This documentary is definitely food for thought:
TULIP - P
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Well, we've made it to the end. We're at the "P" of TULIP. "P," of course,
is for Perseverance of the Saints. Now, when I was younger, I believed
myself to...
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I've seen a lot of the "spiritual junk food" shown here, and have seen so many teens disgruntled with the church. They need meat, and will take meat, but we predominantly feed them pap.
A half truth is a whole lie.
Bible worship was always age integrated. Bible study was not. In fact, we have almost no reference to Bible study for non-adults in Scripture.
Sunday School (or age-grouped Bible study) is not the church at worship, it is the church at study...Bible study.
I guarantee you that if you put multiple age groups together for "Bible study," none of the groups would grow in number or mature spiritually. That's because they are at different stages of ability to learn Bible truths.
We integrated youth with adults and the youth disappeared. So did the older, more mature Christians. The pablum necessary for youth was just too simplistic for mature Christians, hungry to further their spiritual development through the Word.
Having said that, there is a great, mega-need to incorporate families in worship. We also need to formulate a unified approach to Bible study such that different maturity levels are studying the same Scripture, hopefully to make conversation about the Bible study experience easier at home. We even need a specific "church time" to enable families to discuss how the lesson applies to their daily lives.
The old Sunday School was good in some ways, bad in others. The new experiments in family Bible study are even worse. And they almost completely ignore those without children and those who are up in age.
Church must include youth, but it is not now, nor has it ever been, about youth.
I had thought of these things Joe. I would say that it is good to differentiate between Bible study and worship as one evaluates this documentary. A trend that I have noticed, and a reason I pulled my son out of children's church (my 13 year old daughter removed her ownself from "youth group" a year ago) was because of the trajectory it had begun with my son. In our church the families worship separately.
Children are trained to be separated out, and in my opinion, are thus trained to leave when they get too old for youth group and so are kicked out of the only "church" they have ever known while at the same time these same "children" are living in a culture that prolongs youth till the mid thirties. My guess is that many of them have gone on to start their own youth group-based churchianity that has come to be known as emergent christianity.
I used to "lead" children's worship and I always wondered why. I completely agree that families should worship together, and that's the way we do it in our church today (except for nursery and pre-schoolers). Our Education Pastor decided to do the same thing in Sunday School, and that was a complete bust...both the youth and the elders disappeared.
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