“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our savior and of Christ Jesus our hope: To Timothy, my true son in the faith. Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Young people need old people. Sometimes they’re fully conscious of it. Sometimes they’re not, but the need is so pressing they are drawn to them anyway. More specifically, young men need older men and young women need older women. Young people need models and mentors they can look up to for wisdom and direction, for encouragement and even for correction at times. When they find someone like this with whom they connect, the bond that forms can be incredibly strong. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a mid-season review of the HBO-Max series, The Penguin, about the rise of the classic Batman villain. Since then, I’ve finished the series. I don’t often come back to a single season of a series more than once, but this one really stuck with me. Let’s talk about the church, being a mentor, and why The Penguin was both great and terrible.

I grew up surrounded by an unbelievable number of fantastic older male role models. My own dad certainly was, which is by no means something enough young people have today. But the list of godly men in my life who poured into me went far beyond that. There was Roy Goerz and Ken Woodruff who together taught me how to have a regular devotional time the summer between eighth and ninth grade. Not many days have gone by since then that I have spent at least a few minutes in the Scriptures. There was Don Ross, my grade school principal who went out of his way to mentor me through high school and beyond, regularly taking me for breakfast (always to the Big Biscuit on 40 Hwy) just to talk life and faith, encouraging my own faith growth and development in ways that are hard to measure they’re so big. He’s still the god-grandfather to all three of my boys.

There was Tim Henry and Brian Ford, my youth ministers, who both played enormous roles in teaching me how and why following Jesus mattered both with their words, but also their lifestyles. There was Gene Austin, my college campus minister. There was Doug Hacker, who was an excellent teacher (still is), always asked the best spiritual questions, and always talked to me like I was an adult. There was Jim Walters, my pastoral mentor through seminary who taught me how to actually be a pastor. There was John Chandler, a good friend in the early days of my ministry who helped me walk through a challenging transition time. Those were all only a handful of the most significant mentors I’ve had. The list continues on from there.

There were a significant number of godly women too, starting with my own mom, and including Ann Goerz, Lynn Woodruff, Sharri Hacker (yes, those were the respective wives of Roy, Ken, and Doug; there’s something especially powerful about older couples intentionally pouring into youth together), and Cindy Midgorden, who was perhaps the first person to ever put the idea in my head that pastoring could be something God was calling me to do. It came by way of what I’m sure was an offhanded comment during a youth activity in high school. We were on the third floor of the long hallway leading from the Fireside Room back to the youth area. She told me I would make a really good church leader someday.

All of these people and more took a specific interest in my life at some point along my journey. More than that, they took an intentional interest in it. They put themselves, on purpose, in places where they were going to have the opportunity to shape the lives of young people. I am who I am today because of them and more. And none of this would have happened without the church. With only a couple of exceptions in that group, every single one of those people were people I interacted with and who had an impact on me because I was in church with them.

There is literally nowhere better than the church when it comes to providing your kids with opportunities to be impacted spiritually and otherwise by mentors who pour into them both intentionally and unintentionally, and who will have a profound and profoundly positive impact on the rest of their lives. In the church you will find for your kids, but also for you, the opportunity to have true spiritual fathers and mothers like Paul was to Timothy.

If you are not connected with a church community, you need to be. You won’t follow Jesus faithfully and well without being intentionally and actively connected to a church. That’s not the same thing as saying you can’t follow Jesus faithfully and well without the church (although I don’t honestly think you can), but you won’t do it without that. And if you’re not a follower of Jesus, you should still get connected with a church, because you will find community there that will make your life richer and better that you won’t find anywhere else. There’s no community like a genuine, Gospel community.

When I first wrote about The Penguin, I mentioned the character Victor. Vic was a kid Oz (the Penguin’s real name) accidentally took on as a mentee into his life of organized crime. Over the course of the series, which plays out over several months, their relationship grows stronger and stronger. Vic looks up to Oz as a father. By the last couple of episodes, he is passionately committed to Oz. He starts to encourage Oz when he is down, returning the favor Oz had done for him. He plays a key role in getting the heads of several other crime families in the city to partner up with Oz against the main antagonists at a critical juncture of the story. He becomes family to Oz, and they both know it.

Vic’s character development from a scared, aimless kid whose parents had been killed in the flood that marked the end of The Batman (the film that is helpful, but not necessarily required watching for the series), to a confident leader who is stepping more and more fully into his role in Oz’s operation is remarkable. It’s also disgusting because Oz’s operation is taking over the drug trade in Gotham City and murdering anyone who stands in his way. Oz aims to become the crime boss of Gotham and to either merge all other operations into his own or else eliminate them entirely. The sweet-natured, good-hearted kid from the beginning of the series is on a path to somewhere entirely darker than that by the end. But he’s walking that path instead of taking another path that would have led to a much better life outcome because he was so drawn to Oz’s intentional mentorship.

Meanwhile, as the series progresses, we see more and more of just how bad Oz is. He’s been a sociopath since he was a kid. He murdered his brothers without the first shred of remorse so he could have his mother’s attention all to himself. He’s a pathological liar. He’ll say anything to anyone to get what he wants out of them, and then turn on them on a dime when it suits him. He’ll even turn on it in front of them. He has absolutely zero value for human life. Everything he does is for himself. He’s a narcissistic coward as well. And, in the end, because he doesn’t want to have any potential weaknesses preventing him from reaching his nefarious goals, after sharing a touching moment together in the wake of successfully eliminating his chief competition for taking over Gotham’s underworld, he personally murders Vic in cold blood. He strangles him to death with his own hands, carelessly dumps his body on the ground, tosses his ID in the river so no one will be able to identify his body, and walks away casually. It may be one of the worst moments I’ve seen in any series ever. It really left you hoping that in The Batman’s sequel that is in the works that he meets his own just end.

The Penguin is an unbelievably horrible person. He’s a moral monster of the first order. But the series really does powerfully put on display the incredible impact that mentoring can have on another person’s life, especially one who is younger than we are. If you are following Jesus and have been for some time, you need to put yourself intentionally in a place where you are mentoring someone who is younger than you and still growing in their faith. You may not have the relational capacity to do this with more than one person, but you need to be doing it with at least one. On purpose. This is something God calls each of us to who have obtained some level of maturity in our faith. I am who I am today because of it. You are too. Or you are too because you didn’t receive it. Either way, you need to be a part of making sure someone else receives it. They may not know it now, but one day, they’ll be really glad that you did. So will you.