Compassion and Chaos

Last night, I brought a few kids with me to the Communicycle shop to work on bikes. The shop is located in a large warehouse that is shared by a couple of other ministries.

The adult leaders, myself included, tend to have a peer approach, asking everyone to show respect to everyone else, and giving the kids a lot of freedom. We all want an atmosphere that leads to honest, uplifting relationships. We joke around and play while we work on bikes.

Recently, some of the kids have been acting up- picking fights with the other kids, distracting others from working on their projects, speaking disrespectfully, and refusing to follow shop guidelines. So we as leaders are wrestling with how to handle the chaos.

The usual approach is to crack down, to set the rules and assign all adults with the task of enforcement. This would be the easiest way to deal with the problem, and I've seen many of these kids respond well to loving discipline - it seems that having someone who cares enough to correct is actually a felt need.

However, then we get a dichotomy between the leaders and the youth that cuts against what we're trying to do - create a safe zone where we all interact on an equal footing. To create a heirarchy where we are at the top minimizes their responsibility and demands that we spend our energy enforcing a code.

The other option is to lead laissez-faire, letting the kids do as they please, hoping that they won't see us in the same way as all the other adults in their lives. This can lead to chaos as well as growing disrespect, and there is a suggestion of detachment inherent in this response.

So what do we do?

There's no easy answer. You always give something up when you pick your approach.

The solution that I lean toward is as follows: We spend time talking to kids about what they want out of shop time - I think any policy needs to spring out of relationships - and find out where their ideas line up or collide with ours. Then we need to work with them to find a medium we can all live with.

Once we have a shared vision worked out, we can depend on the natural leaders from among the kids to help the others, and when things go wrong, when boundaries are crossed, when leaders step away from the shared vision, we pull them aside and talk with them privately, providing consequences only if they are unwilling to work with us.

This way, we can provide discipline, and it still rests on the kids to figure out how to make a shared vision work. This way, we avoid becoming representatives of "Law," and we get to work together with the kids to establish a kind of liberty that doesn't lead to anarchy in the Communicycle warehouse.