I can hear the passion in Moses’ voice as he speaks to the Israelites, preparing them to enter the promised land:
Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul and with all of your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
And there it is: the one absolute truth we can give our kids to hold on to. When all around our soul gives way, when we don’t have our health, when our finances are a mess, when we feel like there is not a soul on earth who loves us, when all the ground of life is sinking sand, we have a solid rock to stand upon: God and only God is in control. At the end of the day we can confidently encourage our kids to follow that dangerous man named Jesus, because we know that even though it may be the most difficult and painful journey they could choose, it is the only one that can ever fulfill them, the only choice that will ever give them true happiness. As Christians, we have the best gift possible to share with the children in our midst. We have that ever-elusive secret of life. My favorite wording of that great secret is the paraphrasing of John 3:16 by Aaron Tate of the band Caedmon’s Call: “For you so loved the unlovable that you gave the ineffable, that whoso believes the unbelievable will gain the unattainable.” We have the great news that God loved us so much that he made us to be with us and gave us every good thing we would ever need. That even when we turned our backs on him and decided to do things our own way, he loved us. He loved us so much that he sent his son to us - knowing that we would reject him, mock him, kill him. That even in that worst of all moments, his love for us was so strong that he fought for us, defeating the one thing that scares us most – death – and making the path clear for us to live forever with him as he always meant for us. As Christians, we know the one thing that really makes this life worth living – not just that we have an eternity to spend with our God, but that our eternal lives have already begun. Jesus walks with us here and now, bringing beauty from ashes, strength from fear, gladness from mourning, and peace from despair.
This is the wonderful gift we have to pass on to our kids, but as the church it is so easy to despair. 65% of kids are dropping out of the church as soon as they graduate from high school and studies show that people of my generation aren’t coming back to church when we start families as many of our predecessors did. Our culture is becoming less and less Christian and, alarmingly, more and more anti-Christian. At first glance, these statistics scare us because we, the Church, need our kids. They are our future, right? One day they will have to step up and fill our committees and manage our finances. It will eventually be their job to run the business of the church.
But if we look deeper we see that the church was not created to be a business. There may be business-like things to accomplish, but I have a feeling they mostly all fall under the category of things Jesus tells us not to worry about. And while the church wasn’t created for the business of being in business, we also don’t exist for the simple cause of passing on traditions, a community framework or even a building. God has much bigger things in store for us. And if we aren’t careful we come dangerously close to saying that the great tragedy of the church’s 65% dropout rate is that our pews are looking empty. When the real heart-breaking issue is that 65% of American high school graduates are walking away from one of the most important and sacred gifts God have given us – the body of Christ and the even greater tragedy is that many of them are walking away from faith in Jesus altogether.
To be continued...
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