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Special to United Methodist Insight | Sept. 16, 2025
Welcome back to Camp Crystal Lakewood, where John and Charles Wesley have brought their moderate mainline youth group only to have them picked off one by one by horrors unknown! Last week, teen beauty queen Regine and jock heart throb Braedyn decided they were too popular to stay with their own youth group, and found themselves attracted to a group of their equals playing volleyball. While John and Charles start the search for the missing cool kids, we meet the first mysterious camp villain waiting for the teens to fall into his “thirst for God trap.” It’s Friday the 13th’s Jason Vorhees, the relentless hockey-masked tall boy with a penchant for penal substitutionary violence!
This week, we discover that his nefarious plot is not to harm the young well-to-do’s, but to convert them with cool Katy-Perry-inspired worship around the campfire!
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When you’re raising your kids in Christian community, it is natural for your kids to assume that all Christian communities are more or less alike. But the truth is, there are many Christian communities that are cooler than yours, have better budgets than yours, are more attractive than yours, and if they are all of those three, then they are also likely to be more theologically hostile than yours. I don’t fault them for their theology. A huge tradition of Christian teaching is one of a disgusting humanity dangling over the precipice of hell, a wrathful God demanding blood sacrifice who can only be appeased by the pure offering of his own son. One can easily read the Bible and come to those conclusions, especially if it is the primary way you’ve received the Christian faith. A starting point of God’s wrath and the utter worthlessness of humanity is one read of the Christian message that has a huge history of harm, from the subjugation of women to the justification of chattel slavery.
While Methodist founders John and Charles Wesley did share language of human depravity and the wrath of God with some of this tradition, they also questioned its usefulness in the practice of Christianity. If your theology leads you to diminish and demean yourself or others, if your theology leaves you less like Jesus, then maybe it’s time to revisit your beliefs. The Wesleys leaned hard into “practical divinity,” meaning your beliefs must inform your practice, your way, dare I say, your method of living life.
It turns out you can talk about human depravity without demeaning the person of whom you speak. For example, how have you experienced human failing? When is it easy for you believe that our best efforts and good intentions are not enough? Is it hard for you to see Sin as a sort of soul-health condition, a illness that’s bigger than you, something you share in common with a world unable to know how to love as God loves?
And you can talk about the wrath of God without assuming this is God’s leading character trait. For example, what if God gets angry about injustice the way you do? What if God’s wrath is not about how disgusting and hell-deserving you are, but it’s at the systems and structures that have duped humanity. What does it feel like to be angry with someone you love? How is that different from hating them and wishing them harm? How does Jesus show you what God’s love looks like? If Jesus is the clearest revelation of God’s character, how might you narrate the meaning of the cross and it’s relation to God’s anger and human sinfulness?
So when your kids get turned on by Young Life, InterVarsity or Campus Crusades, do not fear them as the boogeyman! But also don’t ignore them! When they visit the cool mega-church and start listening to popular worship music recorded at churches with gay-conversion classes, don’t freak out (entirely)! Discernment is an important part of the Christian journey. If Methodism is rooted in anything, it’s rooted in Christian discernment in community. Methodism began as an evangelistic small groups movement designed to help folks take their faith together seriously. Think about your own answers to those questions above and practice discernment with others in community.
We’ll see you back here next week as we meet our next villain lurking in the shadows of Camp Crystal Lakewood…but no spoilers!