Jesus Junkyard: Do I regret my See You at the Pole days?
Looking back on a youth group tradition.
When I was in high school, I could not wait for each year’s See You at the Pole. It was circled on my calendar before the academic year started, and I was often involved with hanging up flyers to urge fellow Christian classmates to join me early on a Wednesday morning and pray for our peers and teachers.
For four years, I woke up early on a September morning and stood outside Michigan’s Warren Mott Senior High School, hands interlocked with anywhere from four to twenty of my classmates, and prayed and sang worship songs while our fellow students walked into class. My youth group would often have a rally afterward where we’d share stories about our individual experiences.
See You at the Pole, which is still an annual occurrence and happens on Wednesday, Sept. 25, this year, was a major part of my spiritual formation. In recent years, I’ve thought back on both the positive impact it’s had on me, as well as the negative side effects that stemmed from it.
See You at the Pole 101
According to its website, See You at the Pole was a grassroots movement that began when 10 Texas students gathered at their school’s flagpole to pray. There was nothing special about the flagpole; it was just a gathering spot where everyone could show up and pray, and meet other classmates who shared their beliefs.
Decades later, millions of students around the United States still head out to their schools’ flagpole to pray at 7 a.m. on the fourth Wednesday of September. The movement includes youth groups in nearly every state, and it’s supported by a number of different Christian organizations.
When I was in high school, See You at the Pole already was gaining success across the country. Today, the website includes tips for managing a social media campaign to recruit, plan and promote the event, and rallies following the school day are often large enough to fill theaters. See You at the Pole has become a Christian culture event, with all the complications that arise whenever a small moment becomes a major movement.
Prayer and community
Like I said, I have some hesitations about See You at the Pole as a movement. But I want to start by saying that I think the intention of the event is a good one. I remember my See You at the Pole days fondly.
One reason is because the event provided an opportunity to focus on praying for other people. Prayer is not something that comes naturally to me. See You at the Pole provided early practice with praying for other people, including teachers who were in authority over me and classmates I may not get along with or even know. It wasn’t just a prayer that they would find Jesus, although those prayers came up. It was prayers for their well-being, comfort, safety and success. I’ve heard it say it’s hard to dislike someone you pray for, and those mornings around the flagpole forced me not to see peers and authority figures according to their jobs or what clique they belonged to. It was an early exercise in seeing them as fellow image bearers who may have struggles I was unaware of.
See You at the Pole was also an opportunity to pray in community. Very few members of my youth group attended my church and, as a fairly sheltered individual, I often spent the early weeks of the school year wondering if I was the only believer in my school. I often arrived at the pole surprised to see a familiar face. It was a reminder I wasn’t alone, and it gave hope that relationships would form throughout the year that could be grounded in faith.
Praying for and with others is a good thing. And I will always encourage young people who want to find a way to practice prayer and community. That said, my experience revealed to me two temptations that this event often creates.
‘Praying to the flagpole’
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus offers a stern warning, cautioning his followers not to be like the Pharisees who made pageantry out of prayer and used gaudy gestures and flowery wording to showcase their piety. It’s not a prohibition of public prayer, but a warning to check our motives and be mindful of our actions. Prayer is a conversation and an opportunity for humbling ourselves before God; it’s not a performance or a sermon.
I would like to say my motives were pure when I went to the flagpole. I believe that I went out there truly wanting to ask God’s blessing on my classmates and lift up their needs. But it’s also true that I made sure my classmates saw me. I got a thrill when someone would ask me why I was “praying to the flagpole.” I wanted them to know I was praying for them, so that they would see what a committed Christian I was.
Of course, what I really wanted was to impress on them how much better I believed I was than them. I was a bit of a self-righteous prick in high school, and I wanted the to know I was praying that God would have mercy on them for drinking, swearing and having sex. I wanted my Christian classmates to hear my prayers and see just how emotional I was, how much I cared for these sinners. While I believe I had some earnest motives, I’m also well aware how much my presence was part of a plan to brand myself as a God-fearing, Bible-believing Christian who was set apart from my heathen classmates. And in succumbing to that temptation, I was a Pharisee before I even had a driver’s license.
Persecution complex
The other temptation was to be distracted from our earnest prayers for our classmates by reminding ourselves how much persecution we risked by participating in See You at the Pole. We saw this not just as a place for prayer but as a battleground. We steeled ourselves from pushback from school administrators who wanted to shut down prayer at school. We braced for taunts from our classmates. Our youth instructors warned us that we’d be ridiculed for daring to live out our faith; they invited us back to youth group that evening to share our tales of persecution.
Of course, other than some typical high school jeers, we never really encountered much persecution. Our administrators were happy to let us pray at the flagpole, so long as we weren’t preaching or stirring up trouble. Our classmates were sometimes confused by what we were doing, but most of my explanations were met with “huh, that’s cool.” It was instilled in me that non-believers were my enemies, that I was entering a battlefield every time I wasn’t on church grounds. But maybe the worst it ever got was a random spitball being lobbed at us.
The bigger problem was the persecution complex itself. Prayer, as I said before, allows us to see others as fellow image bearers, people loved by God and who we should desire the best for. Telling ourselves that those who don’t share our beliefs are our enemies has the opposite effect; it makes us suspicious of the people we’re supposed to love, it places us in enmity instead of friendship. And the teaching that all good Christians will face persecution, which our youth leaders told us in the days leading up to the event, also created problems. We wanted our prayer to be a theatrical means that would rile up their hatred. It was a prop and a protest, not a request for God’s love and intercession. And when we didn’t face that persecution, we often left confused; were we good enough as Christians if people weren’t angry by our display of faith?
Praying for the prayers
I want to be clear: I don’t want to disparage See You at the Pole. Part of what I want to accomplish at the Jesus Junkyard is to examine Christian culture and see what is treasure and what is trash. I don’t think See You at the Pole is trash; but I do think it’s got some rust and dirt on it that needs to be cleaned up before we can truly appreciate it.
I hope there are millions of students who go out to pray for their classmates next Wednesday morning. And my prayer for those students is that God uses this time to instill a love for their classmates, teachers and administrators. I pray that their prayer is truly for their good and that, in many ways, God uses that moment to grow them spiritually, not just their classmates who may not share their beliefs. I hope they find a community of loving fellow believers who they can come together with to grow in Christ and share their schools.
I pray they will keep Christ’s words about prayer in mind and be mindful of their motives and their susceptibility to pride and Pharisee-ism. And I pray that thoughts or fears of persecution are far from them. I pray that they are not distracted by thoughts of who might be against them but rather pray that God opens friendships and gives them a deep love for the people of their schools. God can use See You at the Pole for great change; we just have to be aware of the temptations that can distract us.