More than a Sunday School Faith

There has been one theme that has resonated with our students this year: You won't survive adulthood on a Sunday school faith. We all need to grow into an adult faith.

What is an adult faith? First, it's not sentimental. I remember growing up with the daily newspaper cartoon entitled, "Happiness Is..." The first correct answer, according to the author is "a warm puppy." an adult faith has moved beyond such nursery rhyme versions of reality. The world is a harsh place because of sin. There is a lot of pain and disillusionment out there because of our rebellion against God. And we have an enemy who wants to hurt God by destroying our lives.

The answer to these realities is not a faery tale. It is a God who loves us so much that he has risked everything to bring us the forgiveness necessary to reunite us with himself. He has made it possible for us to know himself through the gift of the Holy Spirit. And he has empowered us to work with him as he heals the harm that our rebellion has caused.

A sentimental and childish faith is selfish. We may sing, "It's all for you," but our emphasis on personal salvation often communicates "it's all for me." We have found that students today, especially those who have grown up in the faith, have a hard time grasping the idea that Jesus asks us to die to ourselves and live for him. Too often they have heard that Jesus is there to make their dreams come true rather than the truth that Jesus asks us to work with him to make his dreams for humanity come true.

One student complained, "I just want to feel good. I don't want to think about the problems out there." Ironically, peace and joy are never achieved until we are involved with Jesus work out there. Those moments when I know that I am following God, responding to his Spirit, and serving real people with the power and love of God have been some of the happiest moments of my life. I don't believe you feel good without being involved in God's mission. A childish and sentimental faith does not bring happiness.

An adult faith is also informed. Theology is important. Not just for the sake of having knowledge, but theology replaces our warped view of life and reality with the truth of God. Morality is important, but it is not enough. We must see and understand the world differently. We live what we believe, and we believe what we know. Faith must be informed.

An adult faith is moral. Our decisions have real consequences, and an adult can't hide behind a parent or a guardian. An adult must understand that he or she now has responsibility. Morality is more than just a set of rules. It begins with a set of values. What is love? What does it mean to respect another person? Ideals such as, a person must never been treated as a means to my personal need, must be understood and applied.

An adult faith sacrifices for a better end. Children are all about instant gratification. An adult learns to invest in the better things of life. We must present these greater things to our students and teach them their value. I could eat bacon forever. It's cheap, I like the way it tastes, and it's easy to prepare. And while I still retain the taste for an occasional bit of bacon, my life would be a little smaller if I'd never been introduced to curry in all its intricacy and complexity. I could have stuck with comic books, but Shakespeare has enriched my life in so many ways. As Christians we reach for meatier things. Others may pretend to be content with the banalities of this world, but an adult faith wants to move from glory to glory. Without a serious investment, it will never happen. A childish faith gazes at it's own navel. An adult faith touches the face of God.

It's About More Than Conversion

Outreach is important. We need to be reaching those far from God, but if that is our primary focus, it can have some unexpected consequences on our youth.

Conversion is the beginning point, not the end goal of our faith. It is when we are united with Christ and become a new creation that the real mission starts. That mission is to work with Jesus as he establishes the Kingdom of God. But what does that mean?

The Kingdom of God is the rule of God over the earth. We enter the Kingdom through faith in Jesus. We express the Kingdom by living the life that God intended for us from the beginning. The Kingdom is expressed to God through thankfulness, praise and obedience. The Kingdom is expressed to the world through love, service, justice and truth. We treat those in spiritual bondage in such a way that they may gain freedom and life.

Jesus commands us to love and lay down our lives for the world. We are not to judge (that is God's privilege), but to hold out the light of life to a crooked and depraved generation. Paul saw this as the great adventure of the Christian life. He formed his life around it. He was willing to change the way he lived his life and his own comforts so that Jesus could be exalted in new lives.

We are to bring inspiration to both the hopeless and the dreamers. Don't forget the dreamers. They will shape the world. If we can't spark their imagination with a vision greater than anything the world can offer, then we are finished.

Too much of what we hear from Christians in the public arena is about fear and self-protection. Do we really believe the rules have changed? Do we believe the enemy is stronger than the Spirit of God? Do we think politics and legislation are ever the answer over the inspiration and life changing power of the Spirit? Today it seems that we are turning to politicians and political pundits before we support and do the work of missionaries. It seems like many Christians are listening to TV and radio gurus more than they are to Scripture and godly teachers. Perfect love casts out fear, but fear has overcome God's wisdom and vision in too many instances (I will have more to write about this later).

Why do I care about inspiring the dreamers? Because youth are the dreamers. They are just waking up to life and beginning to move beyond themselves. This is an important moment in anyone's life. During these years lives are molded. People can become lovers and life-bringers, or they can become jaded, angry, greedy, disillusioned adults. The enemy wants the latter. He wants spirits to be crushed during adolescence. It is our job to give youth something better, bigger, and nourishing. A vision that can steer a life. One that includes the real suffering and pain in the world while still bringing change and hope.

Conversion is the doorway. The Kingdom of God is where we are invited to live. From there we are invited to heal a wounded and dying world. Youth without vision will perish, but Jesus' dream for us will feed us forever. So teach youth to dream with Jesus.

New Testament Origins

We believe that the Bible is important, but you would never know it from the education most of our students get in church. On the other hand, the Enemy knows just how important it is and how to use students' ignorance to his advantage.

Attacks against Scripture are nothing new, but today there are creative new twists to contend with. Conspiracy theories are the flavor of the day. Power hungry church leaders suppressed the true Biblical documents; Paul recreated Jesus to fit his agenda; the early church councils decided to make Jesus into a God while suppressing Jesus' Hindu teachings on reincarnation. These are just a few of the teachings students are presented on campus and in the media. While some of these ideas are certainly creative, they lack any real support. Yet, they have great power when students have not been armed with the truth.

A couple of years ago The Di Vinci Code made quite a splash. I was asked to do evangelistic talks on the book around the country. I was shocked by what I learned from my audiences. First, most preChristians were unaffected by the book. Most understood it as fiction and did not take it any more seriously than Raiders Of The Ark. Those that were already opposed to God, used it as ammunition for their disbelief (no surprise there). The surprise was the students who were most effected by the book: Christian students.

I met a large number of Christians who were shaken to their core by The Di Vinci Code. Why? They knew nothing about where the New Testament came from and so they were susceptible to Dan Brown's abysmal scholarship. A quick search through Wikipedia would have corrected all of Dan Brown's mistakes, but a little historical knowledge from their home church would have done wonders.

In many cases we have taken education out of Christian education. Students need more than merely an emotional commitment to the truth. They actually need the truth. It is disingenuous for us to complain about the effect of our culture's lies on students if we have not first supplied them with the truth.

A couple of weeks ago, we had an extended Chi Alpha meeting on campus. Some of our students were taking a class on the Bible that argued it did not reflect Jesus' life and teachings at all. Since this professor was an authority figure presenting "evidence," our students were confused and questioning the validity of their faith. They brought their questions, and we went through them all. It was a great time. None of the challenges were especially difficult and there were many assumptions (as opposed to facts) that had to be dealt with. The truth is powerful, and it trumped the authority of the professor. More to the point, these students are now able to successfully navigate this challenge to their faith. They are stronger now.

Students need to have the origins of the New Testament presented to them several times during their middle school and high school years. If not, they will most likely fall to the world's attacks, and it will be our fault. They need to know who wrote what books when. They need to know what happened in the early church councils since these are often distorted and used to undermine the gospel. Most of this information can be found in a good Bible handbook and in encyclopedias. Two very helpful books are The New Testament Documents Are They Reliable? by F. F. Bruce and How to Read The Bible Book By Book, by Gordon Fee. The best book I have found on the authority of Scripture is N. T. Wright's, The Last Word.

No More Jargon Or "Personal Relationship with Christ" is the New "Born Again"

"I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. But in the church I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue." (1 Corinthians 14:18-19) We all know this passage concerning the gift of tongues, but I think the spirit of the passage applies to jargon as well. We allow the dangers of jargon when sharing with preChristians. Words like justification, sanctification, and even sin need to be defined. This same concern should be foremost in our mind as we explain the faith within the church. Our shorthand is full of assumed knowledge, and assumed knowledge equals missed knowledge for our youth.

Jargon is our shorthand for shared truth, but it is dangerous in Christian education. Christian education is where we share the teachings and conveyors that later become our shorthand. If the long version is not shared and shared regularly, then the jargon loses its meaning. We then think we are sharing significant truth.

There is a second problem when we use jargon. It can easily be misunderstood. When we talk about "not being religious" many people today think we are not into "organized religion." For some us, that would be okay since we define "organized religion" as a bureaucratic institution that has lost track of people and God. Yet, most people would define "organized religion" as going to church, listening to a pastor, tithing, and Sunday school. Without explanation, our statement of "not being religious" could be seen as a recommendation to sleep in on Sundays.

When we speak of having a relationship with God, we confuse many people. The have relationships with their dogs, their spouses, and the IRS. What do we mean by the word? Our students and the preChristian world need these ideas unpacked repeatedly before we can trust our shorthand jargon to be useful.

I want to stress repeatedly. During the middle school and high school years students are beginning to learn how to use abstract thought and how to synthesize knowledge. This development is partially biological as the brain develops. It happens at different rates in different people. The result is that not all your students can understand what you are teaching at the same time or at the same rate. You need to present these ideas for the early bloomers (women tend to develop intellectually before men) so they don't get bored and tune out. Then you need to repeat the same information over time as more students develop. You also need to address the material superficially to build familiarity and then return to the topic to develop depth and breadth of knowledge. The idea that you can cover the subject matter once and go on will not develop faith.

Students tend to gravitate toward a strong, well-developed worldview. God has delivered that to us, but if it not unpacked and explained to the next generation, then the Christian faith appears weak and superficial. Overused slogans and jargon will be of little use when faith is challenged.

Why Target 15 to Twenty-Somethings?

During the decade after high school most people decide what they will live their life for. Certainly there are opportunities for change and conversion later in life, but most people chart their course during these times. These are the years that people choose their occupations, find a spouse, start a family, and find that they are now fully responsible for their own choices.

It is during this time that people try to figure out how the world "works." They develop their worldview. If the worldview they have been exposed to by their family and their church does not address and explain the world they find themselves in, then they will look elsewhere. This is why theology is so important during the middle school and high school years. A Christian worldview has to be more developed and richer than the competing worldviews. But, most of all, it has to exist in the first place. As one college professor put it, "One reason students are not getting reasons to defend the Faith is that they are not getting the Faith to defend."

Our Sunday mornings and Christian education need to be planned with twenty-somethings in mind. I find the questions they have are fairly basic and universal. They are the issues that will bring preChristians back to your services and will prepare middle schoolers and high schoolers for the future.

But let's be honest. They will help our youth with the present. My daughter and son are currently in high school, and I know the issues they face. They are interacting with and ministering to fellow students who are confused about their sexual identity. They are being presented with ill-informed caricatures of their faith by well-meaning but misinformed teachers. If we can't meaningfully deal with these issues to their satisfaction on Sundays, then don't expect them to still be there after high school.

One answer has been to protect our youth from all these issues, but if you do that, then you assist in their failure. They will have to deal with these issues someday. If they are not ready, they will fall. Besides, where do you want them working out their ethics-in the lunch room or at church?

This emphasis doesn't mean we neglect the rest of our congregation. You will find that many have the same questions and concerns. In addition, the entire congregation should be thinking missionally. As the body of Christ, we should be looking beyond ourselves and participating in God's work within our youth, our community, and throughout the world.

If we cannot reach and hold twenty-somethings, then we have no future. The twenty-somethings that we lost over the last two decades are the thirty and forty-somethings of today. The corner needs to be turned. The hemorrhaging needs to stop and headway needs to be made. God once again calls us to think differently and to trade our old wineskins in for new ones. After all, we should all thirst for God's new wine. Otherwise, we are just traditionalists and not really Pentecostal.

Past Time for Change

I have a lot of history with natural disasters. I was five years old when I experienced the Alaskan, Good Friday earthquake, the largest earthquake recorded in U. S. history. It was followed by a 27 foot tsunami. My parents then moved to Longview, Washington, not far from Mount St. Helens. You get the picture.

These are these types of disasters that are hard to ignore and fairly easy to respond to. Creeping disasters, the kind that build up over time are often harder to recognize and take seriously until it's too late. We are in the middle of one of those right now.

For over a decade, we have been losing our youth. They seem to do okay up through high school, but then a change takes place. Well over half of our youth (67%) don't make the transition into adulthood with their faith intact. We have been alerted to this fact by our leadership and by fact finding organizations such as the Barna Institute. Some Baptists estimate that they are losing 80% of their youth in the transition to adulthood. This is a new phenomenon. It has not been unusual in the past for young adults to leave the church for a short time, but they always returned within three to five years. For a decade and a half they have not been coming back.

What will the future look like if we continue to lose 67% of the next generation of church goers? Current outreach is not seeing a return anywhere near those numbers. If a third of your church today is not made up of 15 to 29 year olds, what does that say about your future?

The problem with creeping disasters is that we think things will just sort themselves out eventually. When an earthquake hits, everything changes. We had no power, no water, limited food supplies. Everyone's place of employment was gone. The community rallied together. Old grudges were forgotten. The National Guard was called in. Life changed until the problem was solved.

In Chi Alpha Campus Ministries, we know the struggles and challenges that emerging adults face. We know what our students need to be prepared to face and flourish into adulthood. We will share what we have learned here. But the problem is bigger than just college outreach. I will be honest, it is easier to be a Christian on campus today than it was twenty years ago. The attacks are not nearly intense as they were in the past. But our students are less prepared for adulthood than they were twenty years ago. The world has changed to be sure, but so have we. It is hard to defend a faith that is not there to begin with. Most of our students don't know enough factual information about their faith. Biblical illiteracy is at an all-time high in the U. S. They know little apologetics, and they haven't frankly worked through the tough issues of life. The world has changed, but so have we.

The question now is are we going to take the situation seriously? We have heard the facts for over decade and only cosmetic changes have been made. The situation calls for more. If this were an earthquake, we would take it seriously. Aren't the lives and souls of the next generation as important? In this blog we will share about the transition into adulthood, about the challenges and questions that our youth are facing, and about how to address them. We will work hard to keep and save our youth in college-that is our purpose and pledge-but the preparation needs to begin during their middle school and high school years. Our goal here is to help you with that task.