Last night I was privileged to share in a Passover Seder with dear friends. We read from the Reformed Haggadah where God chastised the angels for their shouts of joy at the Egyptians' drowning. Sometimes freedom comes at the end of so great a nightmare and at so great a cost that the shouting of anything - including the shout of victory - rings falsely. Only silence is true. May we never forget.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/nyregion/rabbi-herschel-schacter-

The Faith of Teenagers: Nice or Life-changing?

In preparation for our search for a new minister of youth, I have been reading Kenda Creasy Dean's book Almost Christian: What the Faith of our Teenagers is Telling the American Church.  In the book, Dean analyses data gathered in the national Study of Youth and Religion — the broad-reaching 2003-2005 study of spirituality among American youth. The good news in Dean's analysis is that youth are generally a lot less hostile to religion than we adults suspect. The bad news is that they are also a lot less passionate about their own personal faith than we would hope for. Even more sobering, Dean says the problem with teenage faith (or lack thereof) is really the problem of church faith (or lack thereof). To borrow an old line from a famous anti-drug commercial, our teenagers are "learning it by watching [us]".

 

Dean labels the primary religion of American teenagers as a faith in the god of something she calls Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD). Dean says the fundamental beliefs of MTD are: 1. A god exists who created and orders the world and watches over life on earth. 2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. 3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. 4. God is not involved in my life except when I need God to resolve a problem. 5. Good people go to heaven when they die. With the exception of the implications of number four, MTD seem to be generally positive religious tenets. But for Dean — and for me — that generality is a problem. There is no mention of the particularity of the God who comes to us in the story of Abraham, Israel, and ultimately the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  

 

When I read about MTD, I think of H. Richard Niebuhr's critique of the faith of 20^th century social liberalism:  "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."  Though my own theologically liberal side wants to substitute the word "wrath" with the word "passion," I agree that Niebuhr's general sentiment is true and I think it shares the same power failure as that of MTD. In the end, what we get is a god who is vague, distant, none-too-demanding, and, ultimately, none-too-important. As Dean writes, "If this is the god we offer young people, there may be little in Christianity to which they object, but there is even less to which they will be devoted." The Bible calls this a luke-warm faith.

 

 

In one-on-one interviews with young people in the study, Dean said youth described God as being above all things "nice" and wanting us to be nice also. This is of course all very well and nice, but it doesn't quite lift the luggage. Having a "nice" God who wants us to be nice also is a far cry from the God whose passion runs so deep for us that He came to die for us and calls for us to die to ourselves as well. Dean says we sell our youth short when we assume ministry with youth is all about making things "fun." She says our aim ought to be higher. She closes the book with a quote from nineteenth-century Daniel Burnham:

 

Make no small plans. They have no magic to stir humanity's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work . . . . Remember that our sons and daughters are going to do things that will stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon, beauty. Think big.

 

 

Reading this book has not only been good for my purposes on the search committee but also for my purposes as a father. It has helped me to understand how desperately I want my own children not only to believe in God generally, but to have an abundant and life-giving relationship with Him.

 

Yesterday I had a father and his daughter in my office discussing a faith decision the young daughter is in the process of making. At the close of the meeting the father, daughter, and I held hands in a circle and I prayed. As I prayed, the thought of this father and his daughter overwhelmed me and tears suddenly began running down my cheeks and onto the table between us. It occurred to me that the prayer I was praying for this man's daughter is the same prayer my soul is praying for my own daughter and two sons — that they might come to know God — not a mushy, vague, "nice" God— but rather that they might know the God who is so wildly in love with them that He, too, shed tears for them in Gethsemane and blood for them on Calvary. He is the God who died for us; and He is the God who is worth our living and dying for also.

 

 

And my question as a father and pastor is this: Are our kids seeing that kind of passionate life and death in me?