It's about KNOWING God
Submitted by Forgiven on June 18 2000 04:52:36
In reply to Christian Kiddie Cuddlers submitted by Rex Infinity on June 17 2000 20:42:58
|
One of the sader statistics of recent years is the drop out rate of Sunday School kids who have been exposed to the form of religion but fail to make the transition to personal faith. Part of the issue here is that they have never found God real in their lives; their apparent conformance was for a variety of reasons, but had nothing to do with the reality of God for them. Ultimately there is no clear answer to such a scenario - part of the it though is that there was no work of the Spirit to bring repentance and new life. Certainly we must be less willing to accept into membership any kid just because they've reached a certain age, though standing up to the parents who are likely to have an agenda of wanting that acceptance for their kid is less than a trivial task; there are moments when I'm pleased I'm not a church leader!! But that is no excuse for ignoring the responsibility of teaching kids about the faith - if we don't do it, they will accumulate the knowledge from somewhere else and it is bound to be more wrong than if they had got it from us! But overall, the need is for us to lead them to Jesus, to the same extent that we should be leading adults to Jesus. Let's not be ageist about this! And in the same way as adults can be manipulated into 'standing up for Jesus' by the pressure of the evangelist's patter, so can kids. The need is for better, less manipulative evangelism, not for none at all. |
Follow ups: