The Lie the World Now Tells to Silence Christians

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In November 2004, I sat in a movie theater and witnessed one of the most chilling, frightening films I had ever seen: The Incredibles.

“Aw, c’mon, Dan,” you might protest. “That was an animated film for kids. Pixar. Now Disney. How can that possibly be anything but rainbows and unicorns?”

This scene:

 
The film’s writer and director Brad Bird nailed it:

“And when everyone’s super, no one will be.”

For a while, that narrative played in real life. It was a story the forces that hate God and hate His Church attempted to promote. “If everyone is a good person, and we construct a story we tell that makes everyone good, then no one will be morally or ideologically superior to anyone else. And then we can do whatever we want because we will have killed off religion, especially those that draw distinctions between good and evil.”

It’s an insidious ploy. Problem is, it didn’t work. The reason? Human sin.

You can’t claim that everyone is good if people keep doing heinous things. This especially doesn’t work when certain groups of highly visible people repeatedly are behind those atrocities. The goodness lie can’t stand in a world of fallen people.

Here’s where the flip-side is beginning to creep in…

I’ve noticed a new narrative lately coming from those who are desperate to draw moral and ideological equivalencies so as to excuse themselves, while also taking down any exceptionalism claims by any belief system. It’s a concession that the “everyone is super” narrative failed. What we are now being propagandized with is its opposite.

When Alexander Bissonnette walked into a Quebec mosque and unloaded his weapons into the bodies of the men present, the headline the next day described him with a phrase I’d not seen before in the press: Christian terrorist.

This past week, when Cedric Anderson walked into a California school and started shooting, the press wanted to know why Christians were not denouncing this terror perpetrated by a Christian pastor that left people, including a mentally-challanged child, dead.

Anyone else see what is happening here?

There’s a lie building. And from the perspective of those who tried with the goodness message and failed, it’s a more effective foundation supporting this revised agenda, because fallen people tend not to act good. Therefore, instead of finding cases of wholesale good in any group, find instances of the opposite.

“If we want to establish moral and ideological equivalency, we must show that no one is exceptional. Because if no one is exceptional, then there is nothing exceptional about what anyone believes.”

The implementation as an attack on Christian faith is to find deranged, unstable, violent people who have some slim connection to something someone thinks is Christianity, and paint them as brightly as possible as stellar, A-#1 examples of Christian faith. Then say, “Look at this mass murderer Christian! Christians are just as bad as everyone else. In fact, they may be the real monsters we never realized lived among us.”

You see, Alexandre Bissonnette liked Pope John Paul II on his Facebook page and used an image of a crusader to announce his savage plan to murder.

You see, Cedric Anderson called himself a pastor in public and quoted biblical-sounding things on his Facebook page.

So, of course, these murderers and terrorists are shining examples of orthodox Christians. Orthodox Christians are terrorists too. Look! Look!

Except it’s a desperate lie.

Any 15-minute investigation into Bissonnette showed, if anything, that he is beholden more to an atheistic humanism with roots in rationalist philosophy than to anything Christian. The label doesn’t stick. At all.

Same for Anderson. A con man with a history of weapons and violence charges, who appears to have lied about his military service, had no church behind his “pastorate,” and who espouses some mangling of the Old Testament in a series of Facebook posts—he’s no more an orthodox Christian than Jim Jones.

Thing is, no one tried to draw an equivalency with Jim Jones back in the ’70s. No one looked at the People’s Temple and said, “I can’t see any difference between them and your typical Methodist or Presbyterian church.” Any reporter who tried would have been run out of town on a rail for being so blind and willfully ignorant.

But today? Well, that willful ignorance falls into the rotten “gift” the Web and social media have given us: That if someone says something loudly and often enough on the Internet, that person can find an audience and replace ultimate truth with alternate facts.

Fake news indeed.

This is a real problem for Christian believers.

For us, I don’t see any recourse but to engage this agenda of delegitimizing the Gospel and Christian theology through wide-brushing Christians as morally and ideologically equivalent to those groups that are committing atrocities around the globe. We must confront this forced equivalency and reveal it as the lie that it is. We must draw distinctions between genuine Christian faith and all the perverted forms that people desperate to undermine Christianity are trying to foist on the ignorant as the norm.

Here is one reality we must keep reinforcing. Unlike some other groups out there, terrorists and ideological deviants do not come out of orthodox (small-“o”) Christian churches. Those radicals that may identify (and be identified by outsiders) as “Christian” almost always come out of “churches” with deviant theology that in no way resembles orthodox Christian theology and practice. The distinctions are clear, and anyone should be able to see them if they spend even a little bit of effort to note the difference.

Except those with the equivalency agenda do not want people to do the checking. They figure if they “equivalent-ize” loudly and long enough, people will believe them. Sadly, that seems to work when left uncountered.

All I can say to fellow believers is that we cannot rest and ignore this. If we see someone on the Internet trying to force a moral and ideological equivalency between faiths or belief groups by appealing to examples of “Christians” who commit atrocities, we must speak truth to it.

Again, the most egregious lie is to look for “radicals” and to place them as coming from orthodox church congregations. However, “Radicalized Christians” always come from a “church” with deviant, unorthodox theology, belief, and practice, and almost always glaringly so.

Remember, that to work, this lie must force equivalencies, so it must also operate in the other direction, by excusing non-Christian groups that produce radicals. Fact is, these radicals ARE coming from orthodox versions of that non-Christian group. This is used against Christians by forcing the equivalency that if orthodox examples of these non-Christian groups are producing radicals and terrorists, then orthodox churches are too.

Except this simply is not the case. Radicals do not radicalize in Christian churches that are not preaching radically deviant beliefs.

We orthodox Christians must speak and stop letting outsiders who claim they understand us propagandize lies about us.

Media Clickbait and the Rise of the Hostile Pseudo-Christian

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This past week, I read news stories that included the following:

  • Passengers applaud the removal of a sick Hispanic boy from a plane
  • Illinois debates a bill that forces women to legally name the father of their children, even in the case of rape

Enough to raise your hackles, right? What an uncaring mob on that plane! What an abrogation of good ol’ American right to privacy!

What in the hell is wrong with the world today?!

Well, maybe it has something to do with this acronym:

TL;DR

In case you haven’t read enough to encounter it before (oh, the wicked irony!), TL;DR stands for Too Long; Didn’t Read.

In what may be the most spotlight a semicolon ever received, this phrase expresses the go-go, harried nature of life today. A whole lot of data and words, and not enough time to properly ponder any of it. In fact, some news sources now include a TL;DR sidebar that summarizes the whole article. With Google claiming that 2,200 words is the SEO sweet spot for authoritative articles, it seems in an age of TL;DR, we now have even more content we’re reading even less.

And the less we’re reading is cheesing us off to no end.

AngryReally, is it just me, or is everyone in a pissy mood?

Maybe this will make you more angry than you already are, but the headlines on those two articles up top are both lies. Sort of.

Clickbait is a term used to describe any headline or story phrased in such a way to suck people in. Given the overflow of info available, crafting a headline that grabs people is the difference between read-filed and dead-filed. No point in writing what people don’t read, no matter how stupendous the content might be. In an age of social media, some people read no further than that grabby headline.

The problem: Too many clickbaity headlines get written to purposefully rile. Write something that appeals to anger, and voila! Click, click, click.

About those two articles above…

Anyone who followed up on the awful, discriminatory, uncaring crowd aboard that plane later found that almost no one on the plane knew the boy was having a medical emergency. All they knew is that they were sitting on the tarmac for hours, missing connections and generally not getting where they needed to go. It wasn’t about the boy, his emergency, or his ethnicity at all. People didn’t applaud the boy’s exit; they applauded because an unknown delay finally got resolved and they could take off.

But a plane finally departing after a couple hours doesn’t make a story. Decrying fellow humans for prejudice and heartlessness–real or imagined–does.

Likewise, after castigating the bill proposer in the Illinois “name the father or else” story, a paragraph near the end states that the bill had been sponsored in an effort to help single mothers collect on deadbeat and absent fathers. It wasn’t a Nazi-like effort to embarass women but a means to help curtail the epidemic of fathers who inseminate, bolt, and let their partners and kids fend for themselves.

But that’s not at all what the headline implies.

What’s even more galling than these twisted headlines that hint at a different truth than the actuality just to entice people? That online news today enables instant editing and retraction. News organizations may alter headlines repeatedly to test which ones draw more people. Increasingly, articles also receive edits in real time, which means the story you read an hour ago may not have the same content an hour later.

The upshot: Media sources play emotional games with us, fostering anger where little or no anger should exist.

What does this mean for Christians?

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Those are the fruits of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer in Jesus. The Lord Himself said that these traits distinguish someone who knows God from someone who does not. Their presence marks regenerated and saved believers, while their absence proves who is unregenerated and damned.

Right now in America, a lot of angry, hostile “Christians” are changing the future of this country for the worse. We see them online fighting, cursing, and calling others names. They throw support behind people who show no evidence of the fruit of the Spirit, and in their own dealings with others, they show evidence for all the traits opposite that fruit. They weep and gnash their teeth. Their general horribleness toward their fellow man makes the Baby Jesus cry.

And they may be you and me.

Media clickbait, purposefully twisted news headlines, and stories written to highlight the worst lies rather than the best truths are contributing to the social decrepitude of many. We’re all becoming worse people because we have a permanent chip on our shoulders and a stoked need to lash out at evil and enemies.

But are we adding to evil and becoming enemies of God as a result?

What does it mean when someone who claims to be Christian instead maintains an angry, hostile, permanently livid persona, especially online or in dealing with other people? Where are the fruits of the Spirit by which genuine believers must be known?

I can’t tell anyone how to live. Yet when I see what this suspect news fosters and note what it’s doing to people, I wonder if it’s best for Christians to start pulling back from media consumption.

Because what does it all profit us to engage information if we lose our souls in the process?

The Youth Ministry Problem, Part 3

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In the prior two installments (Part 1, Part 2)  of this limited series, we examined the problems facing ministry to youth. Today, I want to unpack some further issues and provide answers to why we continue to lose kids and how we can not only stem that tide but reverse it.

Rather than have some great build up, I’ll head right into my thoughts:

1. Encapsulating the Gospel and then preaching it is our highest calling.

When the Church no longer knows what the Gospel is, it can’t transmit that Gospel to the next generation. How scary is it that many of the most learned and vocal Christians out there, the ones often in leadership roles, can’t articulate what the Gospel is?

We can only fool kids for so long. Today’s teens are experts at analyzing sales pitches. They are far more savvy consumers than even their parents, and they recognize when they’re being manipulated. So an attractional youth ministry model that has no genuine Gospel meat on its bones won’t be a tempting meal for them.

We also fail when we do not show consistently how the Gospel destroys all competing worldviews. Instead, by failing to understand competing worldviews, we allow people in our churches to synthesize Christianity with social Darwinism, pragmatism. American Dreamism, and any of a thousand other -isms that stand against the true Gospel.

Every Christian must understand the world in terms of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. We must try all competing worldviews and reveal how each sets itself up against the knowledge of Jesus Christ.

If we don’t start fixing this lack of instilling a Gospel-based worldview, nothing else that follows will do any good.

2. A complete cradle-to-grave educational plan for people in our churches is essential.

Increasingly, I believe this is the single most devastating systemic problem in our churches. No church has a handle on a complete educational philosophy. A church can have 10 pastors and not a single one is devoted to ensuring that people of all ages learn the fundamentals of the faith. That’s a genuine scandal.

In my radio interview in July, I mentioned that we need to ask our church leaders about their cradle-to-grave educational plan and ask for point-by-point, and age-by-age details. Listen to the response; it will be the most telling thing we hear about our church.

I also believe that every age group within a church should be hearing the same message, only geared for the appropriate age group. If the pastor preaches on John 1, then every instructional group in the church receives teaching on John 1, from the nursery kids in Sunday School to the mid-week adult small groups. Millions of pages of Bible learning and commentary exist, so it’s not as if the source material is so paper-thin that we can’t mine it for all its worth in a given week.

The mishmash, every-class-does-its-own-thing disaster that is the educational plan at most churches explains much of the state of the Church in the West. It’s one reason why parents give up on their children’s spiritual educations. The church splits the family the second it hits the lobby on Sunday, with everyone going his or her way. Then when the family reconvenes, each person has been schooled in disconnected topics, which makes it impossible for parents to discuss those topics with their kids.

But with everyone learning the same basic topic, conversation opens up. Parents don’t spend all their time trying to tease out what the kids studied. They know because they studied the same topic.

The lack of a comprehensive educational plan (and the church leadership’s lack of constant selling of such a plan to the people in the seats) is one of the reasons why its so hard to get people to volunteer to teach in a church. No one gets a complete vision of the direction for growth. If the goal is vague, why would anyone sign on?

Another scandal in this regard is that our churches spend hand over fist for stupid programming that has no lasting value, but we can’t see the need to pay someone to coordinate and enact the educational vision for the church. One of the worst trends in the last 50 years in our churches is the wholesale elimination of  paid Christian education staff in favor of volunteers. The results are obvious, though, and we need to get serious about the horrendous state of Christian education in our churches.  Most seminarians and pastors never got the training to coordinate the educational direction of a church that we believe they did. So, pay a trained Christian educator to do the job and stop grousing about it. Otherwise, keep the status quo and continue to reap the whirlwind.

3. A youth ministry model based on young men moving from the farm to the factory is passé and must be replaced by a model that meets modern needs.

How many of you, before you read the first two parts of this series, knew the genesis of youth ministry as a response to a shift from rural agrarianism to urban industrialism in the first half of the 19th century in England? Now that you understand this, how appropriate does our contemporary youth ministry model, which is nothing more than an outgrowth of that change, seem?

The model no longer applies, folks. It’s time we replace it it with something better. Acknowledging that broken model is the first step toward a more biblical and relevant one.

4. The youth minister’s job should be to work himself out of a youth-only job.

I do believe that we still need youth ministers. However, their job responsibilities must be completely rethought.

For millennia the most effective youth ministry model involved parents teaching their own children the faith. This has indirect and direct benefits:

1) Parents had to know what they were talking about. It meant they had to understand the faith too. Plus, they exercised valuable teaching and communications skills usable in other situations at church or in life.

2) Kids got their information from the one source most important in their lives, both in terms of total time spent together and in authority. The faith had greater meaning because they saw it modeled by their parents rather than by “professionals.”

Some parents will research and  slave over a Powerpoint presentation they must give (which no one will remember a week later) before a group of corporate bigwigs (who don’t really matter) as part of their job (which has few eternal benefits), yet they can’t spend five minutes telling their own kids about Jesus—mostly because they haven’t done the research themselves. What terrible priorities we have!

I understand that parents have it rough. Fact is, parents have always had it rough. That we have made things even rougher for ourselves by poor priorities will be addressed later.

But back to that youth minister…

The present-age role for the youth minister should be not as a semi-cult leader for teens but as a resource for parents. The youth minister’s main goal should be not ministering to teens directly but teaching parents to become the primary transmitters of the faith to their own children. And frankly, that needs to start long before the teen years.

Parents don’t teach their kids the faith because

they don’t know it themselves,

they don’t know how to teach,

and they can’t find the time.

Let’s be honest, though; today’s parents can’t shoulder all the blame. As I noted in my prior post in this series, parents have been robbed. They weren’t given the right tools to do this all-important job of transmitting the faith. Sadly, what little they do transmit will be the entirety of what their kids call upon when they have to teach their own children.

And so the great mind-wipe carries on until nothing is left.

The youth minister, in conjunction with other church leaders, is the one to address that issue.

There will always be a need to minister to those kids whose parents are not Christians or who do not attend the church, so yes, someone must coordinate that work. That’s the next step.

5. The entire church is responsible for passing along the faith to the next generation.

Somehow, our churches have devolved into age and affinity group ghettos. We’ve lost the coherence of a family, of being the Body of Christ wherein one organ cannot exist without the others. Instead, we break down everything—and everyone—into their generic components.

That’s wrong.

The church is a family, a community unto itself. And as much as I hate to reference Hillary Clinton, it DOES take a village to raise a child.

We’ve forgotten this, though. Our churches separate the elderly from the youngsters. We put the singles into their group and isolate them. We do everything we can to frustrate the mission of the church as a whole by not seeing the value of all people in the training up of the next generation of Christians.

When we plan our cradle-to-grave educational philosophy, we must begin to incorporate a more holistic view of ministry not just as a collection of nuclear families, with parents teaching their kids, but as a church family, with people of all ages serving as instructors to children.

Our programming should always include all people, if possible, and value their contributions. Tribal people understand this and have maintained their traditions. We, however, have not. We devalue the tribe, and in doing so dilute its traditions.

6. “Tribal” rites of passage in our churches must mark adulthood.

I was blessed to grow up in the Lutheran Church and experience a conscientious confirmation and catechism program. Together, confirmation and catechism provided a gateway into adult life and membership within the church. Once past that mark, we were no longer children but full voting members of the church on which certain responsibilities now rested. We could hold board positions and lead groups.

I cannot stress enough, given the astonishing lack of appropriate rites of passage in our society, how much we need Christian rites of passage. When we wring our hands over teen sex, drinking, drug use, and so on, we have only ourselves to blame. We made those our primary rites of passage into adulthood.

I believe Christians must wholeheartedly counter this societal deficiency. Yet what are the rites of passage from childhood into adulthood in the average church?

Each church or denomination must work to formulate rites of passage for its youth. I believe that all ages, experiences, and marital statuses must be involved in creating adulthood curriculum and teaching it to our kids.

In my Lutheran church, I was grilled by the pastor and lay leader on points of doctrine, my understanding of them, and how I applied them in my own life. If I didn’t answer correctly, I had to try again later. That was hard, but it was also life-changing.

So why aren’t we doing this with our kids? Why do we just naturally assume they should be church members by parent proxy rather than by earning it themselves? Why don’t we promote spiritual understanding and show its value through such rites?

I also believe that we can’t start early enough with our Christian kids on classes in being proper husbands and wives. We also need to teach them how to run a household. This should be part of the passage rite.

And as Protestants, how is it that we have downplayed ceremonies? What better ceremony can there be than to present a young person as a full adult member in the church, a title  earned through hard work and study?

Once those teens have passed the rite, push them. Billy Graham noted long ago that the one thing all teens need today is a challenge. By destroying the agrarian lifestyle, we relegated our young people to purposelessness. With no real need for them to help support the family, teens looked anywhere they could for meaning.

Our churches have to give them that meaning and work to involve our teens in the adult life and purpose of the church. We must stop looking down on the inexperience of teens and instead stoke the mission God is giving to each of them. We need to encourage their gifts and get of the way as they use them. When teens feel needed, they are less likely to drift away. Attractional ministry will only hold teens for so long; instead, they need to be integral to the Great Commission.

Too many Christian parents see getting their kids into some elite college as the be-all rite of passage and the only true mission for their kids. We have to rectify that mistaken priority, and that will involve other life changes.

7. We Christians must start questioning and fixing how we spend our time.

We are all too busy with the perishable, which amazingly enough causes us to ignore the imperishable: the next generation.

If you have been a reader here for long, you know my pet peeves concerning how we spend our time. But for those who have not, I will outline them briefly (I hope).

Work/Jobs—I believe that Christians must find a way to speak to the devastating work and job choices we have created in our modern society. The same conservative Christians who wrap themselves in the American flag, talk about the Founding Fathers, and go on and on about how America once was are the same folks who seem to endorse the postindustrial work world of America 2010 that is at complete odds with American work life circa 1776 (when BOTH parents worked from home).  While the stay-at-home mom is lauded, we want dad to be 30 miles away slaving in a cubicle for 12 hours a day, driving an hour through gridlocked traffic, slamming down a cold meal, spending “quality time” with the kids, and then romancing his wife the way she wants and all the Focus on the Family literature says he must. Somehow, we think that is normal—and possible!

Or we once did. Economic realities in 2010 have put dad out of work, or in a sub-optimal-for-his-training job at a sub-optimal income, which means mom now must work. The irony is that she may be better paid, which torches all the Christian literature about dad being the breadwinner.

Ten years ago, most of the households of people I knew were single income. Today, none are. And many of those households were adamant about dad working and mom staying home.

Some Christian leaders, those with a national pulpit, have got to start discussing alternatives to the way we Christians work. The work world of today is broken, and it not only breaks parents, but it breaks their families. For too long we have made the self-made man and his self-made wife and self-made kids the poster faces of the Christian family, with the accompanying McMansion, private Christian schools, and Christian cruises in the Caribbean. Perhaps we should be thinking more downscale.

When we talk about parents educating their children, we’re not really talking about parents; we’re talking about moms. And it’s been that way for a long time, and still is, even with moms working.

Why is it not possible to rethink the way we Christians work so that BOTH mom and dad are home? We hold men up as breadwinners, but the way our society functions, that breadwinner role more often than not completely removes fathers from educating their children. Boys, especially, suffer for not having their fathers around, particularly as spiritual examples.

One of the major reasons youth ministry is failing goes beyond spoken words. Yes, preach the Gospel to kids and their parents. But more than anything else, our culture, which has heard enough words about Jesus from myriad sources, needs to SEE the Gospel message PRACTICED. Nothing is more true than this for kids. Their hypocrisy radar is always cranked to 11. When they go to church on Sunday yet fail to see their parents actively practicing the faith—and I’m not just talking about reading the Bible and praying, but feeding the poor, clothing the naked, and so on—then they will note the disconnect. The first chance they get to bolt, they will.

This happens because families cannot have the world’s mammon and the Lord. Dad’s 60-hour work week and Blackberry slavery when not at work leaves no time for genuine practice of the faith. With this increasingly the case for mom as well, how can any kid not see the disconnect between what we say and how we live?

Dealing with the outrageous inflation of college costs will also force Christians in the near future to discover better ways to prepare their children for work. Yet where are the Christian voices proposing a rethinking of apprenticeships and Christian alternatives to college as work prep?

Christians MUST find alternatives to the contemporary work world. If that means moving downscale, exploring alternative community living, or going back to an agrarian lifestyle—whatever—we need to get our brightest and best together to deal with this most pressing of problems.

Because most adults today spend the majority of  their week at their jobs. If Christianity cannot speak to this, then we are ignoring the most time-consuming portion of people’s lives. And our failure to speak and act on this has brought enough damage already.

Organized Childhood—The other form of slavery Christians endure is organized child events. The worst offender here is sports.

When I was a child, we played kick the can in the street. Our backyards became small softball fields. As most yards were unfenced, we’d string a few together to play touch football. In the summertime came the neighborhood chess tournaments, with kids lined up to play on our front porch. Later, we got into wargames and D&D. We found a way to fill our own leisure time.

Today, most children are shuttled constantly between organized activities. Kids can’t throw together an impromptu game of whiffle ball because all of them are now on Select sports teams. And pity the poor loner who isn’t! Those organized leagues have two-hour practices several times a week, with a couple games at ludicrous times spread out over a 100-mile radius, running parents and kids ragged.

The number one excuse I hear from folks with children as to why they can’t make a church event or just get together to hang out as the Body of Christ is their kids’ organized sports.

When you truly get down to why this devotion to sports exists, it’s hard not to shake the truth that many parents harbor the hope that Johnny or Janie will be the next Drew Brees or Mia Hamm. Sports has become the ticket to an elite college, and for too many parents, that college education trumps everything. Fact is, among parents identified as Evangelical Christians, the majority claim that getting into an elite college is a higher priority for their children than knowing Jesus, according to a George Barna poll from a few years back. Get a sports scholarship, get drafted, and make a mint.

It’s a false dream, though, as noted by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. A kid’s month of birth may have more to do with his success than any talent he may have. Not to mention the minuscule pool of pro athletes today.

And for those who say that all this builds character, well, there isn’t much character in sports today, especially with everything being about money. I’ve seen coaches of 6-year-olds screaming at them for a simple mistake on the field. My own kid suffered at the hands of a coach who made winning everything, even if it meant calling on his handful of superstars to crush the same hapless (read: played even the less talented kids) opponents week after week.

If our kids are spending ten hours or more a week on a playing field somewhere, when are they getting time to hear about Jesus? And what message does all our organized child activities speak about the priority we make Jesus in the lives of our kids? A couple hours a week about Jesus versus a couple hours a day practicing piano is the wrong proportion. Should we then be surprised when our kids are a mile wide in soccer skills and an inch deep spiritually?

Community—We talk and talk and talk about community in the American Christian Church. But when we look at genuine practice, we’re pretty much strangers to each other. The early Church met in each other’s homes every single day, and in the temple for worship. That was normal. In contrast, our normal is their “neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some.”

We have made the busyness caused by work and organized child activities the main enemy of Christian community.

Kids see this. Again, the hypocrisy of what we say compared with our practice speaks (and teaches) louder than our words.

Kids who are NOT regularly surrounded by a multigenerational group of nonfamily members grow up seeing other people as competitors for an increasingly smaller portion of the pie. Our lack of genuine community breeds distance, which abets social Darwinism and the kill or be killed mentality we foster in our business practices. If we need examples, look no further than the highly educated kids from elite colleges who knew they were selling air through mortgage-backed derivatives that precipitated the collapse of our economy. All the postmortems paint those folks as knowing exactly what they were doing to other people, but the opportunity to make a killing at the devastating expense of others proved too great. All ethics, if any existed previously, were dumped in the trashcan.

Technology also hurts community. I watched my teenage niece repeatedly text a friend of hers. Amazingly, the friend lived a couple houses up the street. When I asked why she didn’t walk a few feet to talk with her friend, I got a bunch of responses that I couldn’t understand. Studies even show that today’s teens have greatly reduced vocabularies and an inability to read body language thanks to their dependence on cell phones and the Internet. In addition, social groups depend on these devices, as one parent I know who was strongly against cell phones caved to the pressure when his once-popular 11-year-old son got left out of his peer group because the boy didn’t have one.

Adults fall prey to this too. Most of the Christian small groups I’ve been a a part of don’t meet anymore, or they meet with increasing irregularity. The voices are strong on Facebook, but we just don’t see each other much.

Our busyness, technophilia, and pursuit of mammon have killed our community, hurt our families, and left our children with a distorted view of other people. We have gone so low as to substitute face-to-face gatherings with a fired-off, dozen-word update on Facebook. I believe wholeheartedly that we are in a time when our distance is only breeding contempt, as it seems that fewer and fewer people genuinely like each other, with more and more finding nitpicky, Seinfeld-esque reasons to avoid other people entirely.

These are enormous issues that better minds than this writer MUST address. Yet I hear almost no one in the Christian community with a national voice speaking to them. Instead, those leaders often extol these deficiencies. What these lacks do to our kids, though, can’t be ignored.

***

I believe that the seven points above, when properly addressed within the American Christian Church, can stem the tide of teens leaving our churches. Empty pewThe generation now coming up is one of the least churched in American history because our youth ministry models failed it.

We have got to change! But those changes will need to be drastic, which is why I am not confident that those churches that claim to adhere to Christian doctrinal truth can pull off the fixes. We’re too obsessed with the failures of the culture around us and not ruthless enough in fixing our own deficiencies.

But if we don’t, our lampstand will be taken away—if it hasn’t been already.

Previous posts in this series: