The news about Christian teenagers in America is distressing, if we can believe the research of a Princeton scholar.
Kenda Creasy Dean teaches at Princeton Theological Seminary but she spent a summer in the National Study of Youth and Religion. Her conclusion? Teenagers are being fed a low-nutrition, high-sugar diet of generic spirituality that leaves them woefully mistaken about Christianity and pathetically indifferent to Jesus.
She calls it Fake Christianity. It is endemic, she says, in all corners of the Christian church: protestant, pentecostal, Catholic and Evangelical, liberal and conservative. The me-centered, therapeutic gospel is everywhere. She describes it in her new book, Almost Christian.
What these kids need is a stronger dose of the young preachers who came to Louisville last January and preached about Jesus. They were articulate, passionate, intelligent, compelling, and inspirational. The most preached text of the festival was the saying of Jesus: “If you want to be my disciple, you must deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.”
No easy road to self-centered religion!
I suspect it is we older preachers, teachers, and parents that have concocted the unhealthy batch of religious slop our kids have been eating. Perhaps we have lost confidence in the gospel that transfixes and transforms. They want a sturdy gospel that calls for sacrifice and surrender. They want the real Jesus.
I wonder if this generation of teenagers would be deeper in their walk with Christ if instead of listening so often to me and others like me they could listen to their peers issue the call to discipleship.
No two ways about it: the Academy of Preachers is identifying, connecting, supporting and inspiring a new generation of preachers sold out to the radicality of Jesus’ call to come and die. These young preachers have the potential to shape, not only the culture of proclaimation in America but indeed the entire community of Christ in all of its forms.
So be it, Lord.
