Benjamin and Lauren Turner
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Babel Again

10/20/2012

 
With the elections coming up, we've been watching debates and discussing politics probably like a lot of people around the country this week.  Oddly enough, our thought process went off in a tangent from national issues to one that's seriously affecting local churches.

Christian children are abandoning their beliefs as adults.

The churches are in trouble.  It's not completely obvious on the surface.  There are churches all over the place and they have attendance every Sunday and lots of weekdays as well.  There are activities and programs and all kinds of stuff going on.

But 50% of the kids raised in these churches and attending all the special children's programs are no longer active Christians as adults.  (I did some research on this and the numbers are pretty dicey, but I found an interesting Barna Group study here that talked about how kids raised in church are affected as adults - the paragraph I'm referencing is under the sub-heading "Faith Journeys" and actually sounds positive in the context of the article...but in this instance, I'm a glass-half-empty girl).

What gives?  How can we be losing half the kids in church - kids of Christian parents who were raised attending church all the time?

I'm going to say something really controversial and extremely unpopular in the church today, but please bear with me.

We're losing the kids because we're separating them from their parents.

The churches - at least, all the ones I've been to in the area over the past two years in the course of some area-wide church programs - are splitting up their attending families.  The kids go to Children's Church, the teens go to their own special classes, and the parents and grandparents attend the adult service.  Men and women split up to study the Bible.  Everywhere you turn, you find families splitting all different ways at church.

The more Ben and I watch and discuss, the more we're concluding that this has become an incredibly destructive influence the broader culture has had on mainstream Christian philosophy.

When I was little, there was a very common feature attached to most church sanctuaries called a "Cry Room".  It was usually small with a couple of rocking chairs and a glass window allowing anyone inside to be able to watch and listen to the service.  It was a good place for nursing moms to be able to go if they weren't comfortable nursing in the congregation, and it encouraged something very simple: even the youngest are welcome to listen in.  

But even in my fairly short lifetime, something has subtly shifted in Christian philosophy and the Cry Rooms have all but vanished.  It's another step in a process that's been happening over the past two hundred years or so, a process that involves something unheard-of in the past two thousand years of Christian life: children are no longer expected to be present in service with their parents in a startling majority of churches.

At the founding of our country, those incredibly dedicated Christian parents who first made it to these shores wouldn't dream of attending a church service without their children seated quietly and neatly in the pews with them.  Those children grew up simply and naturally accepting the faith of their fathers in large percentages.  Families that prayed together stayed together, the saying went.  Parents were somehow able to learn about God with their children all seated around them because they expected nothing less.  They knew how to train them not to be disruptive because there wasn't another choice.

Sometime around the invention of our modern school system, though - right in sync with the Industrial Revolution and the concept of having masses of people separated into types to accomplish specific workforce goals - came a new idea to the churches: separating kids from the parents so they could more effectively learn about God.  Sunday School became just as much a fixture of church life as the Sunday sermon.

Still, as my kind elderly neighbor Bertha was just telling me this week, even when kids back nearly a hundred years ago went to Sunday school, they joined their parents for the majority of the Sunday service, including the sermon.

Not so today.

In the church Ben and I attend, the children and teenagers are present for the beginning of the service only.  After the singing and the opening prayers, they're dismissed to their separate classes where various dedicated adults from the church do their best every week to present Godly principles to the kids "at their level" while their parents stay behind and hear a sermon being preached "at their level" in the sanctuary.

The more I watch this happen, the more I want to cry every Sunday when all the kids in every family get up and leave before the serious stuff ever gets started.  There are only three children left in the room, and even they are only there because they're a little young to be left in the nursery (or in the case of one very outspoken little toddler, she refuses to be parted from her parents and protests loudly when they try to put her in the nursery).  Other members are ecstatic about the number of children in the church.  All I feel is worry and grief when they disappear.  Something is wrong.  Very, very terribly wrong.  The services are too quiet.  Half our assembly is missing; and they're missing what their parents are hearing.  

Yes, I've heard over and over, "Well, the adult sermon goes over their heads."  That's only true to a point.  I was one of those kids once.  Yeah, it went over my head for a while.  But little by little, I began understanding.  I knew what my parents were talking about when they discussed things they'd heard.  Even if I didn't totally understand all the time, I learned what they were hearing and what they were learning.  I wasn't left behind when they made decisions because I'd been hearing the whole process of how they thought and where they were coming from.  I absorbed my parents' beliefs and understanding from being exposed to what they were hearing through the filter of what they thought about it.  I remember being about four or five when I first grasped the concept of "atonement"...from hearing adult discussion and matching it to constantly listening to the Bible read aloud on tape.  Four or five!  And I'm no genius.

Jesus was not kidding when he said his Father revealed himself to little children.  Little children that were given to their parents, to grow under their leadership and be taught the things their parents know and understand.

But today in church...children aren't expected to understand.  They're expected to only be able to learn if they're separated from the adults, given a special lesson tailored to their age, kept out of the way so the adults can learn the really serious stuff without them.

Where did this come from?  When did it become a good idea to separate whole families during the time when perhaps they should most be together?  Because from what I can see of Jesus' teaching, he found it absolutely critical that the very young children be included in what his disciples thought was much too adult for the little crumb-crunchers to be wandering around.  That very famous phrase, "Let the little children come to me" came about because Jesus was chastising his closest followers from trying to shut children out of their adult discussion.  Every time I see the kids get up and leave, I wonder what would happen if Jesus walked into the service and looked around.  Once our three little representatives have graduated to nursery and Children's Church, where would be the little fellow he could call over and use as an example in his teaching?

We think one huge factor is that Christians today are accepting a very dangerous philosophy, one Ben and I have started calling "Babel Again".

Our whole society right now is very eager to accept the idea that only by banding together as a worldwide people will we be able to achieve the great ends we believe we're capable of.  We want to end World Hunger, ensure World Peace, think of ourselves as People Without Borders, change our entire planet's climate, redefine entire Human relationship structures, rise above racial differences, decide who should live or die...all things that God himself stated are his prerogative alone.  So by ambitiously staking our claim on becoming a World Society, we are in essence saying, "Let's build a tower up to the sky where God lives!"

Last time we tried that, God was so alarmed by our attitude that he broke our ability to communicate as we used to.  We call that incident the "Tower of Babel" story, a gigantic warning about the consequences of trying to set ourselves up as gods.  It hasn't totally stopped us, though.  We're still out here tower-building; and anyone who's alarmed by it is considered irrelevant because there's been a huge system setup to inexorably continue training the youngest generations how to "think properly" and totally break from their parents if they're such sticks-in-the-mud as to think maybe this or that current philosophy isn't such a good idea.  Because a Global Society only works if you get a huge majority of the world to fall in line with a specific, homogenized way of thinking.  Independent thinkers can destroy the whole construct; and those who believe in a God greater than any Human institution have to be silenced or made irrelevant for the Humans-as-gods dream to succeed.

Hence, massively organized school systems designed to separate children from their parents' views so they can be remolded into whatever form the system desires to create.

And we Christians, rather than being wary of going along with our society's ambitions and philosophies, are trying to take that idea and customize it to our own purposes.  We're transferring the philosophies meant to indoctrinate young children into abandoning their parents' faith onto our methods of teaching the children in our churches.  We're accepting a model of schooling meant to divide children from their parents for the purpose of more easily influencing them and transferring it to teaching about God.  We believe that if the purpose of this style of teaching is to train kids in Christianity, the ends justify the means.  The kids will be learning what they need to know regardless of what their parents think or teach...and we even think it's a plus that we have a chance to take children of unbelieving parents and pull the parents in by working with their kids.  But that's worldly philosophy, not God's!  God's philosophy is to work from the parent to the child, from the authority to those under the authority.  The children were brought to Jesus by their parents, not the other way around.

Separating children from their parents - and even from their siblings of different ages - was a method originally conceived to indoctrinate them away from parents, not to encourage strong, vibrant families where children are in harmony and agreement with their parents and look to their authority first.  We're training children to constantly look to their teachers and give them the love and respect that should only belong to parents; and by sabotaging parents this way, we're wreaking havoc in the churches.  We're sowing a wind that's reaping a whirlwind and each successive generation abandoning God in higher percentages should be a wake-up call.  More and more elaborate children's programs are not solving the problem of adults abandoning the faith they were brought up in.  We're losing at least half of them and that is a percentage that sends a chill up my spine.  It indicates that if Ben and I have two children and follow the current model of spiritual training being advocated in the churches, we stand a high chance if losing one of those children to the world.  That's not a percentage we can live with.  It would be better for us not to have children than accept this.

But instead of recognizing we've let the snake into the garden, let worldly ideas poison our philosophy, we just keep trying more and more fervently to make the world's methods work for us.  Jesus told us pretty plainly that we can't patch an old garment with new patches.  We can't serve two masters.  We can't put new wine in old wineskins.  We're going to simply destroy what we're trying to fix.

The problem is not the sincerity of the church leaders.  It's not the fervency of their goals or the energy they put into doing their very best to teach Godliness to the children entrusted to them.  It's not the parents who diligently bring their children to church every week and conscientiously keep them involved in the programs meant to keep the kids interested in God and learning about him.

The problem is no matter how good the program and how dedicated the teachers, the children are still being separated from their parents.  When it comes to children and families, God's way is to join together.  The world's way is to separate.  God's way unites.  The world's way tears apart.  God says, "I hate divorce" (divorce being a separation of what God has joined together, including parents and children as well as husbands and wives).  The world says, "Separation is healthy and necessary."  God says, "I have called you to be set apart, a peculiar people."  The world says, "Hey, using a few of our ideas will solve all your problems!"

Over the past two hundred years, Christians have accepted the "healthy necessity" of separation and the results are increasingly stark.  The marriage failure rate in our churches has exploded to match that of the general population.  The failure rate of children to maintain the faith they were raised in is astronomical.  Even those who carry their faith into adulthood are far too often suffering a crisis of faith for some period of time that puts them in open rebellion against their parents and what they were taught to believe.  Even if they recover, it's as if they suffered a life-threatening illness and often carry the scars of it the rest of their lives.  This is not successfully raising up a new generation of Godly men and women.  It's a deadly serious gamble.

The definition of insanity is to keep following the same methods and expect different results.

If separating the children from the parents in churches for several generations is resulting in each generation abandoning God in greater numbers, we have to do something different.  Something radical.  Something unheard-of.

We need to keep the kids with their parents.  Abandon the separation indoctrination model.  Quit worrying about sermons going over little kids' heads so they can be one with their parents in learning and talking about and finding God.

We can't afford to be insane.
Emily K
10/20/2012 10:35:29 am

Amen! Amen! Amen!

This was wonderfully written.

Separating children from parents is definitely one of the big reasons this is happening!

Before I met you, it never really occurred to me that I would want to keep my kids in church with me because as we hear over and over-the sermon goes over their heads. I truly believed this. I didn't for one second question it.. and furthermore, Barry and I looked at Sunday mornings as a much needed break from the little kids..almost like it was a date. We loved dropping them off and felt happy and confident that our little ones would be learning good things about God from their teachers. They were. It wasn't at all as though they weren't learning good things. But the whole focus and philosophy is so off.

To go along with this, parenting is going downhill a bit and I have heard very many times that coming to church is a waste because my kid can't sit still that long. So then the parents get out of the habit of going to church themselves and oftentimes never return. (and I am guessing they don't have a home fellowship that they are joining up with either) Disciplining children effectively is frowned upon and considered cruel, so the idea that a small child can handle grown up church seems crazy.

To go along with this, our culture is starting to have a strong distaste for children in general. We dont like them. They are noisy and smelly and annoying and wild...(because training is cruel of course) and so one of the bi-products of this mentality is to set up this artificial childrens culture (and later on, youth culture) and so the children are not only separated by space, but by values and ideas as well. its so easy to get sucked into this....and hard to get out as well. Its just everywhere. And its no wonder that by the teenage years, many teenagers lament that their parents just don't understand them. Well of course not! Why would they?

Our church doesn't really believe in children's church and believes that families belong worshiping together. They always have......and yet we have seen this drop off in our youth as well.. I really think it has to do with parenting, training, and discipling. And probably public school.

My sister in law and I were going through old pictures the other day and I ran into a bag full of pictures labeled "Emily youth group" and I went through them. There were pictures of me with my friends at various youth events and at church and just hanging out with each other all over the place. There were several pictures of a trip I took with my youth group to Mexico (which is another story for another day, but our intentions were mostly good) and it made me so sad to look at these pictures. Out of 25 or so of us, only myself and 1 or 2 others identify as christians these days. Some of the lifestyles of the group are very worldly and sinful.. and I never would have saw this coming, and *neither would their parents have*. It breaks my heart.
I am wondering if the difference with me and why I stayed a christian (though I did stray for a while) is because I was raised in the catholic church, where there was no separating, and even when my dad ushered, I was sitting next to him.

Anyhow, I didn't mean to take your post over. I just thought it was all around really good.

Jen Free
10/21/2012 06:09:56 am

Hi, never read you before. But I sure liked this one. At our church we have a cry room and the chiuldren (of which there are MANY at various ages) are expected to sit and be with the family.
We have seen some amazing young people coming out of our church, and in droves, not a trickle.
One other though, if I might share. When we seperate the children they learn to expect glitter and snacks and puppet shows (not that any of those things are wrong, except the glitter, I have soon to be 8 children and don't allow it in my home! LOL!) Whe they "grow up" worship might seem....dare I say it, less than stimulating. Worship can be fun, but sometimes it is serious. In fact we are coming before GOD, to offer Him ourselves, and it is a wonderful a good thing for our children to understand that right at the get-go.

Lauren
10/21/2012 12:05:43 pm

Really interesting thoughts and additions - wow, Emily, that takes the cake as the longest blog post ever on here!

A huge reason why children's programs are being encouraged absolutely seems to do with the disruptions kids are causing in service because - again - even Christians are accepting mainstream philosophy about how children can and should behave. Though to be honest, that doesn't explain all the teen programs: even the brattiest two-year-old usually learns to sit still for an hour by the time they're fourteen!

And that anecdote about how only a few of the youth group are still Christian...that's why I want to cry when I see the kids get up and leave. It's not just the little kids, it's all the teens too. Honestly, it's at least half the church.

I did notice in the study that children raised in Catholic churches do tend to have a little better percentages than other churches. Still not great, but better.

Jen, it was great to hear from someone who is still going to a family church! As the oldest of 8, I've got a special place for 8-kid families and I concur on the glitter.

You make an excellent point about the puppet shows and fun stuff. Worshiping God shouldn't be hard and it does bring great joy, but it isn't about entertainment any more than real love is like the stuff in chick-flick movies. It's setting kids up to find real commitment to God...well, not too attractive.

Emily25069
10/23/2012 02:46:31 am

HA! I love that you compared real love and chick flick movies!

Perfect.

Emily25069
10/23/2012 02:49:20 am

As far as teens go, its because teens "just don't relate to adult stuff yet."

The church I was attending as a teen decided to have teen church once every other week. I had liked the adult church just fine-and so did most of our youth group-but for some reason, the leadership thought it would be better to take the teens out and give them their own church.

It was..... very fun? We danced and rapped (to DCtalk) and people gave testimonies or whatever. We put on plays.

I think we would have been better off staying in big church. Definitely. Really, it was just more of teenagers hanging out with their friends. Very very unwise indeed.

Lauren
10/23/2012 07:37:17 am

Huh. That's odd. I would've thought most teens are basically adults without much experience - plenty capable of understanding the concepts presented in "adult service". By that reasoning, all the grandparents really should attend a separate service for older adults because we younger ones just can't relate to their stage of adulthood yet.

Emily25069
10/24/2012 06:44:54 am

I get what you are saying, but that is because you had wise parents. Most teens just want to be with other teens-or at least, this is what adults (especially youth leaders) in these churches think. Its absolutely not true. But it is what we think. I knew a youth leader once who I was talking to and I told him the parents should be more involved in youth activities, and his reply was "yeah, because youth want to spend time with their parents.." said very tongue in cheek. :(

Rachel
10/31/2012 05:09:05 am

Boy, are you right about offending people! It has been the theme of much of my "traditional' church experience. As a young child, I sometimes sat with my Dad while he was teaching the College and Career Bible Study. Oddly enough, he wasn't keeping me with him because he subscribed (yet) to the idea that children are better off staying with their parents, but because I asked to stay with him. He liked having me with him, and didn't seen any good reason not to let me. The SS Superintendent came in and confronted him in front of me and my Dad's students. I must have been 5 or 6, but I still remember it. We were eventually told that we weren't a very good fit at the church and it was suggested we leave.
As a young adult, again at a conventional church, there were a few families who appreciated and complimented my parents on how nicely everyone sat during service, but most people were uncomfortable. Ultimately, they came to accept it, but my Dad pretty much was/is given little respect, because of his "odd' ideas. Meanwhile, I started teaching a Sunday School class....5-6 grade girls. It was very disillusioning. At 10 and 11 yrs old they came into my class expecting games and candy. They didn't pay attention very well, were not able to enter into any kind of reasoning conversation about whatever I was teaching, and could barely get through the class without jumping up and wanting to go to the bathroom. For the first 2 years, when I was the sole teacher, I was able to do a little maturity training with them, with good results. After awhile though, they started switching between two teachers every other month, and any ground I gained was lost. I shared my concerns with the SS Super, to no avail, and when I tried to organize a Bible Study group designed to deal with some "deeper" spiritual issues (honoring parents, controlling your attitudes, etc.) I was called in front of the elder board, and only reluctantly allowed to proceed....and only because the head elder had similar values to my family. Of course, within a couple of years, he too was asked to leave. Tim and I chose to keep our kids with us from day 1, and after being angrily confronted about keeping my less than 1 yr. old son with me instead of using the nursery, we started realizing that we needed to move.
I am very greatful for the congregation we are with now. Its much smaller and more family friendly. Activities are either family oriented, or at least open to the whole family coming, even if they are not directly participating (like Bowling once a month). While they do have a Sunday School class and nursery available for children under the 6th grade, we are very warmly accepted and encouraged about our decision to have our children sit with us. We are currently the only regular attendees with young children, but even on the occasional days where we are in and out with a discipline issue, I can count on at least 1 person coming up to me and assuring me that I shouldn't worry about my kid's misbehavior. And what they mean is, don't feel uncomfortable that your child is misbehaving and needs correction, or feel like you can't still sit in with them. We've only been at this place a little over a year, so I don't know everyone real well yet, or at least, not the young people, but my impression of them is very high, and I will be surprised if they end up one of those statistics.


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