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I want to share a few thoughts with you this
evening that hopefully will give some broad
historical perspective to the reason that God
raised up the ministry of Del-Haven some 54
years ago, and why its ongoing ministry is now
more needed and more important than ever.
I would beg your indulgence at the outset
because I want to begin way back at the very
formative stages of our nation. When the United
States of America was born, the industrial
revolution was still nearly 60 years away, and
colonial society functioned largely around
skilled crafts, family trades and agriculture.
[It was then that Millers really were those who
worked at mills, whether it was lumber mills or
grain mills. The Carpenters were who you
contacted if you wanted to build something
because they were known for their building
skills, and masons worked with stone. Today we
have Millers, Carpenters, and Masons who only
carry the name, but those names no longer
identify unique family trades.]
But beginning in the 1830’s, machines introduced
dramatic changes into life in both Europe and
America. The engines of mass production and the
early versions of factories began to make their
appearance, and its impact on the family slowly
began to unfold and that impact was staggering!
In pre-industrial, colonial times, children were
viewed as an economic asset, so families were
typically much larger. As a child grew, he or
she learned to work and to contribute to the
economic welfare of the family. Each child had
his chores. And in the case of the very poor
during colonial times, parents were often known
to contract their children out to work for
others in order to pay off family debts.
But the industrial revolution began the
introduction of a whole new set of family
values. It eroded the family as an economic
unit, and it eventually destroyed the home as
the place where children were educated. You
see, in a pre-industrial world, children were
trained primarily by their parents and given the
skills to carry on the family business or trade,
whatever it was. In that setting, the church
and the village may also have had roles in child
training and education, but the home was
primary.
But with the rise of an industrial economy,
family trades disappeared, villages shrunk as
the industrialized cities grew, and younger
generations slowly began to take jobs in these
new urban centers, and a middle class was born.
The result was that education became less and
less a family thing, and more and more a
government thing. So shortly after the Civil
War, the US Office of Education was created, and
by 1920, all the states had enacted compulsory
education laws.
One of the tensions that arose in the early
stages of the industrial revolution was whether
children should be educated, or made a source of
cheap labor. Industry seemed to have this
insatiable appetite for cheap labor, and the
fact that children as young as age seven were
already working in factories and coal mines led
Congress over a 30 year period to pass several
child labor laws to protect children from
conditions that were very nearly child slavery.
As the industrial revolution gained momentum, a
slow shift began to occur in the way children
were viewed in the family. Where before they
had been viewed as an economic asset, now
they began to be viewed as an economic
liability. Can we afford to have kids
became a question that was privately discussed
at kitchen tables, and the stage was gradually
being set for a subtle devaluing of children
that would eventually give rise to child neglect
and abuse that would emerge in the last half of
the 20th century.
Interestingly, it was clear back in the 1870’s
that we have the first recorded case of child
abuse. It occurred in New York State, and it
was so shocking to the public conscience that it
led to the founding of the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Ironically,
this new organization was patterned after the
American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals, which had been founded nine years
earlier.
In this new industrial society, parental neglect
of children began to appear in large cities, as
reflected in the action of the Illinois
legislature in the closing years of the 19th
century. They passed a law that
established the first juvenile court in Cook
County, Chicago, recognizing that the county
government was going to have to take a role in
controlling juvenile crime.
Then in the first half of the twentieth century,
the stability and cohesiveness of the American
family took a major hit with two devastating
world wars. World Wars I and II took thousands
of American men, many of whom were husbands and
fathers, and put them in uniform on foreign soil
where many lost their lives. The disruptions
especially caused by WW II also forced thousands
of American mothers into the workforce, causing
Congress during the war to pass legislation
providing for child care assistance to working
mothers, and day care centers made their first
appearance on the American family landscape.
The end of the war brought a sense of euphoria
and renewed hope to American life, but it also
spelled a new era in parent-child
relationships. Dr. Spock gave parents
permission to be more permissive. And
permissive parenting translated into parental
neglect, which resulted in children beginning to
raise themselves, and the streets became an
increasing part of their upbringing.
What took place in the 50’s was hardly
full-scale child abuse at the level that we see
it now, but there was a profound disconnect
between parents and their kids that a decade
later in the 60’s began to be called “the
generation gap.” Kids went their own way
without much guidance from parents, and the
operative phrase used to describe the growing
crime problem among the nation’s youth was
“juvenile delinquency.” In the decade following
World War II, juvenile crime stats shot through
the roof, and it was in that very decade and for
that very reason that Don Carpenter and others
with a vision to reach this new and troubled
generation of kids met and began to pray about
raising up a camp ministry to address head-on
the mounting social problem of juvenile
delinquency, and Del-Haven was born in 1952.
The name Del-Haven was short hand for Delinquent
Haven, and the motto became “turning kids from
crime to Christ.”
However, as we moved into the second decade
following the war, something else began to
happen. Through the 50’s and into the 60’s,
doctors began reporting to authorities injuries
to children received at the hands of their
parents, and legislators began to address the
role that government should play in the
protection of children in their own homes. A
soaring divorce rate, step parents and so-called
blended families created unstable environments,
and children found themselves more and more in
difficult and often unsafe situations living
with step parents, new daddies and mommies, and
made a part of new families with new, but
unrelated, siblings. And the stage was set for
what we have now tragically come to see as home
settings marked by verbal, physical and sexual
abuse.
There were other de-stabilizing forces that made
their appearance in the last half of the
twentieth century that we can now look at and
see that America was sowing to the wind and is
now reaping the whirlwind. When Del-Haven was
first formed, no one had ever heard of Elvis
Presley. A year later he was singing southern
gospel music in a little make-shift studio in
Memphis with what later became known as the
Million Dollar Quartet, with Elvis, Jerry Lee
Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins. But four
years later (1956) he was paired with the
Jordanaires, recorded Heartbreak Hotel,
appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, and rock and
roll was born.
The social message that was programmed into
early rock and roll matched up well with the new
Dr. Spock-created family. Youth were encouraged
to break free of old-fashioned restraints, to
become your own person, do your own thing. Your
choices don’t have to conform to anybody else’s
standards, especially the older generation’s.
It didn’t take long to discover that these
weren’t just innocent little soundings of a call
to an upcoming generation to discover who they
were.
These messages very quickly became the growing
place in the 60’s of a revolution that Janis
Joplin and Jimi Hendrix championed as sex, drugs
and rock and roll, and that Timothy Leary of
Harvard sanctioned as a call to tune in (rock
and roll), turn on (free sex), and drop out
(drugs). The hippie movement was born in the
Hait-Ashbury district of San Francisco, and the
free speech movement and the Black Panthers with
their clearly Marxist agenda emerged at
Berkeley. And a generation, politely neglected
by their parents, had begun to make outrageous
choices that were shocking their parents who had
poured out their life-blood to protect American
values through two world wars.
Then slowly these baby boomers, as they were
called, grew up and became parents themselves,
and a whole new set of social problems began to
manifest. The 60’s forever changed American
life, and the Supreme Court and Hollywood became
the radical change agents in recasting a totally
new image of what America should become. The
sexual revolution now became mainstream,
Christian values were specifically rejected.
Prayer was removed from the classroom, and
abortion on demand became the law of the land.
America was now clearly a post-Christian
culture. And in a world regulated only by
secular, humanistic values, children it turned
out weren’t safe from the adult generation that
had given them life. America’s taste for sex
and violence, both nurtured and pandered to by
Hollywood, gave rise to a whole new culture of
sex and violence that was not a safe place for
children. Child abuse reports began to fill
newscasts.
Legislation up to the mid-1980s attempted to
address the problems directly related to the
growing chaos in families by creating social
agencies to step into “after the fact” cases of
child abuse to try to keep it from happening
again. However, these government-created
agencies proved totally ineffective in dealing
with the problem, and child abuse continued to
grow into an epidemic. So in the mid-80’s it
was deemed a “before-the-fact” approach was
needed, to stop the abuse before it started.
Legislation was passed aiming at prevention, and
giving child protective services discretionary
authority to invade homes and seize children
deemed at risk, creating a whole new category of
horror stories about government invasion of
homes and families. And thus was born the
situation of near chaos with which we now live,
without clear boundaries of where government
authority begins and parental authority ends.
What all these social and legal trends have
meant is that the problem we have had to learn
to face is no longer best described as simply
“juvenile delinquency” created by parental
neglect. For years now, kids that have come to
camp have been kids born into and raised in
situations that are high risk for them
emotionally, psychologically, physically and
sexually, to say nothing of the dark spiritual
dynamics that have shaped them in a world of
drugs and the occult. Adults in their lives
have become abusers and predators of one kind or
another, as opposed to the passive neglectors of
the past.
The bottom line is that the segment of our
population that is now at greatest risk is our
children.
The internet has created a whole new monster.
The unchecked proliferation of internet
pornography, and the growth of child
pornography, is feeding sexual addictions that
are creating an epidemic of pedophilia, and is
giving rise to a whole host of websites that
have become the vehicles for the exploitation of
children of nearly all ages. And all the
legislative attempts to build walls of
protection around the very vulnerable in our
society are failing.
The consequences of child abuse, whether it be
through violence or sex (or both), are well
documented. Children who are emotionally,
physically, or sexually abused are damaged for
life, and they struggle to become stable and
productive and compassionate adults. The vast
majority of people convicted of violent crimes
were abused as children. The picture is bleak
indeed. We are witnessing a moral meltdown in
our culture!
Is there any hope in a setting like this? Yes,
but it’s not in our government. It’s not in the
Republican party. Our hope is the very same one
that was the foundational reason for the forming
of Camp Del-Haven in 1952. It is the power of
the gospel of Jesus Christ to redeem, to rescue,
to heal, to transform.
When Jesus returned to Nazareth for the first
time following the inauguration of His public
ministry, He entered the synagogue on the
Sabbath and took a scroll of the prophet Isaiah,
and stood and read the opening words of Isaiah
61. He declared that the Spirit of the Lord was
upon Him, and His Father had anointed Him to
preach good tidings to the poor, to heal the
brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to captives,
and to announce a perpetual Jubilee of release
from the great debt of our sins and
transgressions.
And Christ, the Anointed One of Isaiah 61, has
entrusted to us the same gospel that He
proclaimed that gives hope to those with
nothing, that brings healing to the broken, and
proclaims liberty to those in bonds created by
the powers of darkness, and He gave us His
authority to deal with all those dark realms who
are behind this massive assault now under way on
the next generation.
True Christianity is always generational in its
focus and labor, and it is a particularly
distinguishing mark of the calling that rests on
Del-Haven. This ministry has been raised up to
stay trained on the spiritual well-being of the
next generation. And we are at a critical
moment in our history!
Let me tell you what Del-Haven needs right now
more than anything else from all of you who have
been its faithful supporters for many years.
Del-Haven needs fervent, unceasing prayer.
Ministries that God raises up with this kind of
specific calling must learn to catch the fresh
winds of the Spirit so that we stay in touch
with the new and shifting directions that God
appoints, so that future ministry endeavors
remain as fruitful as they have been in the
past, and then that they may grow to even
greater elevations of effectiveness under the
Lord’s direction.
Speaking of catching the winds of the Spirit
reminds me of a short piece I read nearly three
years ago, back in December, 2003, written
commemorating the 100 year anniversary of the
Wright brothers history-making flight at Kitty
Hawk, NC.
The Wright brothers were not the only ones
trying to build a flying machine. But most of
those involved in the quest believed that the
key to flying was to perfect the shape of the
aircraft. So endless designs were drawn up and
prototypes built, all of which failed. The
perfect shape seemed to elude them.
But the Wright brothers came up with a new
idea. They were first of all bicycle makers,
and they realized something about bicycles.
They did not work because of some perfect
shape. Many bicycle designs were on the
market. But what they noticed as they studied
the bicycle is that the bicycle worked because
it was possible to manipulate its shape once it
was moving over the ground. Once velocity was
achieved by peddling, the key was to constantly
change the direction of the front wheel to
maintain balance. Manipulating the shape of the
bicycle, particularly the positioning of the
front wheel in relation to the back wheel, was
what made cycling possible. When we are on a
bike, we are not even conscious of the
micro-adjustments we are making every few
seconds to the trajectory of the front wheel by
using our handle bars to keep the cycle upright,
along with small shifts in our body weight from
side to side to counterbalance the effects of
gravity. You can prove this the next time
you’re on a bike, if there ever is a next time.
When you’re riding, try holding the handle bars
perfectly still without these
micro-adjustments. You will quickly find out
that you will be able to go only a few feet
before falling to the right or the left.
The big breakthrough for Wilbur and Orville came
when they applied what they knew about bicycles
to airplanes. They realized that perhaps there
was no perfect shape that would keep a flying
machine stable in the air, but rather that the
shape had to be constantly adjusted and
manipulated. Then perhaps the problems of
balance, stability, lift and control could be
overcome. So they experimented. Wilbur laid
down on the lower wing head-first, with ropes
attached to his hands and feet and the wing,
which he used to manipulate the shape of the
wing as he was airborne. Much to their delight,
it worked and flying machines were born!
Today we have computerized wing flaps, but the
principle is still the same. The shape of the
wing has to be manipulated in the air to make
flight possible. We’ve all seen this in window
seats by wings on commercial aircraft. We can
actually watch the dramatic reshaping of the
wing on take-off, during flight, and on
landing. We can’t control the thermals or the
wind, but we can reconfigure the shape of the
wing to maintain control while we’re in flight.
I couldn’t help but think of how this picture
applied to churches and ministries. We have all
these books and manuals today that advise us
regarding the best shape that ministries must
take if we are going to address effectively and
successfully a postmodern, post-Christian
society. And we keep looking for the perfect
shape for ministry to be effective, when in fact
there is no perfect shape. Rather, what needs
to happen is the shape must change to adjust to
the wind that is blowing. Jesus compared the
mysterious work of the Spirit to a wind. We
can’t discern where it comes from or where it is
going, and we can’t adjust its velocity or
direction. However, what we can do is remain
sensitive to its direction and velocity, and
reconfigure the shape of our wings to take
maximum advantage of the season we’re in, and of
the weather patterns of the Spirit that are
designed to direct us into the fulfillment of
God’s purposes.
The book of Acts is full of illustrations of the
early church adjusting to the winds of the
Spirit. Look at the church at Antioch in Acts
13. They were in prayer and fasting, and the
Spirit moved upon them to set apart Barnabas and
Saul for the beginning of missionary journeys
that altered the course of history. But this
takes staying ready and a boldness to flex what
is often very inflexible in the way we have done
things in the past. Like Wilbur and Orville,
once in awhile we will crash. They did, in
fact, some 200 times in their 1902 glider. But
the crashes weren’t bad. They learned valuable
lessons that eventually resulted in breakthrough
and success. God still uses trial and error to
teach us, so that we are always kept at a
distance from trusting ourselves. But
eventually by being bold enough to take the
lowest posture of faith and lie down on the
wing, we sense the wind directly, and we can
alter the shape of our ministry endeavors to
capture the wind of the Spirit and gain
altitude.
This is why Del-Haven needs your prayers. Those
who have accepted the mantle and calling to lead
this ministry need the renewed grace of heaven
to be in a place of elevated sensitivity to the
fresh directions of the Spirit that will enlarge
the ministry as a channel for the distribution
of heaven’s gift of living waters that will
satisfy the desperate thirst of yet another
generation of young people that is dry and
parched.
The picture of need at camp right now in the
realm of the natural is also a picture in the
realm of the spirit. Water to be useful must
have channels for delivery and collecting places
where it can be used. You have heard described
tonight the difficult straits the camp is in
where water resources are concerned—from the
system by which it is delivered to houses and
kitchens and bathrooms, to places where it can
be reservoired and used for swimming and fishing
and other water activities.
The calling of Del-Haven has been to bring that
living water to every renewing generation, and
the promise of the Lord Christ is that He who
believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out
of His belly will flow rivers of living water.
And we want to give heart-felt thanks to all of
you for your faithfulness to sustain that
calling to give living water to a thirsty
generation. We honor you as God’s instrument
through the years to keep us going as long as
our God appoints. |
