Michael Craven Christian Blog and Commentary

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Parents: Do You Know What Your Kids Think?

This past week I had an opportunity to talk with two sixteen year-old skeptics - a friend of this ministry invited me to his and his wife's home to speak with their neighbor's daughter and her friend.

This wonderful couple has been ministering to this young girl for the past nine years and now in the prime of her teen years she has come to ask some serious questions about life and faith.

What followed over the course of our three-hour discussion was one of the most poignant examples of the failure of modern churches to treat ministry to youth seriously and the devastating reality of postmodern relativistic thinking.

Both of these young women had been to church, in fact one of the larger "more successful" churches in our area, in search of answers to their questions and both came away disappointed and to some extent more convinced that their skepticism was valid. Rather than engaging these young people in earnest discourse with an honest effort toward answering their legitimate questions; the youth ministers could only offer them facile religious answers rooted more in emotion and experience than in any rational explanation which might render faith in Jesus Christ even remotely plausible. This coupled with an "MTV entertainment" approach to youth ministry left them with the idea that Christianity does not offer any legitimate answers to life's most important questions.

According to Barna Research, in 1999, 82% of American teens say they are Christian. Three out of five teens say they are "committed Christians." One-third (34%) of all teenagers describe themselves as born again, a figure unchanged in several years. And more than seven out of ten teens are engaged in some church-related activity in a typical week: attending worship services, Sunday school, a church youth group or a small group.

According to these figures we should be encouraged but sadly that is not to be the case. If we look closer at the theological and doctrinal beliefs of young people today I suggest that my case has been made: the modern Church has failed to adequately teach and equip young people.

According to Barna's latest research two out of three teens (65%) say that the devil, or Satan, is not a living being but is a "symbol of evil." Three out of five teens (61%) agree that "if a person is generally good, or does enough good things for others during their life, they will earn a place in Heaven." Slightly more than half (53%) say that Jesus committed sins while He was on earth. Thirty percent of teens believe that all religions are really praying to the same God, they are just using different names for God. In total, 83% of teens maintain that moral truth depends on the circumstances, and only 6% believe that moral truth is absolute. When it comes to believing in absolute truth, only 9% of born again teens believe in moral absolutes and just 4% of the non-born again teens believe that there are moral absolutes.

So, the majority of teens claim to be "committed Christians" and seventy percent of teens are active in their local church and yet their theology and life philosophy is overwhelmingly "un-Christian."

Too many young people in the Church today seem to have no real or meaningful understanding of who God is or of how they are to relate to Him. They, like the world have set Him at a very great distance; an irrelevant being whose influence in our daily lives and personal decisions is marginalized at best, or worse, ignored altogether. "We, like sheep have gone astray" embracing a "way that seems right to us" but is ultimately focused on ourselves and not the Holy, Living God; the Creator of all things and Redeemer of the world.

We have allowed the descent into a "form of godliness (religious practice) but deny its power." The result is that we have confirmed for the world that they are correct in saying, "God is not real" or at the very least, "He is irrelevant." (Jeremiah 2:13) This is the great tragedy in America today and the call upon those who still know Christ as Savior and King is to stand, at all cost, against the 'current of this age' with love, grace and sound minds grounded in theological truth, doctrinal depth, and cultural relevance.

I would argue that as long we continue to treat young people in Church as if they are incapable of being interested in or simply lacking the ability to understand the deeper truths and doctrines of Christianity they will remain woefully ignorant and generally compromised in both their beliefs and behavior. Even worse, by not making "disciples" many will receive positive affirmation of their "salvation" based on superficial practices and feelings when in fact they may remain utterly lost.

Secondly, these young women to whom I spoke were both so thoroughly inculcated with a postmodern conception of truth that they were incapable of believing that universal truth exists and if it does it is simply unknowable.

The result is that they are left with no rational basis upon which they can evaluate any truth claim since they perceive everything to be simply a matter of perspective. Thus what you believe is true for you and what they believe is true for them. The Gospel, to them, is merely one more perspective.

The thing that amazed me was how persistent they were in their thinking even when it was demonstrated to be completely illogical and inconsistent with reality. For example, in our discussion about the concept of justice and the basis for determining what is right or wrong; when presented with the history of Nazi atrocities both of these young women argued that within the context of German society at that time they could not condemn the actions of the Nazi's. Why? Because that is what the Nazis believed to be true! Thus their belief made it true for them. They went so far as to say that if they were living in Germany at that time they too would have embraced the Nazi way of thinking if that is what the majority of people held to be true.

We are seeing the rise of the first thoroughly postmodern generation in history. A generation in which many young people lack any coherent or systematic explanation of truth, reality, morality, ethics, meaning or purpose. Christians must challenge the ideological foundations of this fruitless thinking and equip the youngest in our care with theological depth and rational reasons for believing in God, the Bible, and the saving work of Jesus Christ. To do anything less will only further marginalize Christianity and hinder the advance of the Gospel.


S. Michael Craven is the vice president for religion & culture at the National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families and leads the work and ministry of Cultural Apologetics. The Cultural Apologetics ministry works to equip the Church to assert and defend biblical morality and ethics in a manner that is rational, relevant and persuasive in order to recapture the relevance of Christianity to all of life by demonstrating its complete correspondence to reality. For more information on Cultural Apologetics, additional resources and other works by S. Michael Craven visit: www.CulturalApologetics.org

Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.

Send feedback to: mc@nationalcoalition.org