Gasoline?

Recently, I was listening to a Christian radio program in which the host was interviewing the energetic leader of a ministry aimed at bringing youth to Christ. The man being interviewed proceeded to tell us that the generation of young people during the time of World War II consisted of sixty-some percent “born-again Evangelicals”. In the Baby Boom generation the number of born-again evangelical youth dropped to thirty-some percent. The Generation X-ers dropped into the upper teens and the present generation of young people who are “born-again evangelicals” is somewhere around four to six percent.

The man being interviewed correctly concluded that the Church has almost entirely lost the next generation. What was his solution? The Church has to start gearing itself toward the younger generations. Youth groups need to boldly evangelize and double their size. We need to invite more youth to youth gatherings and so forth and so on.

While this man must be commended for his zeal and desire to reach the lost, it would seem to me that his solution is simply throwing gasoline onto the fire.

Ironically, during this same period of decline in the number of “born-again evangelical youth”, youth ministries have steadily multiplied. There would even seem to be some correlation between the two. As time has progressed since World War II, Sunday schools and youth programs have steadily grown in number while at the very same time, the number of youth adopting their parents’ beliefs has steadily decreased!

Doesn’t anyone find it strange that the Church has been steadily plodding along now for nearly 2,000 years without special youth programs and Sunday schools? And now, after all these years, at a time when a plethora of youth ministries have sprung up in the Church we are suddenly losing all of our youth? How did the Church ever make it so far? What did it ever do before Sunday school and youth groups came along to rescue its youth from the world?

Brethren, perhaps we have misdiagnosed the problem. Many Christians are pointing to the youth abandoning the Church, proclaiming this to be the problem and adopting a fitting solution – more youth orientation to draw them back to the Church. Could it possibly be, brethren, that the youth abandoning the Church is really a symptom of a greater problem and not the problem itself?

In the past century, we have steadily wrenched the job of parenting away from parents and substituted in its place a pseudo-parenting performed by other people. We have foolishly abandoned God’s design and in our great human wisdom have designed something better, but it doesn’t work. We have taken the eyes of our children’s hearts away from their parents and focused them on other people and now we are wondering why they don’t follow their parents.

A disciple is one who walks with his teacher, watches his teacher, learns from his teacher and follows his teacher. The fact that our children do not follow their parents simply reveals that they were not disciples of the parents. We have sent our children every which way to be discipled by everyone but their parents and then we wonder with great amazement that they don’t follow their parents. And even worse yet, some seem to be taking the fact that children are not following their parents and concluding that parents are therefore ineffectual and that we need more programs!

Brethren, when will we stop stoking the fire with our family neutering programs and return to God’s design for family? Maybe if we parents made our children our disciples they would follow us? Maybe what our children are really longing for is that parent/child relationship as God intended it to be? Maybe that void has had a greater impact on them than we have imagined? Maybe the Lord would use such a relationship to draw their hearts to Christ, to the truth and to keep them in the Church?