THE GOOD WORD
With two of our children in their teens and four of our children in their twenties, I was curious to read excerpts from the book, "Almost Christian" (what the "Faith of our Teenagers is telling the American Chruch"), authored by Kenda Ceasy Dean.
The author's premise is that most of today's mainstream Christian teenages have a similar belief system to that of Thomas Jefferson. In 1820 Jefferson was annoyed by the supernatural sayings of Holy Scripture, so he created and edited a more reasonable version of the Bible that omitted all the weird, miraculous and divine stuff so he could read it without becoming offended.
Instead of the Apostle's creed, teenages follow the mutant creed called "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism" (MTD) A belief that God is a nice God that wants nice things to happen to nice poeple that are being nice to others and especially nice to themselves so they can be happy and feel nice and good about themselves. This belief "in God being a nice guy" dove tails our own state version of "Minnesota Nice". Let us be as polite and pleasant, and wave and smile to as many people as possible.
I believe this mutation of "Christianity is incapable of producing saints, but it can produce many suckers." The shaky foundation of MTD cannot sustain someone through the shocks and sufferings of life. MTD cannot prompt or promote the sacrifices and resistance necessary to go against the grain of contemporary culture.
As a Christian parent, I invite other Christian parents to wake and ask themselves some serious questions: what are we doing to shape our children's faith as Christians?
Being "nice" will not suffice, when the gospel calls for life changing, culture challenging faith best defined by Jesus' words: "For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the gospel will save it."
Blessings
Pastor Wayne Swanson
Church in the Maples