Impositions and invitations

“Hey pastor, what do you have to say about this graffiti? What do you think it means?” The question came from the teenage son of our German friends as we were walking around the old town of Rethymnon on a warm late-summer day on the Greek island of Crete around a month ago. I gave the image a quick glance and decided to do the responsible pastoral thing and turn the question back on my interrogator. “I don’t know, what do you think it means?”

I was expecting a bit of playful banter, not much more. I wasn’t really prepared for his response. “I think it means that the church imposes its beliefs on people—that it takes people’s money and uses its power to force people to believe what it wants them to.” My young friend was evidently taking this graffiti a bit more seriously than I had been anticipating.

My first instinct was to consider the source. Being the parent of teenagers, I am dimly aware that this is a subset of the population that is perhaps uniquely primed to detect the slightest whiff of external authority and to doggedly and heroically resist it. Indeed, to be the parent of a teenager is often simply to be an imposition. I exist therefore I impose. Or something like that. If there’s anything that teenagers don’t seem to appreciate, it’s being imposed upon. But I was just (barely) smart enough not to write my young friend’s comment off as a bit of youthful impudence.