Raising Teens in Christian Community
By Brett King, RMCA Headmaster
At a recent meeting with RMCA’s middle school
parents, I reinforced the fact that teens today are facing intense pressures
and rapid societal changes unprecedented in American history. This has
made raising teens a unique challenge today. Thankfully, many Christian
ministries have responded by creating a variety of programs and experiences
to help our kids survive their teen years with their souls intact.
Unfortunately, some of these well-intentioned strategies
have missed the mark, not because of the lack of noble motives, but
because they ignore how God uses true Christian community to transform
lives.
This phenomenon was recently highlighted for me by Chuck
Colson in a BreakPoint Commentary entitled, “The Disturbing Truth
about Our Teens, Chastity and Evangelicals.” I hope the excerpt
below will serve as an encouragement to you for your decision to support
the work of RMCA, and a reminder that this Christian school community
is committed to teaching and reinforcing your most important values.
Our aim is not just to inspire students to make the right moral decisions,
but to point them to the transforming power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ
that enable those commitments.
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Sometimes we would rather not face the truth. It makes
us far too uncomfortable. Recently, Mark Regenerus, a sociologist and
a Christian, has put an unwelcome truth right before our eyes. In his
new study called Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American
Teens, he shares disturbing statistics that reveal evangelical teens
may be engaging in premarital sex at younger ages and more frequently
than their non-evangelical counterparts.
For pastors and youth leaders who have labored hard to
see their young people sign abstinence pledges, this study is a blow.
But as author Lauren Winner pointed out in an op-ed in the New York
Times last year concerning similar studies, we ought not to be surprised.
As she explains, "Pledgers promise to control intense
bodily desires simply by exercising their wills. But Christian ethics
recognizes that the broken, twisted will can do nothing without rehabilitation
by God's grace." This, of course, is no less than what the Apostle
Paul teaches us in Romans 7.
Winner further proposes, "Perhaps the centrality
of grace is recognized best not in a pledge but in a prayer that names
chastity as a gift and beseeches God for the grace to receive it."
She also rightly draws our attention to the brash individualism of such
pledges. Quoting Methodist bishop William Willimon, she writes, "Decisions
are fine. But decisions that are not reinforced and reformed by the
community tend to be short-lived."
To that I say, "Amen!" The Church has all too
often forgotten this truth: True transformation requires God's enabling
grace. And because of the way God created us to reflect the relational
nature of the Trinity, transformation happens best within the context
of community. Now more than ever, we need this nudging reminder that
the community of believers must be indeed just that, a community, supporting
and enabling that counter-cultural commitment to God's ways.
From BreakPoint, Sept 18, 2007 "BreakPoint
with Chuck Colson" is a daily commentary on news and trends from
a Christian perspective. Heard on more than 1000 radio outlets nationwide,
Breakpoint transcripts are available on the internet. www.breakpoint.org
