Cultures Collide

In the late 19th century Sunday schools were formed in churches as a means to teach the children in the emerging industrialized world to read so as to be able to access the Christian Bible. From that humble beginning we now find ourselves locked - it seems - in a culture oriented totally around the needs, wants and desires of our young. Fathers are becoming more and more to be viewed as nothing more than superfluous and according to most TV commercials and sit-coms as idiots.

[...] developments began to coalesce to form a new understanding of the "place" of young people in leading industrial societies after the mid-nineteenth century. A period of public education was made mandatory for young people in many parts of Europe and the United States; increasingly, schooling became an expected and routine part of the life course. At roughly the same time, the field of medicine and the emerging discipline of psychology began to differentiate the stages of the human life course more precisely, determining a "normal" standard for biological and social development based on chronological age.[...] (1)

So as the world surrounding the Christian World, a World that is called to be in but not like its surroundings (1 Jhn 2:15,16), the Christian World has slowly remodeled itself on the order of its surroundings. Now the church is almost indistinguishable in its makeup from the rest of society. Far from the Biblical model of Father, Mother, children, all led in unity by Elders as members of the Kingdom of God, we too have now segregated ourselves by age believing we are doing God's work led by the Holy Spirit - as one Deacon recently told me.

The ease with which Satan has been able to bring about this transition is astonishing. There are few, if any, voices raised in protest as the church changes into just another expression of our surrounding culture.

[...]The driving force, the engine, behind youth culture is greed. It is the creation of an entertainment industry lusting after money. From the beginning, the elite controlling the media recognized that sin is profitable—that they could boost sales by creating products which chipped away at moral restraints and standards of decency. So, with purely mercenary motives, they deliberately made their products more and more offensive. The music became noisier, the speech became more insolent and vulgar, and the clothing of teen idols became more and more disreputable. Soon, the media were filled with sex, violence, and rebellion. Through its campaign against morality, the entertainment industry succeeded in opening up a gap between parents and children, the so-called generation gap. Children embraced a way of life that scorned the traditional values of the older generation. Over the years, youth culture has sunk into worse and worse decadence and has enlarged its constituency to include many adults as well as many children. (2)

A critical question facing the child of a Christian home is whether he will identify with his parents or turn against them and join youth culture.[...]

Sad to say my own church has been caught in this trap. Everything we do is now oriented toward "peer" or age group activities. Even in worship service the youth sit apart from parents or are in a segregated "children's church."

The top down family concept so prevalent throughout most of the history of Western Civilization, sustained by the model of God's Kingdom being built on earth, has been destroyed.

But, when the Church believes orienting everything around the secular model is the only way to survive it is time someone actually began thinking about what we are doing. God's Church will survive, but a particular church may not if the leadership is blind to trap it has gotten caught in. 

There is nothing I can do about this on a personal level other than what I'm doing here in pointing out that this model is unbiblical, and I believe sinful. Oh! There is one other thing I do and that is sit with my wife, our son and his wife and their children on Sunday mornings in worship service. We take up almost a whole row in the pews.

Who knows maybe our sitting together will be viewed as defying authority and our little rebellion against "peer" group segregation will catch on.