Wolf Chili Mistake That Got Me into A Hot Mess in Ministry

 

The recent sword-swallowing pole-climbing controversy at a Christian Men’s Conference got me thinking of when I got myself into a hot mess in ministry. 

Back in the mid-90s when I was a youth pastor I would take a vanload of teens to youth camp every summer at the district camp in Maypearl, Texas. At one of those camps, I got a great idea for a mixer/game to try myself sometime. Before the summer was over I found my chance to use it at an inner-city African-American Baptist church where we were hosting monthly outreaches for the neighborhood youth. We would first draw a crowd by doing fun and crazy activities in the field next to the church and then invite the kids into the church for a youth service. So I did exactly as I had seen at church camp. I lined up ten kids in front of a table with ten clean open diapers, filled each one with a can of no beans Wolf brand chili, and told them to put their hands behind their backs and get to Wolfin--the first one to clean their diaper got the prize. (I groan and cringe to think of the implications of my actions in today's racial societal norms.)

There were no issues, no problems, just pure, messy, crazy fun until a couple days later when I got called in to meet my pastor. It seems the deacons of the church caught wind of what happened and called the pastor accusing us of humiliating their children and never to come back. I explained I got the idea from our own church camp. That may have saved me!

I learned two valuable lessons that summer: context and location can make a big difference and even your best ideas with pure motives can be taken as offensive or worse.  My story may have only affected twenty teens and a church of seventy-five, not a packed arena with thousands of men, but the principles are the same. So please give Pastor Lindell and Pastor Driscoll the benefit of the doubt and a lot of grace for good measure before making their sins your sins too.