One of the nights I simultaneously anticipate and dread as a youth pastor is our Senior Appreciation Dinner. It is an evening of formal attire, glorious feasting, square dancing, and the giving of books and a charge to each graduating senior in our High School ministry. Looking at the faces of the young men and women before me, my heart cannot but feel sadness to know that soon they will leave our ministry (plus the room is always so dusty and one’s eyes water so). I also cannot help but feel very proud, and very grateful, along with the rest of our peerless youth staff, to see bold students transitioning into independent adulthood with a desire to glorify our Savior.

We exhort them, as we have in some cases for the better part of a decade, to remain faithful to our Lord. We call them to live a life of truth in a world of tantalizing deceptions. We plead with them to put down roots of conviction into the soil of faith and to cast up fruitful branches of holy living in the open air for all the world to see.

Here is a not-so-secret fact, however. This charge on its own, or even the entire seven years a student may spend in our youth ministry, is but a drop on the scales compared to the influence, positive or otherwise, of parents.

In his book, What’s Wrong with the World, that great British wit of old, G. K. Chesterton, warned of placing trust in education to accomplish what only the faithful lives of parents can achieve.

He wrote:

The fashionable fallacy is that by education we can give people something that we have not got. To hear people talk one would think it was some sort of magic chemistry, by which, out of a laborious hotchpotch of hygienic meals, baths, breathing exercises, fresh air and freehand drawing, we can produce something splendid by accident; we can create what we cannot conceive… [Parents] seem somehow to think that things can get into the heads of the children which were not in the heads of the parents, or, indeed, anywhere else.

Indeed we live in a world where the older generations can find it tempting to tut-tut and tsk-tsk about the downfall of civilization and to lay upon the generation of our young students the stern responsibility to mend what is broken. I have seen too many students casting about among their schools, books, social media, and the evanescent prophets of pop culture – trying in vain to find what should and must be found in the daily-lived examples of mother, father, grandparent, mentor, and true friend. Chesterton captures this phenomenon well as he continues:

There has arisen in this connection a foolish and wicked cry typical of the confusion. I mean the cry, “Save the children.” It is, of course, part of that modern morbidity that insists on treating the State (which is the home of man) as a sort of desperate expedient in time of panic. This terrified opportunism is also the origin of the Socialist and other schemes. Just as they would collect and share all the food as men do in a famine, so they would divide the children from their fathers, as men do in a shipwreck. That a human community might conceivably not be in a condition of famine or shipwreck never seems to cross their minds. This cry of “Save the children” has in it the hateful implication that it is impossible to save the fathers; in other words, that many millions of grown-up, sane, responsible and self-supporting Europeans [one might be tempted to include Americans here as well] are to be treated as dirt or debris and swept away out of the discussion… Now I am concerned, first and last, to maintain that unless you can save the fathers, you cannot save the children; that at present we cannot save others, for we cannot save ourselves. We cannot teach citizenship if we are not citizens; we cannot free others if we have forgotten the appetite of freedom. Education is only truth in a state of transmission; and how can we pass on truth if it has never come into our hand?

I trust I am not alone in suspecting that fervent cries in our culture today of, “Save the children!” are often nothing more than the emotionally comforting justifications of those who are, in fact, merely delegating or abrogating their responsibilities to others. As Chesterton drives home, “It is vain to save children; for they cannot remain children. By hypothesis we are teaching them to be men; and how can it be so simple to teach an ideal manhood to others if it is so vain and hopeless to find one for ourselves?”

How thankful I am to the many wonderful parents that have modeled maturity to their children. It shows. How urgent remains this imperative for the disciplers of all who continue to approach their graduation nights year after year!

Play the man at home and you make the man. Be the woman at home, and women you shall have. Cry “save the children” till breath is exhausted, and we shall save neither the children, nor the adults they must inevitably become.

The weight of responsibility we wish to pass on to our children is a weight we must show them how to joyfully bear by carrying it upon our shoulders first.

Ever by God’s grace. Ever by His example. Ever…and ever… and ever – until the last generation of man.