Beware of taking your kids to church :)

This week, Passion Week, is one of my favorite times of the year. Easter gives us an opportunity to invite people to church more easily than at other times. As you probably know, many people visit church on Easter even if they don’t usually attend.

That’s great. Sort of.

Several years ago I heard a fabulous sermon on godly parenting and it’s haunted me ever since. The pastor gave an interesting illustration: He made the rather bold point that if we, as parents, are just giving our children a little tiny dose of Jesus we may be doing them more harm than good. We may, in fact, be preventingthem from wholeheartedly trusting and following Christ as adults.

Consider immunizations.  When we give someone a flu shot, we’re actually giving them what?  A little tiny dose of the flu. Give them just enough and it will keep them from getting the full-blown flu.  The natural reaction of the body is able to ward off and render harmless the flu virus.

Is it possible to immunize our children from Jesus?

Studies have often shown that those who are soured most on Christianity are not those people who have had no exposure to church and the Bible, but rather are those who, as children, either have bad experiences in the church or parents who sat in pews on Sunday but showed zero evidence of living out that faith the other six days of the week.

They had a tiny dose and therefore were apparently immune to the full-blown effect of the risen Lord.

Why is this?  Because a parent who models a half-hearted or Sunday-morning faith is essentially saying, “I know all about this Jesus guy and He’s not significant enough for me to actually change my life.  It’s just not that big of a deal.”

That, friends, is a scary message to give our children.

It’s not just that we haven’t given our children enough religious experience, it’s that we’ve proven by our lives that there are no real-life implications of believing in God.  Kids aren’t stupid. They have great noses and can smell BS a mile away.

Why would they want to believe in something that doesn’t matter?  So they abandon ship.  Of course, they hold this stance only until they have their own children.  Then they decide they want their children to “have religion”, so they wind up doing the exact same routine as their parents.  No real faith, just going through the motions.  And in these motions, another generation is immunized from faith in Christ. Frightening.

Along this same vein, a paragraph from Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood has always haunted me in a similar way. Dillard reminisces her fond memories of summer Presbyterian church camp:

“The adult members of society adverted to the Bible unreasonably often. What arcana!  Why did they spread this scandalous document before our eyes? If they had read it, I thought, they would have hid it.  They didn’t recognize the vivid danger that we would, through repeated exposure, catch a case of its wild opposition to their world.  Instead they bade us study great chunks of it, and think about those chunks, and commit them to memory, and ignore them.  By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.” (p. 134)

Did you READ that?  It’s startling. The women is a literary genius, of course, but she’s also hitting the nail on the head, and the conviction is well-earned.  If our lives have not been transformed, utterly and completely transformed by the power of the gospel, then what are we doing teaching it to our children?

The gospel is scandalous; its claims are spectacular, it is “wild opposition to the world”.  How tragic it would be if we taught our children to study Christ’s claims, “commit them to memory, and ignore them.”  Wow. Is that not what we are doing when we ourselves ignore them?  Are we not then merely giving our children’s lives a “serious tint” and giving them “quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms”?

Please, please hear my heart in this: I do hope we all take our children to church this weekend. And every weekend. But more than that I hope and pray that we are convinced of this scandalous, life-changing gospel found within the pages of Scripture: It is the power of salvation to all who believe (Rom. 1:16).

The life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ changes everything.

May it do just that in us … and our kids.

{Thanks so much for reading.}