Almost Christian 2

All this week we’re looking at issues related to the faith of teenagers, as reported in Kenda Creasy Dean’s book, Almost Christian – What the faith of our teenagers is telling the American Church. Yesterday I told you about how research indicates that our churches are by and large unable to share the core content of the Christian faith with kids. As a result, kids have a non-Biblical and faulty concept of God, and God has become unimportant to them. Creasy Dean says that what churches are offering kids is a kind of diner theology – what she calls a bargain religion, cheap but satisfying, whose gods require little in the way of fidelity or sacrifice. The result, she says, is that we’ve filled kids with an agreeable porridge about the importance of being nice, feeling good about yourself, and saving God for emergencies. That’s not a biblical faith and it’s not the kind of faith we should encourage in our kids.