Between Sundays
Many of you know that before I came to Calvary, before I found my footing as a pastor, I found it somewhere else entirely, in a room full of teenagers.
Since 1994, as a college student who volunteered with my home church in Alexandria, VA, youth ministry has been where my call began to take shape. Where I first learned what it meant to shepherd, to listen, to take someone seriously when the world hadn’t quite gotten around to it yet. I carry that with me everywhere I go. I carry it into this pastoral appointment. Into the classrooms I have the privilege to teach in, and I carry it into this Sunday with particular joy, even as I have to confess something to you: I won’t be with you in person.
This Sunday I will be fulfilling another one of my most important callings, being a mom. My daughter’s lacrosse team is celebrating Senior Day, and as a junior parent I have obligations that simply cannot be moved. But I will be joining you all via our live stream. And, there is something almost fitting about that, if you’ll allow me the reflection.
This week, our youth will lead us in worship. They will bring their thoughts, their prayers, their questions, and their faith to the front of our sanctuary, and I want to invite you to receive what they offer with the full weight of your attention. Not the indulgent smile we sometimes offer young people, the isn’t that sweet kind of listening. But the real kind. The kind that says: I believe you have something to say that I need to hear.
In our Tuesday Bible study this week, we sat with the story of Thomas, that beloved, complicated, thoroughly human disciple who needed to see before he could believe. And one of the questions we wrestled with was: Consider a time when you doubted what you had been told, seen, felt, or experienced, and how doubt, especially self-doubt, undermines confidence.
As a mother of three young adults making their way in the world, I know something about the fierce, urgent desire to instill confidence in a child. To give them something strong enough to stand on when the world, and it will, tries to knock them down. Self-doubt is insidious. It whispers that you are too young, too inexperienced, too unproven to matter. And our young people hear those whispers constantly, from a hundred different directions.
That is exactly why I keep returning to Paul’s instruction to Timothy: Let no one look down on you because of your youth. It wasn’t a suggestion. It was pastoral defiance. A direct challenge to any community that would diminish a young person’s voice, gifts, or presence simply because of their age.
And it is a challenge I want to lay before us as a congregation.
I have said this before and I will keep saying it, because I believe it with everything I am. Our young people are not the future of the church. They are the church. Right now. Right here. Alongside us. Their faith is not a rehearsal for some later, more serious version. It is the real thing, and it is happening in real time. It is precisely why multigenerational ministry is not a program or a strategy for us at Calvary, it is at the very heart of who we are and what we are called to be together.
So, I want to ask us an honest question: what are we offering them? Because yes, we are grateful for young hands that move tables and set up chairs, and that gratitude is genuine. But if that is the fullest expression of belonging we extend to our young people, we have fallen far short of what this community can be.
This Sunday, when a young person stands before you in worship and shares something of their interior life, their doubts, their hopes, their prayers, I want you to lean in. Make eye contact. Let them see that you are truly there. And the next time you find yourself seated next to a young person in these pews, ask yourself: have I told them lately that they belong here? Not someday. Now.
I will be missing you all from the lacrosse sideline, but I will be [taking attendance from the livestream and of course] with you in spirit, and I cannot wait to hear all about it.
That is the church I believe we are becoming.
Until Sunday, and all the days between,
Dr. Hutton