Equipped But Not Burdened

Parents worry. It’s what we do.  Ask one of us, if you can break through that quietly-panicking glassy-eyed look we have  from time to time. We dream that our kids will be doctors and then worry they will end up on Dr. Phil.  We envision them with large happy families, and the next minute worry that the leaders of those families will have names like Great Exalted Poohbah and live in an abandoned ammo dump outside of Bismark.

OK, so I am projecting. But now and again we do worry about what sort of a world we are sending our teens into and how equipped they are to handle it. We want them to have a faith that is built to last, one that can go the distance. A vital faith they embrace and carry forward into adulthood, passing it on to the next generation.  And our churches hopefully are coming along side us and addressing the same concern.

Is the faith we have built into our children relevant to the world and culture they are about to live in full-time?   To answer that question, we need to open it up and look into the contents of that faith. What is it about?

The fact is (Dad, Mom, church leaders and fellow church-goers), to a large degree, that faith is what we have told them it is. They have been trusting us to teach the truth, after all.

While we could always improve, I think that evangelical churches do a pretty good job passing on the essential elements of the historic faith. You know  -  the biggies, the “creed-worthy” stuff:  the nature of God in the three persons of the Trinity, the sinful plight of mankind, the necessity of salvation through Christ alone, the resurrection, the Second Coming  etc.  However, in many churches, other ideas are assigned nearly the same weight – perhaps not formally in the statement of faith, but they are so much a part of the church’s culture that they might as well be.  Among these are:
- an approach to Christian living that is based more on rules than on the guidance of the indwelling Holy Spirit and the principles of the Word.
- an outmoded and questionable view of women and their roles in church and in society.
- a heavy emphasis on creationism as the only acceptable  view of our origins and a suspicion of science in general. 
-insistence on alliance with a particular political party as the only valid choice for believers.

You could probably add a few more. I am not here to open debates on any of these positions.  As Paul says, let everyone be fully persuaded in their own mind.  My point is this: we do ourselves and our teens in particular a huge disservice whenever we give these or any tangential issues the same or similar weight we give to creed-worthy beliefs.  In doing so, we weigh their faith down with elements that teens may increasingly view as out-of-step as they move into adulthood. If they bundle all of this as "Christianity", and if we have not taught them to distinguish a secondary issue from a core issue (say, one’s political allegiance  vs. one’s position on salvation through Christ), they will be at risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, putting their faith aside because they no longer see it as being applicable in their lives and their culture.

Think I am pushing the panic button here?  This is exactly what is happening.  David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Research Group, cites various reasons why young adults 18-29 leave the church or at best keep it at arm’s length once they are out of the house. Some reasons young adults cited are:  the church is anti-intellectual or anti-science; it over-simplifies complex things; Christians demonize any views that are outside of the church; church teachings do not connect with the real world in which I live; I am not encouraged to think for myself , etc. (for more, read Kinnaman’s excellent book You Lost Me).

At its core, the gospel of Jesus Christ is a challenging message but one that has survived the test of time. So why would we insist on attaching other elements to it that are at best non-essential, making it much harder for teens to connect their faith to their world? (I have some ideas, but that’s for another blog, another time.)

This is not to say that we as believers cannot have our opinions on these side-issues. We certainly can and we should. But let ‘s do a better job differentiating between the historic affirmations of our faith and issues where Christians have agreed to disagree. Let’s be more committed to training our teens in how to examine secondary matters for themselves and come to their own conclusions.  Let’s send them into adulthood armed with the faith, without asking them to carry our baggage as well.