The article begins: “If you’re the parent of a Christian teenager, Kenda Creasy Dean has this warning: Your child is following a ‘mutant’ form of Christianity, and you may be responsible.”
I know that with Gathering Sunday, we are no longer using the summer theme of “Holy Headlines”, but then, this headline sounds a lot more like bad news than good – announcing the threat that today’s teenagers are becoming ‘fake’, even ‘mutant’ Christians.
A subsequent article on CNN.com picks this up, offering that “Mutant Christians” “sounds like the title of a 1950s science fiction B movie”, complete with a “lurid movie poster showing disfigured churchgoers lumbering through panicked city streets.”
The author referred to in the first headline is Kenda Creasy Dean, and the article reports on her most recent book, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church.
Creasy Dean, a United Methodist Minister and professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, was one of the researchers involved in the 2001 National Study of Youth and Religion, a wide-ranging study involved in-depth interviews with at least 3 300 American teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17. While the results of this study were already published in the 2005 Soul Searching, Creasy Dean’s Almost Christian is an attempt to reflect on the implications of this sociological study for churches.
One of the central findings of the National Study was that while more and more teens are abandoning faith, they are not doing so out of teenage rebellion, but out of “Benign Whateverism”. They tend to have a generally positive view of religion as a “very nice thing”, but not something that is particularly important. It is not so much that they are hostile towards faith, as that they just don’t see that it matters very much.
The study further suggests that this is not simply a case of typical teenage apathy, but is a consequence of the dominant form of Christianity among teens. This is a neutered form of Christianity that the study calls “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” It is a variety of Christianity that can be summed up by saying that God wants you to be nice, to feel good about yourself, and is otherwise not particularly involved in the world. In this view, God mostly stays out of the way, though being available for emergencies from time to time – perhaps like a cosmic therapist or divine butler.
Creasy Dean observes that it’s hard to get very passionate about a God like that. It’s certainly hard to imagine anyone loving such a God with all their heart, soul and might. The God of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, the God that wants us to be nice, feel good, and otherwise stays out of the way, just doesn’t seem to matter that much.
And one of Creasy Dean’s main points is that if we want to grow lasting faith in our children and youth, we need to pass on to them a faith that matters.
They need a story about a God whom they can love with all their heart, soul, mind and strength. They need a story about God and the world that gives them something to believe in, a story embodied by a community that they can belong to, a story that gives them a purpose to live out, and a hope for the future.
This was also Israel’s need as they gathered on the plains of Moab, across the Jordan from the promised land. Today’s text from Deuteronomy speaks to Israel at a key time of transition. Perhaps not unlike the teenage years, it was a time of shifting identity. They were at the threshold of entering the promised land, at the threshold of a transition from being a wandering group of runaway slaves to becoming a great nation.
At this time of transition, Moses reminds them of the God that they were called to love with heart, soul, and might. This is not the God of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, not a God who is absent and inactive, but one who has acted powerfully to free Israel from slavery in Egypt, who covenanted with them at Sinai, who gave them instruction on how to live justly, and who accompanied them as they wandered the desert. This is the God who made promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and who now fulfils these promises, accompanying them as they enter the land of promise.
Such a God, who acts powerfully to free the oppressed, can indeed be loved. Such a God, who makes and keeps covenant, who provides guidance, who accompanies, can indeed be loved with all one’s heart, soul, mind and strength.
It was the story of this God that Israel was to remember as they entered into the land. Telling and retelling this story, reciting it, talking about it morning and night, at home and away, was so important because, once they were in the land and had become a great nation, Israel would be liable to forget their founding story, and the God who brought them to the land.
And so Moses admonishes them: When the LORD your God has brought you into the land that he swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you – a land with fine, large cities that you did not build, houses filled with all sorts of goods that you did not fill, hewn cisterns that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant – when you have eaten your fill, take care that you do not forget the LORD, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
Remember who you are, and who your God is. Do not let the story of wealth, comfort, and self sufficiency become your story. It will be all too easy to get comfortable with the fertile land, large cities, furnished houses, vineyards and olive groves; It will be all too easy for the story of conquest, of wealth and comfort, to become your primary identity story. Take care that you do not forget Yahweh, who brought you out of the land of Egypt the house of slavery.
And don’t let your children forget either. It has been forty years since Israel left Egypt. The children and youth among them have never experienced slavery in Egypt, and did not experience God’s dramatic liberation. And those born once Israel enters the land will not
have experienced wandering in the desert, but will instead have been surrounded by wealth and comfort from the start.
If these children and youth are to learn to love God with all their heart, soul, and might, they will need to learn Israel’s founding story and to have their identities shaped by it. They will need to identify with the story of being a people who Yahweh brought out of slavery in Egypt, who God covenanted with at Sinai, and who God accompanied through the desert, rather than having their identities shaped simply by their current surroundings.
And the way to teach their children the story, to pass on the story, was by immersion. They were to learn the story, and to learn it well. They were to surround themselves and their families with the story, talking about it at home and away, day and night. They were to surround themselves with it verbally, visually, symbolically; the story was to be bound on their hands and forehead, written on their doorposts and their gates. They were to live the story, and be ready to answer when their children asked why they lived that way by telling them the story of God with Israel.
In this way, the story that they want to pass on to their children becomes more pervasive than any of the other stories about who they are, and who God is. It takes up space in their lives, becoming the framework through which their children come to see the world and through which they understand themselves.
Embodying and speaking about the story of God’s liberation, instruction and accompanying of Israel will give subsequent generations a story to believe in, a story embodied in a community that they belong to. They will then be able to find their purpose within as they live out this story.
Which brings us back to thinking about Christian formation here at TUMC. What story do we invite our children to believe in? What story forms us as a community that we are inviting them to belong to? What purpose will they find for themselves, and what hope will sustain them as they pursue that purpose?
At TUMC we have a Youth Ministry mission statement that outlines answers to these questions: The mission of TUMC’s youth ministry is to actively invite every youth to commit to a personal relationship and ongoing adventure with Jesus Christ, mentoring them towards wholeness within a supportive church community, and empowering them to bring healing and hope to the world.
The story that we are inviting our children to believe in, to live into, to commit themselves to, is the story of Jesus, the story of the God who is revealed in and through Jesus Christ. This is the God that we want them to love with all their heart, soul, mind and strength. We seek to actively invite every child and youth to commit to a personal relationship and ongoing adventure with Jesus Christ.
The place that children and youth learn this story, where they will learn what it means to place one’s trust in Jesus, is in the church community and in their families. One of the main findings of the National Study of Youth and Religion is that, while Sunday School and other structured times of teaching are important, the implicit curriculum of the life of the community and family is far more significant in the lives of children and teenagers.
Children and youth learn what it means to commit to a relationship with Jesus, to trust Jesus, in a community that enacts the story of Jesus. We invite children and youth to commit to Jesus as we seek to mentor them toward wholeness within a supportive Church community.
Unlike the story of God told by Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, the story of Jesus as the story of God’s self-giving love for the world, is a story that teenagers can be passionate about. It is a story that offers meaning and purpose to their lives. God’s self-giving in Jesus invites them to give themselves out of love for others, rather than being oriented to pursuit of self. Such purposefulness is captured by TUMC’s youth ministry mission statement when it speaks of empowering youth to bring healing and hope to the world.
Today we begin a new year of Sunday School, and this is one of the significant, structured way that we seek to tell the story of Jesus to the children and youth among us.
But our text from Deuteronomy invites us to consider Christian formation more broadly as well. The story we live, the story that is implicit in our lives, is the story that our children and youth will learn. As important as the formal teaching of Sunday School is, we also need to attend to the hidden curriculum that is our lives.
What I am really trying to do in this sermon is to invite all of us to active engagement in ministry to the children and youth among us. Some of us participate in this ministry through teaching Sunday School, others through Youth or GERMS sponsoring, mentoring, inviting children and youth to participate in corporate worship through reading scripture, or playing music.
All of us, however, participate in this ministry through our lives, through what the children and youth see and overhear as they live among us.
Christian faith is learned by watching the lives and actions of others who trust Christ. Children and youth will learn to believe in Jesus, to trust and follow Jesus, by seeing others who trust and follow Jesus. They will learn have their identities formed by the story of God’s love in Christ by watching and listening to others as we both live and talk about the story of Jesus.
Which means, of course, that we need to learn to live and to articulate the story of God’s self-giving love in Jesus ourselves.
Christian formation is not only for children and youth, but is a lifelong process that happens in both formal and informal ways. It happens as we worship together, share and pray together, preach and listen to sermons together, as we attend Adult Education sessions, read books and talk to each other about them, as we read Scripture and talk about it with each other.
And it happens as we observe the ways in which each of us strive to embody the story of God’s self-giving love in our lives, in the decisions we make about where we live, where we work, how we spend our time, what we aspire to, and who we are becoming.
We are all engaged in the ministry of Christian formation, teaching each other and learning from each other, so that together we might more faithfully embody God’s self-giving love in the world, and so that we would be ready to answer when the children and youth among us ask us why we li
ve the way that we do by telling them the story of God’s love shown forth in Jesus Christ.
Amen.