Over the last week, several factors have led me to reflect on the following question: “What (type of Christianity) are we teaching our children?” Or, more pointedly, are we teaching our children Christianity at all? Having grown up in an evangelical mega-church, I was immersed and well-versed in the activities, appearances, and axioms that amalgamated to form what most people would call a “good Christian.” However, as I grew older and began to question some of those “good Christian” things I had learned, I found that Scripture (quite often) did not line up with much of what I assumed to be true of the Christian life. One of the areas in which I found this to be most true was manhood vs. womanhood.
To be fair, the evangelical soup of youth groups, Christian music, Bible studies, and retreats certainly taught me some things about God and his word. Yet they taught me almost nothing about becoming a Chistian man, husband, and father. (One of my youth ministers, to his credit, did seek to teach these things, and I remain grateful for his efforts!) Children’s church had disconnected me from “big church”; youth gatherings encouraged my hormones more than my spiritual mindedness; and college groups just turned me off because they were, well, the same people who had been in youth groups, just older. I was supposed to be maturing in all other areas of my life, but the “be a good Christian” mentality had grown stale. I was discouraged. If the Christianity I had learned in my youth had not prepared me for adulthood, then I needed to find something new, something applicable. If (as I was often told) the “be a good Christian” approach was as firm and reliable as I had been told, then why did so few things make sense when I finally struck out into the world on my own?
In summary, the Christianity I learned in my youth did not translate well into adulthood because it had always been disconnected from the “adult world.” And over the last few years, I have seen a growing number of articles on this same subject. Young men and women in our churches are being taught a lot of “Christian” things, but too few of those “good Christian” lessons translate into real life. Especially with the rise of homosexuality and transgenderism, we as believers need to rethink how we are leading and teaching our children. What interests us more: raising good Christian kids or nurturing future Christian men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers?
As we move forward in our teaching series, I encourage you to think less about what we can do / are doing for the kids in our church and more about how we are training the next generation of men and women, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives. I hope the following articles will challenge and encourage you in that regard: