Grace’s Story, part 1

As a high school student, I was a go-getter. I was working two jobs at a time, acing my honors classes, running cross country, going on mission trips, and generally trying to be perfect and to save the world. My relationship with God was vibrant and my home and church involvement positive and encouraging to that end. I did not yearn for prom or football games or the things that most high schoolers wanted, I just wanted to get “out there” and serve God and to get on with my life. After a particularly moving trip to Russia with Teen Mania, I felt like I had more perspective than your average high school senior and wanted more. I prayed a lot about what that meant for me, and having been connected with Teen Mania and having seen a lot of lives changed through their ATF conferences and mission trips, my experience with the organization was positive. I knew about the Internship (now called the Honor Academy) and really felt that this was what God would have me do. I had the desire, the opportunity was there, and I had enough credits and enough drive to graduate early from high school. I finished up my Junior year, and enrolled in the local community college while taking AP English at High School so that I could graduate in December and move on to Texas, where I felt that God would use me.

Upon arriving at Teen Mania, I had confidence that God had called me there, and that got me through some of my initial doubts during the gauntlet week when we had the commitment ceremony and performed the various Gauntlet rituals. There was always joking about Teen Mania being a cult when I was there, but I think that my intern friends and I always thought, “Hey, we’re just out of high school and we love God—we do not bear any resemblance to cult members.” It was true, so many kids had come with an awe-inspiring love for God and a zeal to follow him and that truly just needed to be channeled and harnessed in a positive way. At the time, I felt like that was exactly what Teen Mania was doing for this army of zealous young people. My opinion changed as I became more aware of what life as an intern was like.

After settling in and getting to know staff and the daily expectations of an intern, things started to get a little less sunny for me. We worked LONG days in preparation for missions season, and were fully entrenched in classes, chapels, retreats and the like. It was exhilarating to be pushed on so many levels, as I craved more challenge in my walk with God, but something about it started to feel too pushy, and I started to feel weary. The subtle feeling of being manipulated didn’t sit well in my spirit and I began to pray for wisdom. The thing about being in such a “pressure cooker” of spirituality is that everyone around you is so zealous and so convinced of their own understanding of any given issue. They think that their strong feelings and their love for God means that they are following God and that anyone whose opinion does not line up with theirs “needed to get their life right” (a direct quote from one of my TM roomies). In any case, the disagreeing party needed prayer and conviction from God. As a person growing up in a very non-charismatic background with a lot of emphasis on doctrine and discernment, this kind of emotionalism and what felt like “spiritual bullying,” raised some red flags for me. I persisted, because, after all, this was what God had called me to do and I reasoned that since this was a different approach to following God than I had known, that some level of squeamishness was natural and normal. I figured that my discomfort only showed that I must have needed to be stretched into a more submissive and malleable intern; one more willing to hear what God was saying.

There was a lot of talk at TM about “teachability” and submission being strong virtues of a good intern (and consequently a good follower of Jesus). Because submission’s logical antithesis is pride, it made sense that we, as interns should be less attached to our own ideas and more willing to take on what was being taught. Pride is dangerous and unbiblical, except that at a certain point, not holding on to the doctrine and depth of what you have been taught in the faith becomes dangerous as well. There were many teachings around TM at that time that were in direct opposition to what I knew to be true of God’s nature. I had understood that he was the originator of joy and redemption, and a God of an illogical and undeserved grace. The teachings at Teen Mania that upset me most were those that fed into my perfectionist tendencies: having to cling to legalism and a list of standards and regulations to feel that I was worthy to come to God was the very culture of the internship. We even had something called “Leadership assessment points” that were given and taken away based on the frequency of your quiet times, your dedication to your job, your daily run, as well as your class homework and scripture memory. In the same vein (and most troublesome to me) was the “name it, claim it” belief that bad things would happen to you if you did not claim your healing and victories in prayer. As if there was a magical formula that convinced God whether or not you were worthy of the good gifts he wanted to give you. The unbalanced use of the verses concerning the tongue, and its power of life and death, had my roommates jumping all over each other at the mere admission of a human frailty. The phrase “pain is just weakness leaving your body” was originally spoken by Dave Hasz, but it was echoed ad nauseum among the interns and paired with phrases like “speak life” or “I rebuke that in Jesus’ name” if so much as a headache or less than agreeable sentiment was voiced.