Outlook editor Jack Haberer is getting closer to what ails us with each editorial! In recent weeks each one has crept closer and closer. You can almost hear him muttering with Emerson:
Give me truths;
For I am weary of the surfaces,
And die of inanition
On October 30, he quoted Tom Ehrlich’s column in the September 11 Outlook. It said that what made 1964 such an “unhappy turning point” as the year the mainline denominations began to shrink, was that “post-war Baby Boomers began to graduate from high school.” The discussion then turned on the question “What did they do after graduating from high school.”
Oops! Wrong question! What the young folks did or didn’t do after graduation, or what the church did or didn’t do after they graduated assumes a cause and effect that doesn’t exist! The real cause for non-attendance after graduation starts years before that! Although we can all agree that it was the church’s treatment, or non-treatment, of its youth that was the main reason for their declining interest in attendance, the question that must be asked if we are to discover the main reason for non-attendance is rather What was the church doing before those baby boomers began to graduate from high school?
My own 20-year experience of working with churches as owner with my wife of a Christian bookstore leads me to conclude that most churches, to use Donald Gray Banhouse’s term, were frittering. The primary aim was to assure that those kids had FUN! If they didn’t have FUN they wouldn’t come back. So it was FUN in the 30 or 45 minutes alloted each Sunday. Throw in a trip to Fun Depot every once in a while, and a week of REAL fun time, VBS, every summer. The older kids had their own version of the same kind of FUN thing.
If you’ve read those ads in World magazine by Worldview Academy, which ask whether your son or daughter knows the difference between Truth and the beautiful hogwash they will get in college or elsewhere, you know what I’m getting at. A glance at a few of the studies done by George Barna and other pollsters will confirm the fact that our young people for the most part don’t know zip about the faith we have been charged by our Lord to teach them.
See especially Barna’s Update, “Most Twentysomethings” at www.Barna.org . The research perspective of that report says, “Much of the ministry to teenagers in America needs an overhaul – not because the churches fail to attract significant numbers of young people, but because so much of those efforts are not creating a sustainable faith beyond high school. There are certainly effective youth ministries across the country, but the levels of disengagement among twentysomethings suggest that youth ministry fails too often at discipleship and faith formation. A new standard for viable youth ministry should be – not the number of attenders, the sophistication of the events, or the “cool” factor of the youth group – but whether teens have the commitment, passion and resources to pursue Christ intentionally and whole-heartedly after they leave the youth ministry nest.”
When they are faced with sneering professors or jeering contemporaries and have no answers for their “beautiful hogwash” it is you and me, and our church they will hold responsible for not preparing them for the onslaught and it will be some time before they get over our failure to teach them.
So that is where we must begin. Our Lord has commanded us to “preach the gospel to all creation” Mark 16:15, and to do it “beginning at Jerusalem” (Luke 24:47). Surely our Jerusalem is our local church and it is there first that we must “make disciples,” teaching them to observe “all that I have commanded you.”
That includes adults as well as children and youth. And our materials must contain both substance and continuity. Three principles we have long ago forgotten must be the platform from which we teach:
1. God has spoken. The Bible really is the inspired, infallible Word of God and has the answers for our problems, both corporate and personal.
2. What our primary mission is. Hint: it is not who to ordain. We already know how we ought to do that (see 1 above).
3. We are a church at war. There, I said it. I used a dirty three-letter word. But we had better get used to it because our Lord Himself declared war when He said “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers.” Those enemies are at war with one another and will be until the Lord comes again to fight the final battle.
This is not the time to “cut and run.” First, let’s not seek and find reasons for retreat or desertion. It is tempting to say the hell with it and run off to another place. But we need to identify the real problems and not the illusory ones and then to begin to make the painful changes that will return to the church the truth, the vitality , and the passion it once had. We can’t do that if we are running for the exits.
Bill Newkirk is an elder at Trinity Church in Satellite Beach, Fla.
