Studies by Barna, for what they are worth, show that most children growing up in evangelical churches will abandon the faith. According to the studies, even though many of those who drop out of church are actively involved in church during their teen years, by their early twenties most have stopped participating actively in the Christian faith. In total, six out of ten twentysomethings dropped out of church and general Christian living. Worse, it’s not just a temporary phase, but the trend seems to be continuing deeper into adulthood, even when those who have dropped out of church have children of their own. In other words, such people, who grew up in evangelical churches, are well and truly denying the faith with their lives.
All kinds of reasons have been proposed for this phenomenon: the age-segregation of the church, shallow youth ministry, inconsistency of Christian adults, lack of spiritual leadership in the home, lack of serious discipleship in the local church, and proliferation of unwholesome media. Any or all of these may be contributing factors. However, it seems what is missing in these conversations is how a child’s disposition towards Christianity is shaped long before he or she encounters the truths of the gospel, or the demands of discipleship.
Before the child is able to weigh the propositions that explain the gospel, or consider the validity of biblical teaching, he already has prejudices for or against the claims of Christ. He either has a disposition, a sensibility that Christianity is true and good and beautiful and ought to be embraced, or he does not. As he grows, this sense increases or decreases in either direction, and largely shapes how he interprets the facts of Christianity as they are placed before him.
In other words, a child is no tabula rasa. He arrives with a set of faculties that immediately begin to make sense of the world by interpreting the raw data of the world through an ever-growing ‘grid’ of interpretations, sensibilities and dispositions. No fact he encounters is understood on its own; it is understood through a network of other facts, feelings and desires. This includes ‘facts’ like Jesus is the Son of God, hell actually exists, and Jesus deserves your total allegiance and ultimate love. How the person responds to those statements, both when he is five and twenty-five, are largely a result of this grid.
Another term for this grid is the imagination. How a person imagines reality in totality, how he pictures ultimate things that make sense of the raw data of his life, how he places value on things and orders them, is his imagination. This imagination can either be Christian or non-Christian. It can be religious or secular. And it is shaped long before the child can read or answer catechism questions.
J. Gresham Machen put it this way: “…[I]t would be a great mistake to suppose that all men are equally well prepared to receive the gospel. It is true that the decisive thing is the regenerative power of God. That can overcome all lack of preparation, and the absence of that makes even the best preparation useless. But as a matter of fact God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favorable conditions for the reception of the gospel.” (Christianity and Culture, 7).
It’s my belief that many of the evangelical dropouts we witness today are abandoning the faith because they grew up with a fundamentally secular imagination, with a thin evangelical overlay. Over time, or as a result of some life circumstance, the underlying grid pushes the person to re-evaluate his beliefs and align them more consistently with the grid. Since the grid is essentially one that views God as a weightless, if not non-existent concern, at some point the thoughtful person recognizes that his Christian faith is a wrinkle in his worldview, an error in the program, an extraneous digit that does not belong. Consequently, he announces that he “no longer believes”.
The question for Christian parents becomes, how is that grid shaped? How does one shape the imagination so that the child has a prejudice towards Christianity’s truths, both before and long after he has embraced them?Parents need to think long and hard how to shape those prior conditions of the mind. Our goal over the next several posts will be to consider some ways that the Christian imagination of a child may be shaped.
Tags: religious imagination
January 20, 2012 at 7:03 pm |
[...] just finished our Family Matters series last year, here is great article from Pastor David De Bruyn. He begins… Studies by Barna, for what they are worth, show that [...]
February 13, 2012 at 5:41 pm |
[...] am so encouraged by reading the articles on his blog. I have been so inspired by his articles on Pre-Evangelism for Your Children that I decided to do a series summarizing (or writing in my own words) this series. I am sure I [...]