This is a long-form article I first drafted some years ago. I post it now in the hope that it will be helpful for those who minister to youth as parents, disciplers, pastors, etc.
There was an audible gasp from one of the teachers who was listening. He apparently couldn’t believe that one of the students would give such an answer. I did not gasp, nor was I shocked. I smiled. This student gave the kind of answer that once again proved how much work there is left to do before graduation. Our children’s doctrine is not as sound as we think it is.
The scene described above happened recently in what we call “Equipping Hour” at our church, which many other churches call “Sunday School.” In this case, the location was the high school class, where we teach systematic theology. The student in question had answered a doctrinal question that was antithetical to what our church believes and teaches about the Bible. The answer could only be considered heretical.
It gets worse. The students had just examined biblical passages related to the day’s topic. As the teacher that day, I started with a doctrinal question and my answer as we always do. Then we began to check my answer against what the Bible says, having selected relevant passages. The student’s answer came after examining passages whose plain teaching contradict the student’s position. The student was not attempting to be a rebel; he thought what he said was true and supported by the Bible. But it was not.
It gets even worse. This is not an isolated occurrence. The same scene plays often enough for me to be accustomed to it. I did not gasp because I was not surprised. The other teacher in attendance gasped because he is new. He is unused to hearing blatantly unbiblical doctrine spouting from the lips of students who are often considered well-informed and biblical. I, however, am used to it.
But it gets even worse. By all accounts, the students do not seem to understand that they are what we might call “doctrinally deficient”. By this term, I mean that the students do not realize that what they think and what we teach are so far apart from one another. They are often surprised at what the Bible so plainly says despite many of them having grown up in church and hearing Scripture faithfully preached and taught all their lives. They know the stories. They know the right answers on the surface. But when you poke below the surface, you discover that they hold opposite positions to what we would affirm. And despite consistent efforts to point out the disparity between our teaching and their apparent views, they do not get frustrated and stay home. They come back every week because they are intrigued (and because their parents send them). And that is where things get better.
The students who best understand what we are doing do not come to pool knowledge with the teachers, dutifully offering “Sunday School answers” to “Sunday School questions”. They come to be challenged, to be taught, to have their assumptions exposed and unbiblical views corrected. If they understand at all what we are doing, then they do not come to show off. They come to learn.
That is the best case, I suppose. Other students come because it is expected of them. They could not tell you why it is important to come. They are there because they were brought there and are not inclined to dig in their heels. They perhaps find the class mildly interesting, but they do not come looking to learn to live. Still, even these students are better off than the students who do not attend, since we have the opportunity to present what God has said to them. It is not that the students who do not come are doctrinally sound. The students who do come represent, if anything, the “cream of the crop,” despite consistently showing that their doctrine is immature and what might best be termed, “shaky.”
Knowing Scripture Is Crucial
Is something wrong with our students? Are their parents failing them? Has the church already failed them? I do not believe so. I believe this is to be expected because students are young and immature by definition.
If students are going to be doctrinally sound, they must know God’s Word. They must know how to read it, how to understand individual texts, and how to compare texts with one another. But they do not know how to read in this way and so they are not doctrinally sound. But the students, by and large, do not know how to read beyond the level they learned in Elementary School. And because their reading comprehension is poor, their comprehension of Scripture must necessarily be poor.
In my experience, parents and leaders alike are consistently surprised at how many students show themselves to be unbelievers after graduating high school. Once they are out of the home, they are often also out of church. And their lives commonly show that they never believed at all. Of course, the Lord still saves some of them, so they sometimes are rebaptized and join a church. But many of them do not.
A Terrible Choice
It is at this point that I believe a question is worth considering: is it better for a student to graduate as a self-deceived unbeliever or a self-conscious unbeliever? In the first case, the graduate thinks he is a believer when he is not. In the second case, the graduate knows he is not a believer. Of course, the prayer and point to which we ought to work is that each student be saved. And we do this. But we recognize and submit to God’s sovereignty in salvation. God can save every student and he may. But that is not to say that he will or even that he must save them before they graduate high school. He may save them later. Therefore, given that God uses means to save people, such as teachers like us who labor to make the message of the gospel clear as it is revealed in Scripture, and given that teachers cannot control whether and when each student is saved, which case reflects better on the method and quality of the teaching when a student graduates? Is it better to believe they are saved when they are not, or is it better to know they are not saved?
In short, I argue for the latter for several reasons. First, a student who knows he is not a believer has a shorter path to salvation from a human perspective. While God is sovereign in salvation, and regeneration is the Spirit’s work, we should nevertheless not neglect the fact that faith comes by hearing. That is to say that God uses means to draw people to himself. From God’s perspective, there is nothing difficult or more difficult than anything else as far as his power is concerned. But from a “hearing” perspective, the perspective of the evangelist sharing the gospel, there is more work to do in the case of a self-deceived unbeliever than a self-conscious one. Why is that? It is because the self-deceived unbeliever must be convinced that he is not saved before he can be saved. It is more work to un-save a person and then “save” them than it is to “save” a person by sharing the gospel with an unbeliever. The self-deceived must be undeceived, and that takes more time.
The second reason I would prefer a student graduate knowing he is an unbeliever rather than being self-deceived that he is unbeliever is that it prevents hypocrisy in the church. I take religious hypocrisy to be one of the most common and deadly dangers in our church context (cf. James 1:19-27). Allowing or even encouraging a student in their self-deception does them no good. Instead, it does them great harm. Surely part of the reason teachers are subject to stricter judgment is because their words are taken as having authority by the students (cf. James 3:1-10). And if teachers cannot or do not teach students what they need to know to be assured or not assured of their profession of faith, surely some of the students’ blood is on the teachers’ hands (cf. Acts 20:26-27). Part of the reason religious hypocrisy is so rampant is likely due to teachers’ inability and/or unwillingness to speak the truth in love to students (cf. Eph. 4:11-16)
How to Respond
What should parents make of all of this? Parents of youth can fall into a few different categories worth mentioning: those who believe me, those who do not, and those who do not care.
The parents who believe me are parents who are likely already aware of how far off their students are from being fully developed. These parents have perhaps been so engaged with their students that they have heard the same kinds of things at home as the teachers do in the classroom. But this seems rather rare.
Other parents do not believe me. This is likely the next biggest category. There are plenty of students who have grown up in the church and who therefore might be expected to hold the orthodox and biblically sound positions. Some students seem particularly bright by dint of a gift of natural intelligence. They seem to know the Bible well. And many teachers, and I imagine parents as well, therefore assume that their children hold and can articulate the kinds of positions they were taught. Therefore, these parents do not believe what I am saying applies to them. They would be wrong.
I have been involved in youth ministry as a leader for about fourteen years. If you add my time as a student in the group, make it twenty years. I can think of no student in my time who both held and could defend the doctrinal positions they were taught from Scripture with confidence. The best of them graduated on shaky and unsteady doctrinal ground, even if they were on a good trajectory. Many parents are surprised when their students choose a path that deviates from what they were taught. If I ever was, I no longer am. I have learned that students being taught is not the same thing as students learning. Many parents faithfully teach their children. And with that they are content. Fewer children seem to learn. And parents seem to be less aware of that. But communication is a two-way street. For communication to occur, messages must be both sent and received. I suspect parents, and perhaps teachers as well, do not sufficiently account for this. Saying the right thing in the right way does not constitute communication. The right message must be received and understood in the right way. One part depends on the messenger. The other part depends on the recipient.
We might liken this process to the difference between regular mail and a certified letter. With regular mail, we place an envelope in a mailbox with the appropriate address and stamp and raise the flag. Our job is done at that point. We have sent the envelope and now it is up to the postal system to carry it and the intended recipient to open and read it. And this works for most things.
But certified mail is different. With certified letters, the sender can be sure that the letter was not only sent but also received. A signature from the intended recipient is required before the letter is marked as delivered. As parents and teachers, we need to think of communicating with students more like certified mail than regular mail. It is not enough to drop the message in the mailbox.
We might also liken it to delivering a package to someone’s home. Porch pirates are a growing nuisance. For important packages, it is not sufficient to drop the package at the door and ring the doorbell. People often steal packages from porches and doormats. Some companies offer ways to ensure that the intended recipient receives the package, such as requiring hand-to-hand delivery or allowing the recipient to retrieve the package from secure location nearby.
Parents and teachers cannot be content with delivering the message to the front door of the students’ hearts. There are too many porch pirates. There are too many dangers and obstacles in general which prevent students from receiving what we are trying to communicate.
Our Model
What do we do then? The main practice we have developed in our classes is to test for understanding. This is not by written or even oral examinations. It is instead by dialogue. We practice and model discourse in our classes so that the students can develop and grow with the conversation around God’s Word or remain stuck and unmoved. To the extent that students “get it”, the conversation develops and grows, and real and solid discourse happens. To the extent that they do not “get it”, the conversation stagnates, and the students remain confused, bored, indifferent, or unreceptive. Most students fall into one of these four categories.
I believe that the Sunday morning Equipping Hour is the most important event in Student Ministries at our church. Yet it is probably the least valued as well. This is no doubt in part due to the reputation that Equipping Hour gained among the students when I arrived nearly eight years ago. Students referred to Equipping Hour as the “First Sermon” and the main service as the “Second Sermon”. But those who come stopped doing that several years ago.
I believe in the value of sermons, of course. We preach on Wednesdays. Expository preaching is essential, crucial, and invaluable. I am not therefore setting Equipping Hour against preaching. Hearing God’s Word preached is the very next thing the students hear in the main service after Equipping Hour. If that were not so, this article, and the plea to go with it, would be very different. But because the students hear preaching on a consistent basis, and because of the depressing statistics and stories of students growing up in churches like ours only to leave when they graduate and not return anywhere, I believe Equipping Hour fills a crucial niche in the students’ lives as a supplement to their parents’ instruction. Our children’s doctrine is not as sound as we think it is. Equipping Hour helps to expose the need as well as fill it.
Lately, I have been struck by the need to help the students understand why we do what we do. This has often happened in the middle of teaching lessons themselves. Why should we do what we do? Why the way we do it? The questions are not self-explanatory. They require answers for understanding to be expected. If the students are expected to go along without a theory of why we do what we do, then we are training them to go along with teachers and leaders in churches without developing the criteria that guide the way we do things in the first place. Without those biblical criteria, they will be more likely to go along with whatever the leaders in churches are doing. This puts them in the vulnerable position of being conditioned not to question the methods and models of leadership but to go along trustingly. We are in constant danger of teaching successive generations what they need to know without an understanding of why they need to know it. In other words, we are in danger of ignoring the need for children to develop into critically thinking adults.
Why would we do this? There is probably some measure of fear that the children will reject what we teach them. But what good does that do? If they are going to reject the faith, is it not preferable that they begin to reject the faith while we yet have their ears and not once they are already sent out of the home?
It may also be that we fail to make the transition with our students from childhood to adulthood. When they are children, the focus should be on hearing and absorbing facts. We are teaching them the content of the faith. This is precisely so that they will have the content they need to put together their doctrine for their own living. We teach them about life, about God, about Christ, so that as they grow and mature into adulthood they may begin to put together in dependence on the Spirit an understanding of how to live for God through Christ. If this is not our goal, and if our goal is mere communication of facts that we tell them are important without the intentional development of critical thinking about those facts and their resulting import on their lives, then we are by design not raising up the next generation to live as God would have them but to so what their teachers tell them. Is it any wonder that they go astray as soon as they are out from under our influence?
If someone says that what we tell them and how God would have them live are the same thing, then the point is missed. They cannot be the same thing in the way I intend to convey. To whom are the wills of the students finally subjected, to their teachers or to God? It must be to God. Our teaching can and ought to correspond to the will of God, but it cannot and must not replace it.
Children are taught from infancy to do what they are told by their parents, then their teachers and later their supervisors and other authorities, such as the government. But a mark of adulthood, and of human flourishing in general, is the conscious choice to obey authorities because it is right and not merely because they have been told to do so. True freedom is not the lack of all subjection whatsoever, but the choice to be subject to what we ought to be subject and not to what we ought not.
We must also remember at the same thing that what is right is right because of God. Our children’s morality cannot be based on an abstract theory of principles because an abstract theory is not the source of our morality. The sources of abstract theories are human minds. The source of true morality is God.
What I am saying is that so often Protestant parents affirm a form the priesthood of the believer in theory but deny it in practice. The older generation of parents and teachers ought to be the mediators of morality, of goodness, truth, and beauty to children while they are children. But children must be prepared to learn that the source of that morality is God himself. Not only that, but their access to true morality is as direct as their teachers. Teachers and leaders do not provide access to the good, true, and beautiful without which people cannot access. Instead, teachers and leaders facilitate access that all have. In other words, all authority that is not God’s is derived from God. Parents have authority because God gives it to them. It is not intrinsic apart from God. Parental authority is intrinsic to the parent-child relationship because of God.
Students, then, need to be taught that they have the same basic responsibility as their teachers and parents. They need to learn that they cannot settle for allowing others to determine who they will be—what they will think, what they will desire, or what they will do. Students must be taught that they are responsible before God. If we teach students that we teach them and require of them only what seems best to us, then we are modeling for them the very thing that most grieves us when they graduate and do the same. So many generations fashion a Frankenstein of the successive generation only to be appalled at the result. We are not gods. We are men, and so are our children, and they must learn to live as we do: as men before God—coram deo.[1]
In practice, this looks like treating students as independent moral agents responsible before God. We ought to experience a fear of God for our own lives, which drives us to walk by the Spirit and learn how to live as God would have us, living as those who have faith and not as those who depend on themselves for their righteousness. But a mistake we seem so often to make in the way we parent and teach is to fail to communicate this very need to the students. They need to know what we know. They need to recognize their direct exposure to God. Parents and teachers often seem to structure their teaching and instruction to inculcate a fear and respect for them in themselves rather than as representatives of the God who is there. If we want our students’ doctrine to be sound, we must continually ensure that the doctrine we teach is the same doctrine we model, and not be surprised when students’ answers demonstrate that they are still in the process of maturing.
[1] Coram deo is a Latin phrase meaning “before the face of God.”