intent on helping his listeners connect with the love of God, which to Jesus, meant searching for a treasure and not giving up—but devoting our whole lives to the search. For Jesus, it meant scattering seeds and not only trusting that they will grow, but celebrating when they do. For Jesus, it meant living by faith that the smallest of things can become the most beautiful and most important.

That kind of teaching is not easy to create a formula out of. Most of Jesus’s teachings fail to be categorized or organized or placed in tiers of knowledge. In fact, I’m afraid Jesus’s teachings can sometimes get in the way of Christianity’s big ideas.

Enter Cara Meredith’s new book Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, And How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation.* Cara is asking big questions, not just about the formula often used (and misused) when it comes to introducing young people to the person of Jesus, but she is also asking White Evangelical culture to reckon with the ways its formulaic teachings, exclusionary practices, and tendencies to present faith with a consumeristic lens has led to harm for an entire generation of young people, especially young people of color and LGBTQ+ youth.

And, as Cara writes: “I believe in a Jesus who does no harm.”

Cara is confronting her own questions as a person who knows Christian Camping deeply. She spent summers of her high school and college years working zip lines and lifeguarding. She became a teacher in order to have summers free to speak at camp. And she eventually left her teaching job to work full time for an evangelical parachurch organization that required her to spend a month every year at camp, speaking or coordinating the program for hundreds of campers a week. In short, she has the right to ask these questions, not only because she has spent so much of her life a part of Christian camping, but because she deeply loves it.

While Cara is no longer speaking to hundreds of teenagers at Christian camps, she is a public theologian and writer, whose job is to ask important questions. One of the questions she’s asking is this: What causes spiritual harm to young people?

Does pushing a specific formula of conversion do harm? And is that specific formula of conversion most often presented at evangelical youth camps harmful? Is it particularly harmful for the marginalized—young people of color, LGBTQ+ kids, or the disabled?

Formulas of conversion are nothing new, but they take on a particular flavor and transactional nature when placed in a camp setting among young, vulnerable people. “At what point does staking claim to an atonement theory, such as penal substitutionary atonement, cross the line?,” Cara asks. “When do good intentions instead result in further harm, let alone psychological and spiritual damage?”

This past Wednesday Tim, my youth ministry co-leader at church, taught our high school students about some of those tricky teachings of Jesus, the ones that aren’t so formulaic. The ones that don’t necessarily tell us what to do next in our pursuit of God, but simply open us to the possibility that God is worth looking for like a treasure in a field, or already taking the little we have like a mustard seed and growing it into a tree. His lesson probably left our students with more questions than answers, and I think that’s good.

I spent my younger years in ministry following a form of youth ministry that, honestly, felt a little safer, a little easier, than the way I care for students now. I showed young people exactly what to do to have a relationship with God: How to take these tools and this plan and build themselves a structure for faith. Here’s how to get themselves in order, how to be good, what to expect. In ministry, this feels wonderful to offer, but it doesn’t prepare young people for how God actually works in the world. When they are confronted with the reality that God’s work in their lives will look a lot more like chaotic seeds growing than like an orderly built structure, my formulas can’t serve them. Jesus’s descriptions of the Kingdom of God will. Faith will always look like seeds grown into trees, like treasures hidden in fields.

I’m still learning how to live a life of faith in the Jesus Way, as opposed to the formulaic way. This makes guiding young people into this Way even more challenging and, honestly, more simple than I’m prepared for. I’m still learning.

What I love about Cara’s book is her insistence—not that camp is bad, but that the formula has hurt people. Cara writes: “Jesus isn’t so much a shiny bauble to me anymore as he is a liberator and a blesser.” She wants to see the liberation. She wants young people to hear a message that is bigger than a transaction. The kind of blessing that looks like a mustard seed suddenly grown into a tree where the creatures rest. No formulas there, but wow. So much life.

* I can’t write about Cara’s book without noting that Cara and I have been friends for over a decade. We met as she was leaving full time ministry with the same parachurch organization I had worked for a few years prior. She was focusing on her babies and her budding writing career at the same as I was. And we both lived in the Bay Area at the time. We had a lot in common. She has been a dear friend and one of my most significant writing partners all these years since. So when I write about her book here, please know I have spent time with it from its conception to the final product.

A Slow Practice

What are the formulas you have either been taught or taught yourself to rely on in your spiritual life? And how have these formulas helped you or harmed you?

I think of those of us who have held ideas of karma, that we deserve good things from God if we do good things. Or those of us who cling to notions of earned blessing: if we pray enough God will intervene and fix our lives or the lives of those we love.

Take out a journal and spend some time with these questions:

What spiritual formulas are you holding? How have those formulas helped you? How have they harmed you?

Where did these formulas come from? Are they from scripture? Are they passed down from your spiritual teachers, from your time in church? Are they simply accepted phrases that you’ve received over time?

What formulas do you need to let go of? If you let them go, what do you need to believe in their place? How will you fill the gap they leave in your belief systems?

What are some of Jesus’s most confusing explanations of faith or the “kingdom of God”? How might you begin to incorporate that non-formulaic understanding of faith into your daily rhythms?

Close your time of reflection with this prayer:

Oh Mystery, You are a seed worth watching for. You are a treasure worth searching for. You are beyond my formulas, and beneath and beyond every formula is Love.

A List of Things:

• I highly recommend Cara Meredith’s book, which releases this Tuesday, April 29. If you or anyone you know or love have been part of Christian camping in the past, this book is worth a read, if only to open up conversations about what camp should be and could be. I’m excited to see how it becomes part of the greater conversation around theology and church.

• Speaking of conversation, Cara and I will be chatting on Instagram Live about her book this Tuesday at 12 ET/ 9:30 PT. If you miss it, I’ll post it so you can catch up later!

• Thanks for your patience as I’ve been traveling around this past month with speaking events and the family. I know my regular posts around here have taken a hit. I’m excited to get back into regular posts, sharing about what I’m reading and interacting with you. It’s my favorite time of year. Happy Easter! Happy end-of-the-school-year! Happy summer-vacation-planning! Happy yard project-doing! I hope you’re getting some lovely outdoor time and spend as many days celebrating Easter as you did sacrificing during Lent.

• One more thing. For my readers who are fascinated by the Pope’s funeral, the Conclave, and all Papal related things, I highly recommend my brother Jason Boyett’s substack The Religiverse, which does an incredible job covering all things religion. Jason is a journalist with a background in religion writing, and whose most recent book is a primer on the 12 major religions of the world. He’s great at explaining exactly what’s going on and why.