I've recently watched a film called Divided which makes a pretty bold statement about the church and the youth. At the core, it asks the question what is the reason that causes up to 80% of youth from churches to walk away from the faith once they leave for college. Their proposed answer was a little surprising, youth service or Sunday school. The premise is that how majority of churches in the United States conduct Sunday school or their youth programs are flawed. There is an awful lot of fun and games programs conducted within Sunday school with very little substance in the end that by the time the kids hit the real world by going to college, there is no solid grounding in the teachings of the Bible. Not only that but parents almost treat Sunday school as a glorified day care centre where they provide a service to educate their children in spiritual matters. When the sermon ends, they come and pick up their children and go home. Hit repeat every week until college. It goes even further to say that how Sunday school that has age-separated classes fundamentally contributes to this problem. In fact, the primary mission of Sunday school when it first started wasn't for the Christians but for those kids on the streets wasting their lives away in crime. So they argue that Sunday school was a means of outreach rather than edifying the Christians and so shouldn't be there in regular Sunday service. The idea of a youth service or even Sunday school for that matter was not a model illustrated in the Bible (ie. not a God ordained model, in their words) and so does not guarantee it works.
Whoa.
I recommend watching the film (it's free anyway after e-mail registration) as there are quite a number of things presented that I think are quite relevant and certainly the take-home lessons of the film. Some of the things may sound like a bit of a stretch, for example, how Sunday school children are getting more and more attached to their teachers than their own parents and because of all the fun activities they do, the children will get whatever spiritual teaching they can get from their teachers, if any at all. I can honestly say, after much thinking, that this is somewhat true from my own experience though not in the same "extreme" behaviour portrayed in the film.
In my old church, the one that I went to for the first 18 years of my life, Sunday school was a big deal for pretty much all the kids. Plenty of fun activities, sing songs etc. Most of us love our teachers because of it. This is not even including the Royal Rangers (think Scouts but with a heavy Christian slant) program my church had which most of the kids did join. So, if you were a regular church kid and joined Sunday school, your whole weekend and sometimes most of the holidays are filled up with fun church activities. By the time puberty kicks in, Sunday school classes for the teens start getting smaller and more awkward, even though there were plenty of kids my age. Activities became less fun, most of us started getting bored but the one saving grace was if you had been in the Royal Rangers program. You start to see more lukewarm Christian behaviour among friends and eventually most of us went to the main service and some eventually disappeared. I was quite fortunate during my teen years that my high school Christian Fellowship helped me a lot and much of my faith was built up here. The point is that while the Sunday school ministry in most churches meant to educate children in the faith but the reality is that with the overemphasis of the fun factor means that we are trading the gospel for something else. Which was what I started to see though not very conscious about it. It became even more apparent just before I finished high school that our church decided to revamp the youth program in order to get more of the youth back into church. Their approach? More fun factor. We had a games room (complete with a pool table, table tennis table etc) all of the sudden, food was catered to us, organizing highly publicized youth events and the lot. It wasn't long before I realized something is still not right.
It seems, based on the film, that one of the major contributors to the kids leaving the faith was the failure of fathers to educate them in spiritual matters. Because they treat Sunday school as a spiritual day care centre, it frees the hands of the fathers to educate, one less thing to worry about. Which again, is not a model ordained by God. I can remember clearly several months before I was to come to Melbourne that my dad said to me to be careful of teachings behind the pulpit for they are not always right. He then went on to explain the fallacies of sermons coming from the senior pastor of the church. Since then I was very careful, listening more intently to the sermons than I had before in my entire life. That one short session with my dad did more to my spiritual life than possibly all the Sunday school lessons combined. Because that was the beginning of handling the word of God properly which is far more important than fun Sunday school activities. It was said in the film that even the best Sunday school educators cannot replace the father which I find to be true.
As the film goes on, the suggested solution is to train fathers to be the primary spiritual educators instead of pouring into youth pastors or develop youth programs that are "fun and engaging". I hope that if the time comes that I were to have my own family that I would be just that. That I will not neglect my responsibilities of being a father and provide the spiritual education and grounding to my children and not sign them away to a day care service.
But I'm not there yet. Not even sure that I'm meant to get there. But it doesn't matter.
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Why is it that I find two different reactions when it was announced that the ISA will be repealed? One is that people see it as a victory of recent events while still not being overly naive and celebrate and the other being completely cynical that nothing will change at all. And the two reactions were also mostly divided into two regions, people staying in Malaysia and those who are not. A step in the right direction does not demand cynicism but caution regardless of the proposed implementation of the step. I also guess it is because few care about a country outside the one they are in even if it is your home country.
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Monday's a big day. Scared.
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