Andrew Young, former U.N. Ambassador, Mayor of Atlanta, and close friend of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., is also an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. He once told a group of ministers how delighted he had become when his eldest daughter became active in her local church. With each deepening level of her involvement he became more and more pleased. But one day she announced to her parents that she was going to join the ministry of Habitat for Humanity to build homes for the poor in Uganda. This was not too many years after the fall of Idi Amin, and Uganda was still a very violent country.
Andrew Young confessed, “I tried to talk her out of it. I mean, I wanted her to go to church, to find a nice Christian man to marry, to develop a relationship with God and settle down. But, believe me, I didn’t have anything like this in mind. I didn’t intend for her to go so far with it. I mean—Uganda! But she said she felt called!”
We bring our children to church because we want them to grow up to be polite and respectable individuals. We want them to be subdued, tamed, civilized, settled. We need to be careful. We might not be prepared for the consequences. The church can be a dangerous place for a child to hang out. They just might hear and respond to the word of the Lord.
