If you're the kind of person who runs in church-discussion circles then you're familiar with the much heralded arrival of the Post-Modern, Post-Scientific, Post-Christian world. When I was a kid "Post" was just a secondary brand of cereal (I always coveted the characters on the General Mills cereals. Post cereal cartoon characters were poorly developed.).
I need to become more conversant on the topic because I will be leading two seminars at Emmanuel on knowing the mind of your congregation and then on the topic of reaching Post Moderns. It's the second topic that concerns me the most because "Post Modern" hasn't quite arrived in East Tennessee.
Oh ... there are free spirits and ill-logical thinkers around, but I'm not sure how many true Post Moderns there are. East Tennessee is still overwhelmingly (and yet thinly) Christian.
My daughter, Anna, told me that on her bus there was a boy (let us call him "Darwin") who proclaimed that evolution could be proved and that the idea of a creator God (my description, not his) was laughable.
"Don't you believe in God?" A fellow rider asked.
"No." Darwin said.
At that point, according to Anna, the bus population descended on him in an angry rage, demeaning him, grilling him, and dismissing his beliefs as ridiculous. In other words, the bus riders who nightly play music so offensive that I can't print the lyrics here, riders who consistently speak to each other in words angry and vulgar in nature, treated the non-Christian boy in a most unChristian fashion. To which, I suppose, he should have no moral objection because on the bus (as everybody knows) survival of the fittest is the only rule.
We Christians, however, should have moral objections to the kind of behavior the bullies and berates those who disagree with us. We worship someone whose very life demands we love (not just tolerate) those who disagree with us.
Anna said that while the melee was going on she looked at Jim (who is in the Grandview youth group with her) and said, "Do you get to facebook this or do I?"
Sigh. How do we teach our children to do more than believe in Jesus? How do we teach them to love like he loved?
4 comments:
Thanks for the insightful post, Aaron. I have noticed that fellow Christians locally are more than happy to bludgeon non-believers with the Gospel. They prefer the blunderbuss approach instead of the St. Francis approach.
It's regrettable, actually.
How *do* we teach our children and youth to do more than just believe, and to love deeper?
Maybe we first teach their parents?
Sounds like these kids needed a lesson in love, and in evolutionary biology. Perhaps we should teach both in our church (which I guess has actually happened at Grandview).
Modeling, it's about modeling Christian values...We can teach about them and that has to be done, but it's not enough.
We Christians are just as adept as anyone else at the practice of "do as I say, not as I do".
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