The day is finally here, my first day on the job as a Student Ministries Pastor! So much excitement about the journey ahead, but I know it's not going to be a smooth road. Over the past three months I've been sharing the responsibilities with the summer intern. A few months earlier the current youth pastor had left the position. I don't want to go into a lot of details about that, but I will say that once I started the position I felt that the youth group had just gone through a very painful separation and divorce. The young man, who I replaced, was the first youth pastor our students had at TRBC. He was a great guy, built a lot of solid relationships with the students but it was still a rough separation. My wife and I had been facilitating DivorceCare for the last five years and seeing the pain that comes from separation and divorce was really similar to what we were experiencing with the students in this youth group. This was the first hurdle that we had to overcome in our brand-new ministry.
Coming into this I already had some thoughts and ideas and game plans that I believe God had laid on my heart for this youth group and for me. One of the things was a desire to get to know the other youth pastors in our community and to work together in serving the community of Gonzales as one youth group and yet staying very independent in our own youth groups, more about that later.
Within my first week I'll never forget leaving Whataburger after lunch one day and as I drove by the football stadium I just really remember how God laid on my heart teenage parents. I remember saying, “this is my first week on the job I have a lot of things that I need to get used to are you sure you want me to start this new ministry so early?” This is just one of those things that you try to set aside and He keeps bringing it back, you set it aside then He brings it back. During a conversation one afternoon, with one of the ladies in our church, I was sharing with her what God had laid on my heart several months earlier. She told me that teen parents were also heavy on her heart because she had been a teen parent. In sharing this with my senior pastor he told me that this is an area that is near and dear to the heart of our core. At the time of this conversation our church was approximately 3 years old. He shared with me the conversations that went on in the very beginning with the core families. I started researching teen parenthood in our city and our state and in the nation. The things I discovered in my research were not only shocking but really disappointing. Our local high school, of only 600 students, was just barely through half of the school year and one of the counselors at the high school told me that this year alone new pregnancies, not counting existing teen parents but new moms and dads was already at 17. Learning that our state, TX, is third in the nation for first-time pregnancies and we rank number one in the nation for second time pregnancies for teens. Quickly I found many women in our congregation that had the same burden as I did and we began putting together a program for teen moms and dads. We didn’t want to leave the dad out as many of the fine programs out there are strictly focused towards the moms. Understanding that dads usually don't stick around which leaves the teen mom by herself without support from him, we wanted to try to keep him involved. Like many programs that are begun in the church this one had its troubles. The people on the planning team had trouble with commitment to meetings and following through with assignments, due to their own busy schedules with families and jobs. These were all things that contributed to putting this program on hold for a while. I still believe that this is something that God wants us to do here in our community but I also believe that it wasn't meant to be the way we were going about. This is still an area that comes to my heart on a consistent basis. I am waiting on God to show when the time is right to pull the plans out and begin getting things back in motion for this important opportunity to reach young people who have made a choice and will need guidance in living with the outcome of those choices.
