I love the World War II generation and the enormous impact they have had on our nation! Perhaps no generation has had a greater challenge since then than the one presently coming to maturity. Last night, at Teens In The Word, we asked the teens to describe the religious philosophy of their peers as they interact with them at school, their jobs, and their extracurricular activities. It was heartening to see and hear our teens’ conviction, knowledge, and heart, but disheartening to discuss the fruit of a couple of generations of our culture’s social experiment to reprogram the thinking of people, especially this burgeoning generation.
Our teens attend schools in Douglas, Jefferson, and Denver Counties, go to large High Schools, charter schools, private schools, and home-schools. Despite these diversities, what they encounter is remarkably similar. It might surprise you that many of their peers believe in a Higher Power and would consider themselves spiritual. More than anywhere else, these peers attend community churches. Whatever the church growth gurus and experts claim, the teens that go to these churches tell our teens something very different. Their religious experience is heavily dependent upon entertainment, doing fun things with a party atmosphere, not motivated or influenced by much biblical teaching, segregated from adults, hard-rocking music, dancing, and overall, a very tactile experience. What impact does it have on “faith”? If speaking in terms of growing closer to God and learning more about Him, not that much. The prevailing worldview of many of our teens’ friends is “what’s right for me may not be right for you,” that God and the devil, heaven and hell are mindsets more than realities (really just your conscience inside of you), and that essentially the only or worst sins, the “objective wrongs,” are offending others and judging others. When our teens seek to assert objective truth from scripture, they sometimes encounter scorn or rejection. While our teens know a varying degree of peers whose faith and beliefs are more concrete and committed, perhaps the most frequently observed comment last night was that many of their peers “believe in God but not the Bible or Christ.” They see the Bible as a book of myths or fairytales and not the revealer of truth or a standard of authority.
As we closed our class last night, I was left awestruck. Our teens are among my most cherished heroes. They are on the frontline of faith, battling in a world more opposed to truth than that of any generation now living which preceded them. We were struck with more than admiration, though. We felt determination, the need to redouble our efforts to establish and defend the trustworthiness and integrity of the Bible, the existence of God, and from that the authoritative nature of Scripture. Not only will this bolster the faith of our teens, but it will help them in dialoging with those among their peers possessing good and honest hearts (cf. Luke 8:15).
Here are four things you can do right now for our teens. (1) Pray for them. (2) Live Christ without hypocrisy before them. (3) Actively encourage them. (4) Help equip them. Look for heroes where you will. I have found mine!
Neal Pollard