Minister to Emerging Generations at Brentwood Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee
Moral Therapeutic Deists. In 2005, University of North Carolina sociologist Christian Smith coined that phrase to describe the core religious values held by the vast majority of the next generation of the church in America. Summing up four years of research for the National Study of Youth and Religion, his study gave definition to some of the greatest fears already sensed by thousands of discerning ministers and churches across the evangelical world.
In spite of teenagers’ surprisingly positive interest in matters of religion and active participation in vibrant churches, millions of students “graduating” from our ministries were unable to articulate even the most basic beliefs of the Christian faith. The carefully designed study revealed that young people were emerging from our popular children’s ministries and youth programs with the belief that religion is about doing good and being happy, watched over by a distant and benign Creator whose purpose is largely to help us feel better about ourselves.
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For all of the advances and investments in the fields of preschool, children and student ministries in the past thirty years, this wasn’t the desired outcome. Barna research revealed in 2006 the inevitable result of such a shallow foundation: millions of young adults who had been active in evangelical churches as children and teens were now dropping out of church in record numbers as 20-somethings.
Lead researcher Dave Kinnaman noted, “Much of the ministry to teenagers in America needs an overhaul – not because churches fail to attract significant numbers of young people, but because so much of those efforts are not creating a sustainable faith beyond high school.”
[2]While many churches are still content to ignore these warning signs, there is a growing movement in the evangelical world that is rallying around the conviction that the best path to impacting future generations is actually found in recovering our past – the ancient model of spiritual formation as revealed by the role of the family, as first discovered in the Old Testament and then combined with the power of Christ-fueled community in the New Testament.