Teenagers in real crisis need adults who will come close and stay. They need to be treated as people worth hearing before they look or act the part. And they need a truthful word from God that holds up under what they are living through. Pastor Jay Harris leads a church in downtown Jacksonville and has spent years mentoring students in one high school classroom. The young people he works with face shootings, hunger and homes where no adult is watching out for them. A better event cannot supply what they are missing.
What these teenagers are carrying
A teacher in Harris’s congregation asked him to help in her classroom of mostly young Black men. On his first day he met a student whose brother had just been shot fifteen times at a bus stop. The boy was in a gang, and he was expected to retaliate. Harris recalls the boy calmly working out how many people he would have to hurt to earn enough fear and respect to walk his own street freely again. His mother had no money to move the family away. The student behind him had just lost a brother too. Another had been shot in the face earlier that year. A girl in the same room had just lost her mother, murdered by the mother’s boyfriend.
That was one classroom in a school of hundreds. One boy came to school without shoes because the crack house he lived in had been raided that morning, and school was the only place he got food. Some students had no lights or running water. Some were mocked for the smell of clothes no one could afford to wash. One had moved nine times in a few months. Some were being abused at home.
For kids living like this, Harris says, “the expectation you have for them to come in and play school every day, it ain’t really real.” The same is true of church. A teenager surviving that kind of week has plenty of noise in his life already. What he lacks is safety, food, an adult, and someone who knows what is happening to him.
Why the church misreads them
The behavior that shows up in a classroom or youth room can be ugly, and Harris does not soften it. A student can have a good day, then come back the next day, flip a table, curse everyone out and spit, because they “still have to go home to the trauma of home.”
Adults look at kids like this and decide they won’t let anyone lead them. Many of these kids stopped trusting adults long ago because the adults in their lives abandoned them. In Harris’s words, “the story deeper than just being a disrespectful kid.” One boy’s mother’s boyfriend pulled a gun on him and his five-year-old brother, and the mother defended the boyfriend. That boy now raises his little brother and keeps his distance from his mother. He has good reasons for not handing his trust to the next adult who asks for it.
Some of these teenagers are also making sacrifices no outsider sees. Kids whose families sell drugs choose to bounce between homes and stay broke rather than take what is offered. People call them thugs. Harris says most people in their circumstances would be, and these kids are not. When he tries to name the weight they carry, he calls it “the pain of an 80-year-old man inside of boys.”
Violence is still wrong, and Harris never says otherwise. What changes is the first question an adult asks. A church that sees only the attitude will try to correct the attitude. A church that knows the story will stay long enough to be trusted with it.
Getting close enough to bleed
The parable of the Good Samaritan sits at the center of Harris’s thinking. In Luke 10, Jesus tells it in answer to a lawyer who asks, “And who is my neighbour?” (Luke 10:29). The religious figures in the story see the wounded man and keep walking: “And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side” (Luke 10:31). The Samaritan behaves differently: “But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him” (Luke 10:33-34).
The text is specific about movement. The priest crosses to the other side. The Samaritan comes to where the man is and goes to him. Jesus never settles the lawyer’s question about who qualifies as a neighbor. He asks instead who acted like one. Harris builds on that movement:
I always say the best place to minister from is where you getting blood on the shoe, not across the street talking about why people are laying on the ground, but literally next to the person on the ground.
His addition is the person across the street who is talking. That is the one explaining the cause, whether bad parents, bad neighborhoods or bad choices. Analysis from a safe distance is one more way of passing by on the other side.
Being on the ground looks like this. Near the end of a school year, a student told Harris his brother had been shot during a drug deal. His family was gathering guns to go kill the shooters, and everyone assumed he would go. He did not want to. Harris told him, “I’m here with you. If your family abandoned you, I’ll be your family, period.” He also told the boy the truth: his brother would return to the streets the moment he left the hospital, and the boy was being asked to kill someone for a life his brother would not give up.
From that conversation Harris draws an observation that should change how adults see these kids: “some of these teens, even though they’re kids, they are the high level of critical thinking in their whole family.” Refusing a revenge shooting looks like an easy call from outside. It was hard for that boy because no one older and wiser was there to ask. As Harris puts it, “he just needed somebody to throw this problem against, to give him dignity in saying, no, I’m not gonna do that.” Presence meant being the one adult in that boy’s life who could be asked.
Dignity before correction
Before a class trip to Washington, DC, someone wanted one of the boys to cut off his locs. Harris refused to tell him to. In DC that boy turned out to be one of the most articulate and engaged members of the group. Harris explained his refusal this way: “he shouldn’t be acceptable based on his haircut.” And then: “He should be acceptable. ’cause he’s a human being.”
Later the young man did cut his locs, on his own timing, and other boys followed him. The dignity was in the decision being his. His appearance changed, but acceptance never depended on it.
The same logic applies to church customs. Some teenagers in Harris’s orbit had never owned a collared shirt. Some people with alopecia avoid church because someone will make them take off their hats. Harris reaches for the biblical call to make the Lord’s paths straight. In Luke 3:4 John the Baptist takes up Isaiah’s words: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” In context, that call readies people to receive the Messiah through repentance. Harris applies the image to the obstacles churches put in front of newcomers, reasoning that “you don’t have to climb over this stuff to get to Jesus.” Dress codes and appearance rules are human customs. When they keep a wounded kid from walking through the door, the custom is blocking the way to Christ.
Dignity also changed what these students could do. Police officers once visited the class and, by the boys’ account, talked over them. One boy described the gangs in his neighborhood and was told he should move. He was fourteen. The boys felt they had been spoken to like second graders. Harris invited the officers back and coached the students to speak as grown men. That conversation became a turning point. In time the same students spoke with federal prosecutors, a federal judge, the state attorney, the mayor and officials in Washington. Along the way they kept telling Harris, “We always have something to say. We just didn’t have a framework.”
They had plenty to say all along. What they lacked was an adult who took their voice seriously enough to help them shape it.
An honest word from God
Presence and dignity leave plenty of room for hard truth. When a boy talked about how different he was from his drug-addicted mother, Harris warned him against pride. The virtues setting him apart were not naturally his; God had given them. The same thing destroying his mother could destroy him. His chance to change his family’s direction was something to do, as Harris told him, “you doing it for your mom, not at your mom.”
That is a real theological word about grace, humility, and honoring a parent who has failed you without excusing her. It fits the boy’s actual life. It was not taken off a shelf.
Harris handles the music his students quote all day the same way. He walked them through songs about mistreating women and showed them the story was their own home: the woman in the song was their mother. He explains that “that’s not to judge them or condemn them, it’s just to give them a base like how to critically think through this stuff.” His conclusion is blunt: “they just need people around them to give them answers to this stuff.” If the church does not offer those answers, other voices already are.
He aims one warning squarely at adults: “your gospel gets real funny when you ain’t next to suffering. You come up with all type of theologies and doctrines and stuff that is not really, really real.” Distance distorts belief. A faith never tested against a fourteen-year-old’s grief produces answers that sound fine from across the street and collapse up close. Harris admits that before he entered that classroom, everything he thought he knew about his city’s gang problem was naive, even though people knew him for his ties to the streets.
His own story gives this kind of truth-telling its patience. As a teenager he was in and out of juvenile detention, robbing and stealing. People prayed for him and probably assumed he never heard them, but “at a certain time all I could hear was their voice.” A true word spoken to a hurting teenager may take years to bear fruit.
Isn’t this just social work?
One objection says clothes, shoes, rides and court visits are good deeds, yet stand apart from the church’s main calling. Harris’s practice answers it. On Sunday mornings he drives around the city picking up eight or nine kids, turning a fifteen-minute trip into hours, so they will hear the gospel and their families’ direction can change. He calls this kind of self-giving “actually the will of God.” The care keeps the door open long enough for the word to be heard.
The opposite objection asks whether welcoming kids as they are means lowering the bar. Harris talked one boy out of a revenge shooting, confronted another’s pride, and challenged the music they loved. The bar stays where it was. What he removes is an adult’s preferences as the price of being heard.
There is an honest limit here. Presence does not cure anything. The victories are real, and the next day a student may flip a table, because home has not changed. Showing up does not guarantee that a teenager will heal, avoid violence or come to faith, and Scripture makes no such promise. Caring adults are also no substitute for counselors, doctors or police. Love includes bringing in people with the authority and training to protect a child.
If a teenager tells you about abuse or violence at home, believe them, and do not press them to make peace with the person hurting them. If a child is in immediate danger, call 911. Most states require certain adults, including teachers and many ministry workers, to report suspected child abuse to child protective services. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233. If a young person is talking about ending their life or is in emotional crisis, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, at any hour.
The cost, and where to begin
Harris recalls Paul calling believers to suffer as good soldiers. The King James Version reads, “Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ” (2 Timothy 2:3), and many modern translations render it as a call to share in suffering. Paul was urging Timothy toward faithful ministry under pressure. Harris’s application is simple: no one has enough goodness of their own for this work, and only God’s power makes it possible.
He is plain about the toll. He has cried on his back porch, sat frozen unable to pick up the phone when he knew someone was in distress, and spent hours on calls with the teacher crying over students. “That joint costs you something,” he says, and “you’re not gonna get a trophy.” He admits he keeps fighting for healthier rhythms in his own life. Adults who walk with traumatized teenagers need rest and support of their own, or they will not last.
Still, Harris insists “everybody can do something.” His starting point is concrete: go to a local school, ask the principal what is needed, offer to support a teacher, and expect no thanks for a long time. He also names something anyone can stop doing. It wounds him to watch adults online talk about Black teenagers like dirt, because the boys read those threads. Refusing to join that talk is the smallest version of staying on the right side of the road.
The boy whose family was loading guns already knew what he wanted to do, and he was nearly alone in wanting it. He needed one adult close enough to hear him and say the right thing out loud alongside him. Harris believes the church has enough people to be that adult for a great many teenagers. Whether it will depends on how many are willing to cross the street.