In order to know the state of American Christianity, I get a number of e-mail updates from Christian organizations that I don’t necessarily agree with but that provide a good window through which to judge the state of affairs of Christianity in religion and culture. One of those groups is the “Worldview Weekend.” It is an organization that stresses the importance of Christians having a “Christian Worldview.” I agree with that, but I don’t agree with how they define a “Christian Worldview.” On their “Worldview Test,” I came out as a “Secular Humanist.” Well, as one who tends to be more traditional theologically and pietistically, this revelation was quite shocking (and totally ridiculous).
Anyway, I recently got an e-mail update talking about the crisis of young people leaving conservative Evangelical churches in droves. Brannon Howse, the founder of Worldview Weekend, reported on a new book that reports the results of a survey of 1,000 conservative Christian young adults. The book is entitled, “Already Gone: Why your kids will quit church and what you can do to stop it” by Ken Ham, Britt Beemer, with Todd Hillard. The results of the survey I believe, but the analysis of why this is happening or the suggestions to solve the problem I won’t necessarily agree with (just like Howse’s definition of want constitutes a “Christian worldview”).
Here a few points emphasized by Howse from the book:

A mass exodus is underway. Most youth of today will not be coming to church tomorrow. Nationwide polls and denominational reports are showing that the next generation is calling it quits on the traditional church. And it’s not just happening on the nominal fringe; it’s happening at the core of the faith.
+ Only 11 percent of those who have left the Church did so during the college years. Almost 90 percent of them were lost in middle school and high school. By the time they got to college they were already gone! About 40 percent are leaving the Church during elementary and middle school years! [emphasis mine]
+ If you look around in your church today, two-thirds of those who are sitting among us have already left in their hearts; it will only take a couple years before their bodies are absent as well.
+ The numbers indicate that Sunday school actually didn’t do anything to help them develop a Christian worldview…The brutal conclusion is that, on the whole, the Sunday school programs of today are statistical failures.
+ Part of the concern is that the mere existence of youth ministry and Sunday school allows parents to shrug off their responsibility as the primary teachers, mentors, and pastors to their family.

The clergy at St. Paul’s (all two of us) have been talking over the past couple of years about ministry to younger people – Jr. High age and up through college age. One conclusion that we’ve come to is that the problem will not be solved programatically. A vast array of new programs will not solve the basic problem – the giving up by parents of their responsibility to impart the faith to a new generation. We see that most parents are not engaged in their own kids’ spiritual upbringing and Christian discipleship. There are notable exceptions, but sadly not many. The question is, “Why?”
In many ways, over the last 30 odd years we have witnessed the same thing happening with religious education as has happened with secular education – parents have given their children over to institutions to be raised and educated. When I was teaching high school and working with college students, there were constant complaints that parents now expect the schools to teach their kids everything from math to self-disciple. Parents, for whatever reason, relinquished their responsibility in many ways for raising their own children. This has happened with the religious education of children as well.
The Church can’t do it! We can provide opportunities to augment what is done in the home, but if parents expect “raising children in the way they should go” to be the Church’s responsibility and having little to do with them and what they do in the home, then they are frankly crazy and spiritually irresponsible. Parents are the primary disciplers and religious teachers. If they expect Christian education/formation to occur in a one hour Sunday School session and perhaps another hour of formal worship, it won’t happen! As a matter of fact, what the kids hear (if they pay attention) in church or Sunday School makes little difference if they see something very different occurring in the home. If parents proclaim to be good Christians and act as does the world contrary to the Life in Christ, then their children will simply cry, “Hypocrite.” I don’t blame kids for leaving the “faith” when the example is so bad and they see little or nothing of their own parents’ faith in action.
The problem is that so many parents don’t even know or understand their own faith, let alone how to pass on the faith to their children. Many parents place very little importance on the spiritual education of their children, sadly. Music lessons and football practices are more important then their kids’ Christian formation. Church leaders let it happen because the consequences of not showing up for youth group, etc., are non-existent.
Would a coach of the football team allow a team member to play games when the member rarely shows up for practice? No, of course not. Yet, the church places no high expectation on our young people because we are so afraid of driving them away or insulting them or making them feel bad about themselves. Or, we really don’t think that the formation of our young people is really all that important! Yet, these kinds of responses are actually what cause younger people to have little respect for the Church or to not take Christianity seriously. If their relationship with God is truly important, then the standards and exceptions need to be quite high (along with the support to teach and enable them to meet the high standards and know God through Jesus Christ).
We deal with our young people as if they really aren’t important. We speak down to them. We won’t deal with their honest questions and concerns because… well, I think we are afraid to because they make US uncomfortable or appear stupid or hypocritical. For parents, I think they don’t engage with their kids’ spiritual lives because they themselves don’t know or are such hypocrites that they won’t engage out of embarrassment. Maybe not, but that’s what I see all too often.
I think one of the most important things the Church can do for the successful formation of younger people is to make sure parents know their own faith and how to pass it onto their kids. We need to provide opportunities to stress and inform/train parents how to disciple their own children and provide support for them to do so. Successfully passing on the faith to the next generation must, must, must begin in the home!
We could make Sunday School not for kids, but for parents to learn how to disciple their own children through everyday life with constancy and intention.

There is probably a lot wrong with what follows, not least the spelling and grammatical mistakes, but I’m trying to flesh out some thoughts:
I’m a political and international affairs junkie. Even since Jr. High School, as a paperboy at a young age of 13, I would read through the newspaper nightly, watch the network news telecasts and then turn over to PBS to watch the McNeil/Lehrer News Hour. Okay, I was a freak. So, I focused on Political Science, Sociology, and History for my Bachelor’s degree (while spending most of my spare time in the campus ministry I was a part of). I know well the issues and demands surrounding “civil-rights” for all kinds of different groups of people that are not part of the majority. Empathetically, I know far less of the trials and tribulations of peoples who have had to and continue to suffer under the prejudices, bigotry, and discrimination of far too many people within the majority. There is nothing new under the sun. I do know from my own personal distinguishing marks what it is like to be the center of the majority’s conversations, arguments, denunciations, and social and religious decision making concerning “me” (a class of people) without my input, however.
I looked up the term “civic” just to make sure I hadn’t missed some more nuanced definitions of the word. It’s pretty straightforward: “of or related to citizen, a city, citizenship, or civil affairs,” to quote the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Law. The word has its root in the Latin “civicus” or “of a citizen” (according to the Online Etymology Dictionary) and translated more specifically, “citizen” (according to the American Heritage Dictionary). I also looked up the word, “civil.” There is much overlap in the way people use the two words, but “civil” also denotes the way in which we behave within the contexts of society and the relationships we engage in between groups and individuals.
We should all be “civil” in our “civic” lives. If I wanted to translate the secular and civic vocabulary of the previous sentence into the verbiage of the Christian Faith, I might suggest the words Jesus’ second great commandment: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” (Mark 12:31; Matthew 22:39; and by extension Luke 6:31 or Leviticus 19:18)
From the U.S. Declaration of Independence from England, we find these words

Then, there is the Equal Protection Clause in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

As a citizen of the United States, I’m glad these words are part of the documents of governance that we uphold and strive to obey. In our civic lives, we can advocate for and even demand that these rights be upheld and applied to all people (even though, from what I remember and perhaps incorrectly, when they used the word “men” originally, that is exactly what they meant – the males of the species, and actually white, landed, men).
As citizens of the United States of America, I content that it is the right, privilege, and obligation of all citizens to be engaged in securing and protecting the equally applied and defended rights of all people. “Rights” language is properly situated within this kind of discourse and action.
I’ve heard many Church people advocate for and protest on behalf of civic rights for dispossessed people groups, which is certainly an appropriate course of action for Christian citizens for the betterment of our society. Before I became an Episcopalian, I followed the goings on in the mainline denominations and listened carefully to the arguments for equal treatment of people within the various denominations begin to more often center on the word, “Rights.” The language and understandings used to justify the demand for changing the non-equal practices within the various Church bodies, whether because of skin color, gender, or sexual-orientation, sounded increasingly like civic discourse rather than the language and understanding of the Church. Socio-political understanding and verbiage began taking precedence over theological and ecclesiastic understanding and verbiage.
Within the Christian faith tradition I grew up in, the idea that as Christians we die to self and give up all our “rights,” understood in the civic sense, was commonly discussed and emphasized. This wasn’t an attempt by leaders to subjugate congregants or to retain power, since we were congregational in governance, but put into proper perspective the differences between of civic and religious understandings of how we are to relate to one another. (Obviously, sometimes abuses occurred in religious culture and still do as in civic culture).
Christianity uses different concepts and language to deal with unjustified perceptions of other people that tend to denigrate their God-blessed humanity. To anyone that wants to deny the assertion that all humans are equally of God’s purposeful design, there is Galatians 3:27-29:

“…for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”

At the heart of our consideration of how we want to and how we ought to consider and treat one another the significant difference between the intent and language of the civic minded and the faith minded is the difference between concepts of “rights” and “love.”
I believe it is a mistaken application of civic “Rights” language when we talk of our interactions and treatment of one another within the Church. For the Christian, at the point when we decide to declare our intent to follow Jesus (when we become born anew), we give up all of our “rights.” Why? Because we give ourselves freely to be transformed out of our culture-bound misunderstanding of God’s Way (a mal-formation) in order to more fully be brought into the Body of Christ, the Family of God (a re-formation).
Our cause as Christians within the context of the Church is not to fight for rights! I have no rights. Our cause is to fight for the common, consistent, and complete application of Christ’s command to “love one another as we love ourselves!” The language is a language of “love,” not “rights.” There is no “right” to baptism. There is no “right” to communion. There is no “right” to leadership. There is no “right” to ordination. Justice in the Christian sense is not that we treat everyone the same, but that we treat everyone appropriately. (Because there are those who misapply this idea, who remain in their mal-formed state, does not mean the concept is corrupt or wrong, but that we fallible humans are.)
When we descend into civic rights language for Church purposes, as in “I or this group has a right to be considered for leadership at all levels of the Church and including Holy Orders,” we open up for other people the “right” to work to deny equal consideration of all people alike. When we get into the language of “rights,” we open up the “right” to deny “rights,” else we act hypocritically.
Instead, we have a privilege and sacred obligation! If we want to be Christian, we are commanded to and must obey the call to “love” one another, as God defines such a word. (John 15:10-15) As Christians, we have a sacred obligation. We do not have the “right” to not love another person, treat them with considered respect that looks like and is received as respectful intent by our opponent. I don’t have “rights” in the Church; I have the obligation to love… therefore I do not have the “right” to not treat others as I want to be treated. Hear from the Gospel writers:
Mark 8:34-38:

“Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”

Luke 6:27-32 –

“But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.
“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ love those who love them.”

There are issues of social or civic concern that all citizens need to be aware of and engaged in whether Christian or not. There are issues of concern within the Church that on the surface may seem identical to the civic endeavor, but are to be understood on a fundamental level differently from concerns of the citizenry of the State. There are often overlaps between the civic and the religious, but for the Christian in the context of religious affairs the beginning point (the entire point) is to “love,” not to demand “rights.” The foundations of thought, ideology, and methodology by which we deal with issues of how we regard and treat other people are different, or at least should be. Frankly, if we incorporate the Christian difference as Christians within the civic arena, we truly will be a “peculiar people” (I Peter 2:9 KJV).
The language of civic discourse concerning the way we treat one another is, “Rights.” The language of Christian discourse concerning the way we treat one another is, “Love.” As we confuse the two, as we are rabidly apt to do these days, we open within the Church the “right” of those who wish to deny “rights.” It is forbidden of us to not “love” our neighbor as ourselves, to not treat others as we want to be treated.

A “non-zero-sum dynamic” and Decoding God’s Changing Moods, from Robert Wright.
This got me thinking… If we can find the “non-zero-sum” in our dealings with our opponents/nemeses, we will be better positioned as Christians to obey God’s command to: Love – to love God, our neighbors, our enemies. We show no wisdom when we allow anti-love (from a Christ-centered perspective) to overwhelm our thinking and feeling.
I don’t necessarily agree with everything Wright is postulating – where he ends up within the context of his theorizing – but gleaning ideas from his writing and trying to examine how we live our lives as Christians can bring us to a more Christ-centered life.
From his website:

Happily, after the exile, life got more non-zero-sum. The Babylonians who had conquered Israel were in turn conquered by the Persians, who returned the exiles to their homeland. Israel was no longer in a bad neighborhood. Nearby nations were now fellow members of the Persian Empire and so no longer threats. And, predictably, books of the Bible typically dated as postexilic, such as Ruth and Jonah, strike a warm tone toward peoples—Moabites and Assyrians—that in pre-exilic times had been vilified.
A more inclusive view is also found in a biblical author (or authors) thought by many scholars to be writing shortly after the exile—the priestly source. The priestly source, or P, uses internationally communal language and writes not just of God’s covenant with Israel but of an “everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”
A zero-sum, isolationist worldview had moved Israel from polytheism to belligerent monotheism, but now, as Israel’s environment grew less threatening, belligerence was turning out not to be an intrinsic part of monotheism. Between second Isaiah’s angry exilic exclamations and P’s more congenial voice, Israel had segued from an exclusive to an inclusive monotheism.