More Than a Foundation

(These are my thoughts over the past couple days.  While they are not worded in the best way, I felt that I needed to share them.)

Ask any builder, and he will tell you that the most important part of a building is its foundation.  However, there are so many different building styles and materials when it comes to the foundation.  When one travels to the plains states, he would see a very unique style.  In that part of the country, every building has a cellar.  The builder digs out the cellar, builds formations inside the hole and pours concrete between the dirt and the formations, creating concrete walls around the perimeter of the cellar.

When the twisters come in the spring and summer, that foundation provides the family with protection from the violent attacks of the storm.  Even if the home is blown away, the foundation remains.

We are called to build foundations for our families.  I'm not just referring to the physical foundations upon which our homes are built, but also the spiritual foundations upon which we need to build our homes.  Many people see the foundation as something that you build one time and forget about, but one must continually inspect and repair his home's spiritual foundation.  He must also keep in mind that the foundation is not just what he builds the rest of his home on, but also the source of protection for his family in the time of storm.  He must make that foundation the only One who can calm the storm.

How Amazing!

As a young child, I took part in a Christmas musical about the nativity from the angel’s perspective.  One of the songs that we sang went, “How amazing; how confusing! How can God the Son become a man?”  At that time, I just took the statements of my parents and Sabbath school leaders regarding the plan of salvation in blind childhood faith.  I never really tried to wrap my head around what it all meant; so, it took me a while to really understand just how amazing it is that Christ died for me.

Romans 5:7,8 reads, “For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die.  But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”  Everything that we as a human race do comes after what is known in the economic world as a cost/benefit analysis.  We examine how much we are going to sacrifice and we compare it to how much we are going to gain.  And it is here in Romans that we see God’s cost/benefit analysis, and it boggles our minds.  God says that he is willing to sacrifice everything for a chance to save someone who has made no indication that he is going to accept the gift that he is being offered.  Paul compares this analysis to those that we perform.  He reminds us that we as humans are reluctant to even lay down our life for our heroes, and yet God was willing to die for the yet unrepentant scum.  And, all of this, not because He was going to gain anything, but because He loves us.

In examining this seemingly twisted line of heavenly logic, God has been called by many “crazy,” or “underhanded;” crazy because He seems to have sacrificed everything for nothing, and underhanded because no one would really give up all that for nothing; he must have some other motive, right?  But God is neither crazy nor underhanded.  I have experienced first hand the results of this “illogical” plan and the immense freedom that it brings when we accept it.  While I regret the choices that I have made and the pain that I have caused my Savior, I am more thankful than I could ever express to have been the subject of God’s immense love, a love that even the angels have not experienced, a love that makes everything alright.

So now, eleven years later, I am beginning to better understand just how amazing, just how confusing the plan of salvation really is to us in our limited understanding.  So as we ask ourselves the question: how amazing, how confusing; why would God the Son become a man, we realize that perhaps the only answer we will find for now is: love. 

Closing the Back Door

Our church is currently facing a crisis.  It is as if someone has yelled “fire,” and now our young people are jumping ship.  It has been estimated that eighty percent of young people age sixteen or older will leave the church, and only thirty percent of those will one day return.  What is happening, and why aren’t our efforts in youth ministry more effective?

I believe that the cause of this crisis is itself rooted in our youth ministries methods.  During the industrial revolution, children were working in the factories every day of the week except for Sundays.  Robert Raikes felt that these children deserved an education and so he began what became known as the Sunday school movement.  These “Sunday schools” taught the little factory workers to read, write, and do simple arithmetic and also gave them basic religious instruction.  It was not long before religious leaders began to see a fundamental danger in these institutions.  The Reverend Thomas Burns wrote, “Be that as it will, I repeat it again, my great objection to Sunday schools is that I am afraid they will in the end destroy all family religion…”  His fear was that the parents would leave the religious training of their children to the Sunday schools rather than training them and mentoring them at home.

Since then, the education field has been transformed by the work of men like John Dewey (an American psychologist and the “Father of Modern Education) who were influenced by evolutionary theory.  They theorized that just as man had "evolved over time," students evolved through their education, and that the “less-evolved” lower grades should not jeopardize the evolution of the more advanced students.  And so began the reign of the age-segregated classroom.  These methods of education began to creep into the church to the point that children are no longer worshiping with their parents in the worship service but are again separated from their parents and stuck with a group of youth their own age and maturity level, thus continuing a pattern that has perpetuated itself all week and the week before that.

Yet, when we look for youth groups and age-segregated ministries in Scripture, we find a very different pattern.  Instead, we find parents taking responsibility for the training and shepherding of their children; we see the children under the constant mentorship of their parents.  Deuteronomy 6:6,7 reads, “These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be upon your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.” (Italics added)  Furthermore, Scripture puts the burden of religious training even more specifically on the shoulders of fathers when it says, “Fathers do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” (Eph. 6:4)  We are even told in Spirit of Prophecy that it was only because the parents in Israel were neglecting their duty to God and to their children that God commanded Samuel to institute the schools of the prophets (Education 45,46).  Had parents discipled their children as God had commanded them, there would have been no need for such schools.  

Could it be that the ministries that were designed to keep our young people in the church are the very reason that they are leaving?  Could it be that because our church has all these fancy programs, parents no longer feel the need to take personal responsibility for the spiritual development for their children?  Why is it that rather than follow the plan that God himself gave for the spiritual training of our young people, we have taken up the methods of men who gave no consideration to the ways of God?  When Israel asked for a king it was because they wanted to be like all the nations around them instead of being God’s “peculiar people,” and as a result, they faced the same hardships that the nations around them were facing.  Let us as a church not make the same mistake.  Let us follow the pattern that He has given us and not follow after the world’s methods.