When Sunday School started this fall, I asked my Grade 6-8 class, “Why do you come to Sunday School?” They looked at me in disbelief, and I immediately corrected myself -- I know why they come to Sunday School: their parents make them come. “So why do your parents make you come?” I asked.
They understood that their parents felt it was important to learn about God and Jesus, but really had no idea why: they figured it had something to do with making them good people.
So here’s my problem: if you’re just looking for a way to be a good person, you can be a secular humanist and sleep in on Sunday morning, and sooner or later, these kids are going to figure that out. Christians have no lock on being good people, and there will be plenty of non-Christian friends who will gleefully point out the many, many times throughout history when Christians have actually been as far from “good people” as it is possible to get.
My co-teacher, and the mother of one of our students, mentioned her gratitude to God for all that he has done as one of the major reasons she wants her daughter to be in Sunday School. And that’s great, as far as it goes. But is it enough? Sooner or later her daughter is bound to notice that God causes the rain to fall upon the just and unjust alike, and wonder what the point of gratitude is.
A study by the Barna Group recently arrived in my mailbox showing that young people have an increasingly negative view of Christianity. (You can read the report at: http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=280) Even those with some experience in churches saw Christianity as judgmental and hypocritical. They also thought that Christians were “anti-homosexual,” failed to put into practice our teaching of “loving our neighbor as ourselves,” and that Christianity no longer looked like Jesus.
It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s what the kids in my Sunday School class are going to hear from their peers as they move into high school and college. There will be lots of reasons not to go to church -- will we have given them any reason to come?
We can no longer count on social pressure to keep our children in church until they discover their own answers to why be a Christian. If we are to have any hope that our children will know God, we need, desperately, to be able to articulate a deeper understanding of our faith, something that goes beyond platitudes or a fear of Hell. And for that to happen, we need to understand, ourselves, what we are doing here.
The place to begin, I believe, is in telling our own stories. I know why I go to church, but I’ve spent the last four years in an intensive discernment process listening for God’s voice in my life. That makes me far from typical. But I don’t think it should. I think that each and every one of us has a powerful and compelling story about how God has moved in our lives. If we didn’t, we’d long ago have quit setting the alarm clock on Sunday mornings.
What is your story? Why do you go to church? Or why don’t you go to church -- is there something about the way Christianity is taught that keeps you away? What would you tell my sixth to eighth graders?
If you feel up to being public about your story, leave a comment on the blog. If it’s something too intensely private to share with the world, I’d love to hear from you directly: I’ll keep it confidential, just between you and me.
in telling our stories, I believe we begin to find the places where God is truly and deeply present in our lives, allowing us a fuller relationship with Him. And that, in turn, allows us to help others find and be found by Him, which is the true meaning of Christ’s command to us to “go out and make disciples of all nations.” So please, join the story telling! At the very least, it will help me offer better answers to my sixth, seventh, and eighth graders about why they should keep dragging themselves to Sunday School when they’d really rather stay in bed.
Suzanne
They understood that their parents felt it was important to learn about God and Jesus, but really had no idea why: they figured it had something to do with making them good people.
So here’s my problem: if you’re just looking for a way to be a good person, you can be a secular humanist and sleep in on Sunday morning, and sooner or later, these kids are going to figure that out. Christians have no lock on being good people, and there will be plenty of non-Christian friends who will gleefully point out the many, many times throughout history when Christians have actually been as far from “good people” as it is possible to get.
My co-teacher, and the mother of one of our students, mentioned her gratitude to God for all that he has done as one of the major reasons she wants her daughter to be in Sunday School. And that’s great, as far as it goes. But is it enough? Sooner or later her daughter is bound to notice that God causes the rain to fall upon the just and unjust alike, and wonder what the point of gratitude is.
A study by the Barna Group recently arrived in my mailbox showing that young people have an increasingly negative view of Christianity. (You can read the report at: http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=280) Even those with some experience in churches saw Christianity as judgmental and hypocritical. They also thought that Christians were “anti-homosexual,” failed to put into practice our teaching of “loving our neighbor as ourselves,” and that Christianity no longer looked like Jesus.
It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s what the kids in my Sunday School class are going to hear from their peers as they move into high school and college. There will be lots of reasons not to go to church -- will we have given them any reason to come?
We can no longer count on social pressure to keep our children in church until they discover their own answers to why be a Christian. If we are to have any hope that our children will know God, we need, desperately, to be able to articulate a deeper understanding of our faith, something that goes beyond platitudes or a fear of Hell. And for that to happen, we need to understand, ourselves, what we are doing here.
The place to begin, I believe, is in telling our own stories. I know why I go to church, but I’ve spent the last four years in an intensive discernment process listening for God’s voice in my life. That makes me far from typical. But I don’t think it should. I think that each and every one of us has a powerful and compelling story about how God has moved in our lives. If we didn’t, we’d long ago have quit setting the alarm clock on Sunday mornings.
What is your story? Why do you go to church? Or why don’t you go to church -- is there something about the way Christianity is taught that keeps you away? What would you tell my sixth to eighth graders?
If you feel up to being public about your story, leave a comment on the blog. If it’s something too intensely private to share with the world, I’d love to hear from you directly: I’ll keep it confidential, just between you and me.
in telling our stories, I believe we begin to find the places where God is truly and deeply present in our lives, allowing us a fuller relationship with Him. And that, in turn, allows us to help others find and be found by Him, which is the true meaning of Christ’s command to us to “go out and make disciples of all nations.” So please, join the story telling! At the very least, it will help me offer better answers to my sixth, seventh, and eighth graders about why they should keep dragging themselves to Sunday School when they’d really rather stay in bed.
Suzanne
1 comment:
I think that a lot of people get alienated by the way their church is run -- if there's an emphasis on collecting money, for example, or they see their pastor acting in a hypocritical way. I know that doesn't apply to every church by a long stretch, but I hear about it often enough.
But more often I hear people say that they don't need to go to church -- like you said, they feel like they can be good people on their own, without having to go to church and be told to.
On the plus side, I think that one reason to go to church is for the community -- the sense of fellowship and connection to fellow believers that can become like an extended family. It can also be a special time and place set aside to connect to God. But I think that the bottom line is that if you don't believe, going to church will just make you feel more alienated and hypocritical than before. At a certain point, belief--or lack thereof-- has to come from within, not without.
So you're probably going to ask, why don't I go to church? I'm not Christian. Sometimes it's that simple. ;-)
Post a Comment