Church for Dummies – 1
I get through more Bible in one scripture lesson with non-Christian high school kids than many church congregations get in 6 months. Why have we dumbed church down so much?
“A young man, who never really wanted to graduate from high school himself, gets hired as a youth minister. His task is to put together a wild and crazy time down at the church, with perhaps a little inspirational message attached. The driving assumption is that young people today will not tolerate serious instruction and discipleship, and so we must give them large amounts of what they do want, which is “fun, fun, fun, till her daddy takes the T-bird away.” The problem here is not that the kids in the high school group get together, but rather that we have assumed that their time together should consist largely of froth and vanity. As these children grow up, we find that they are unaccustomed to any kind of serious, sustained worship, and so the pressure mounts to make the worship service more and more like the youth group used to be. Because we have tolerated and encouraged the dumbing down of the faith amoung young people, we discover over time, as they grow up, that it stays dumbed down.”
Doug Wilson, Mother Kirk, p. 220. Available from www.canonpress.org
