Youth ministry researcher Chap Clark says, “I’m convinced that the single most important area where we’ve lost ground with kids is in our commitment and ability to ground them in God’s Word.”
As a result, Barry Shafer says, “The church today, including both the adult and teenage generations, is in an era of rampant biblical illiteracy.” Duffy Robbins takes this one step further when he says: “Our young people have become incapable of theological thinking because they don’t have any theology to think about. ”¦ And, as Paul warns us, this ”¦ leaves us as ”˜infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching’ (Ephesians 4:14).”
At the conclusion of the National Study of Youth and Religion, lead researcher Christian Smith reported: “Even though most teens are very positive about religion and say it’s a good thing, the vast majority are incredibly inarticulate about religion. ”¦ It doesn’t seem to us that many teens are being very well-educated in their faith traditions.”
I’ve attended a number of evangelical non-denominations churches and I found, that the vast majority (95-99%) of those under the age of 40 have almost no Christian theological understanding beyond Jesus died for my sins. Moreover, even the implications of Jesus dying for my sins is understood only at the most basic levels and, beyond the popular Romans Road, they can’t use the text of Scripture to support the notion. I specified “Christian” theology earlier because I’ve encountered quite a bit of Buddhist and Hindu theology masquerading as Christianity. One of the worst is the notion that my material and/or spiritual blessing is tied directly to a quasi-sacramental “quiet time.†Not that a rigorous devotional life is not important, but this is karma, not Christianity. Moreover, the “Christians†in these churches could not talk at all about what passages of Scripture meant in an objective sense, only how they could apply it to their lives or what it meant to them. We must recover the strong catechetical tradition of Protestantism and transform youth groups from something that is fun, “relevantâ€, and meaningless into something that is challenging, biblical, and in my experience young people actual find quite interesting when compared to all the dribble of this world!