A few years ago Christian Smith, a researcher from the National Study of Youth and Religion at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found some disturbing trends among youth and their views of God.
It seems that their religion can be summed up with the words, "Moralistic, Therapeutic, Deism." That is, there is a God who created the world and watches over it kind of (Deism); He wants us to be nice and fair and "good." (Moralistic) However, the only time that God seems to matter is when you're going through hard times (Therapeutic).
Of the three thousand teens interviewed in this study, most of them had no idea what the basic beliefs of their faith were. They seemed to talk about God as being good to talk to, but not as a Deity, as a Friend. Unfortunately, many of those questioned were Christian kids who had grown up in Church.
What should the Church do in order to counteract this thinking?
0 comments:
Post a Comment