Teaching Youth about God
I’m blessed to attend a church with a large youth population. On a regular Sunday morning, around 100 teens, aged 13-18, attend Sunday school. I’ve been teaching the Grade 11′s and it’s been great to see how God is working in the lives of many of them. Sometimes I worry about what they might be learning.
As a Sunday school teacher I’ve tried to equip my students with sound doctrine (knowledge), a discerning mind (wisdom) and good moral values (character). I hope I’m being successful. Judging from a study by sociologists Christian Smith and Melina Lundquist Denton, the church as a whole is doing a poor job of equipping its young people.
They interviewed nearly 4,000 American teenagers, and when they “asked these teenagers to describe the particulars of their religious faith, they were “incredibly inarticulate” about even the most basic tenets of their beliefs and practices.”
Protecting the earth: Can you be an atheist and an environmentalist?
This generation: Finding hope in the face of AIDS
Remembering our recent post about the shocking beliefs of a large number of American Christians, we shouldn’t be too surprised young people in America aren’t “getting it” either. I think the first step to good education of youth is proper education of their parents and church leaders. The second is to come up with creative ways to communicate eternal truths effectively to modern (or “postmodern”) young ears and minds.
Do you think your church does an effective job teaching its young people? And what role should the church play and parents play in creating disciples?
Related resources:
Online Life Lessons for teens. Topics include the media, getting along with parents, the fear of food, dating, staying strong in your faith and friendships
Teach Your Children to Study the Bible
Tags: Bible, Christians, church, darren hewer, doctrine, Experience, faith, Men, religion, spirituality, Sunday school, Women
7 Responses to “Teaching Youth about God”
Leave a Reply
Start a Conversation
Media
What Do You Fear?
What do you fear, and why? Is it holding you back from realizing your full potential?
>Watch
Do you crave destiny? (Part 2)
Destiny? Is this really me? Was I really born for great things?
>Watch
Darren, sorry for the late reply–it’s been a crazy week.
In a lot of ways, I don’t think that the process of changing things to be more relevant is a conscious one. People will attach themselves to what resonates with them–and by emphasizing different aspects of it or changing a detail here and there, entirely change the meaning. If they’re even aware of a shift, they regard it as a correction rather than a departure.
With regard to moral progress, while I think the arguments for universal human rights are very strong ones, I also recognize that we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, and not everyone’s giants grew in the same direction. I don’t know to what extent we can expect universal suffrage from, say, a country that has only recently adopted democracy. We can make the argument, certainly, but it might not even make sense to everyone at the time.
For example, in the States there are still people who resist giving gay couples the right to marry. They don’t just not see the need for it; they think that it’s morally wrong. The best I can ever do is try to persuade them it’s right; otherwise I’d be forcing them to do something that they feel is wrong, and freedom of conscience is a basic human right as well.
And there may well be things that people a hundred years from now regard as self-evident, that would completely flummox us. That doesn’t mean we’re wrong right now; we just haven’t gotten to the point where we can see something righter.
As for an eternal religious truths…it took me a minute to figure out what you meant here, because you covered morality above. I’m thinking that you’re talking about the mythological aspect–correct me if I’m wrong. There are motifs that come up again and again, because of who and what we are. That’s not limited to Christianity, though, and the recurring motifs only very rarely have even a grain of literal truth. And as I said above, the interpretations are culturally determined, so that while people tell the same story a thousand years hence, it means something entirely different.
Hope you’re well!
Cat, I’ve read your reply several times over the last day or so, and I have to admit I’m still struggling to understand it. (Except the part about ice cream. For me too, it is a sugary weakness.)
When you say “We build on what’s gone before us, and we change things to be more meaningful to us.”, I agree that we do examine what was done before and try to make good choices as to whether we should do likewise.
I’m wondering though, is there more to it than that? It sounds almost like you’re describing a personal decision, ie, if something seems meaningful to me, I will accept it, and if not, reject it. However, when you say we are “building” on what came before us, it made me think about moral progress. We say, for example, that women’s suffrage is a good thing, that it was positive moral progress for our society when it became law. The fact that it CAN change is obvious from history, whether it SHOULD change is another question. In some other country that is still male-dominated, they may not see granting women the right to vote as being meaningful to them, but that does not make it moral to do deny women the right to vote. To say that something SHOULD change seems to imply that there are certain eternal truths, at least when it comes to moral issues? (I say eternal because the granting of women’s suffrage did not make it moral; it was always moral, even when/if not recognized by the government or even if no one at all recognized it as being so.)
Oh yeah, we were talking about religion weren’t we. :) Certainly ancient practices differ from modern practices, but the idea that religious “truths” can change, and therefore should change, doesn’t follow. It seems to assume that there is (and was never) any actually objectively true religious belief that is not subject to change. Is it at least possible that, like certain moral beliefs, there may be certain religious beliefs which are eternal (not bound to any specific time, place, or person) as well?
Sorry for the long reply! Hope you’re doing well, and are able to make some sense of my meandering thoughts!
Actually, my worship of Ben and Jerry notwithstanding, I don’t think that the comparison of religion to ice cream is an accurate reconstruction of my reasoning. I don’t think religions are all ultimately right or wrong, either. In a lot of ways, those are words that I don’t think apply.
The absence of eternal truth does not mean that we all just arbitrarily make things up as we go along. We build on what’s gone before us, and we change things to be more meaningful to us. One of the values of studying past beliefs, and past conceptions of what are allegedly the same kinds of beliefs, is that we can compare the past with the present, and thereby learn about both.
Another value this has is that it becomes possible to envision the world differently. If you understand how things have changed, you’ll know that they CAN change. One of the ways that fundamentalist movements construct their own authority is to conceive of themselves as a continuation of ancient–and therefore more authentic–practices. These practices become the only correct ones; anything else, even coming out of the same faith, is heresy, degradation, straying from the source. But these movements are actually profoundly modern. If you compare them with past movements, and understand the relationships between them, then they lose that pretense at authority, and it becomes possible to imagine how people might be outside of the movement and yet still acting in good faith. The assumption of good faith would put an end to a great deal of human strife.
Does any of that make sense?
Interesting thoughts Cat. I’m thinking you’d say religion is more like ice cream (if not, please correct me). ie, that we can (and should) choose whatever one we like best. If that’s the case, I’m not sure why we would care what was most important to people hundreds of years ago, because if as you suggest eternal truths are fluid I could easily redefine my own “truths”.
I was wondering, would you say that all religions are ultimately right, in the sense that they all point toward some sort of deeper “truths”? Or that all religions are ultimately wrong (or at least misguided) because there is no ultimate truth available to find? Or something else? I want to make sure I understand your view :)
But it is very useful to know what people believed hundreds of years ago–first of all because it tells you about what was important to them, and also because it serves to remind us that “eternal” truths are extremely fluid, which is something we desperately need to understand.
But say, for a moment, that religion is like medicine. Not every ailment gets treated with the same medicine, or the same dosage; it has to be tailored to the patient. For that matter, not everyone is ailing, either.
I guess whether the results of this survey are a problem depend on the real nature of religion. Is religion more like medicine or ice cream?
If it’s like ice cream, people can choose whichever they like best, and none is ever “better” than another. In that case, who cares about what people believed hundreds of years ago? Or what they believe today, for that matter?
But if it’s like medicine, only what contains the right composition, in the right proportions, can heal what ails. In this case, we should be concerned about the “composition” of faith beliefs today.
Greg Koukl, former atheist, has a thoughtful article here on this topic:
http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5538
I found the survey interesting, but not disheartening. Belief systems change based on what the believers need. If believers need something different from what they did fifty years ago, or a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, then there’s no sense shaking a finger at them and telling them to shape up. Anything set in stone for all time is doomed to fail: that’s modernism. And there’s not a thing the least bit wrong or even untrue about that: that’s post-modernism.
Evangelical Christians are a subset of the Christian population that for whatever reason finds their own particular permutation of Christianity suits their needs better than any other. And that’s fine. But it’s not that they’re holding to the old ways, and everyone else is slipping; Evangelical Christianity is only a couple hundred years old, really. I could show you Christianity from fourteen hundred years ago, that you would consider absolutely alien, and yet its practitioners were utterly convinced that it was the one true way.