Shepherds! Protect the Lambs

One of the most frustrating things I have found in over two decades of working with youth in both a church and Christian school context has been the response of Christian pastors to Christian education. It ranges from apathy to antipathy. Few have the courage to call their congregations to obedience to Christ in this area. This despite the very real danger state education presents to the little lambs in their flock.

My experience has been that many young adults from Christian homes are either incapacitated and rendered impotent by the secular worldview they imbibe during their 17-year secular discipleship programme, or they leave the faith. And a lot of them do leave the faith.

Just this week, I was chatting with a friend who spoke of two young people he knew, both attending secular schools. One no longer attends youth group or church and has decided he is not a Christian any longer. The other, a young woman, has been so indoctrinated by feminism and humanism that she looks up to feminist icons who are responsible for the liberalisation of abortion.

Can pastors continue to look the other way? A pastor is a shepherd. When a lion or a bear came to attack and kill David’s sheep, he would seize them by the hair and kill them ( I Samuel 17:35). That takes manly courage and the ability to face risk and danger. This is the need of our hour. We need pastors who are willing to be courageous men. They must stand between the lambs and the wild animals out to devour them.

Jesus himself warned of the danger posed to little ones. After calling a child to himself and showing his disciples that they must become like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven, he gave one of his starkest warnings. He said, with this little child and perhaps others next to him, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.”

We know, without a shadow of a doubt that the 17-year anti-Christian state discipleship programme is in a large part responsible for many little lambs being torn to pieces. Any Christian leader worth their salt should be aware of this. Teaching a child that God is irrelevant to the world he has made by never mentioning him in 17 years of education is likely to cause him to stumble. Teaching a child that Christ is Lord of his heart, but that he isn’t too interested in the rest of life is causing our children to stumble. Flawed teaching on gender and sexuality is causing our children to sin.

So about that millstone…Does it belong to our secular officials who desire to control the future by discipling our children into their faith? Does it belong to the teachers who abuse their positions to poison the minds of children with depravity? Does it belong to parents who fail to follow God’s law to impress God’s laws on their children day and night (Deuteronomy 6:6-9), or does it belong to the shepherds who see the children in their flock falling away from the faith but say nothing?

What will it take for Christian leaders to wake up, grab their weapons and start protecting the flock? When will we hear a sermon about the importance of training our children in the Christian faith and protecting them from the evil one? When will we hear our pastors calling all families to remove their children from the perils of secular education?

Will the recent news of the proposed Conversion Therapy ban wake our pastors up from their slumber? Will pulpits throughout the land warn parents that they are in danger of losing their children? Kris Faafoi on Newstalk ZB was asked whether it was ‘cool with him’ for parents to tell their children they can’t go on hormone blockers. He said, “No it’s not.” Of this law, Family First writes, “Shockingly, parents would be criminalised and potentially liable up to five years in jail simply for affirming that their sons are boys and their daughters are girls. These bans will lock children into transgenderism.” As a teacher with knowledge of the school system in New Zealand, I can assure my readers that this degeneracy is already being promoted by many schools and teachers. Too many naive parents think secular schools are only there to teach Maths and English. Unfortunately, that is about the only thing they are not getting. These must make way for the all-important secular indoctrination programme you see. A law like this is only going to make things worse. Godless teachers will turn children against parents and make them aware of their ‘rights’. The only protection will be removing our children from these godless pagans. Will pastors protect their sheep by saying this? That remains to be seen. If not, God help us.

Thinking Longterm

Joy Pullman executive editor of The Federalist, has written an excellent piece highlighting the dangers of evangelical over-emphasis on evangelism. Before you burn her at the stake for a heretic, hold on. The context for the article I am quoting from is the Southern Baptist Convention where an ageing and declining membership are considered to be an issue.

As I watched my evangelical peers apostatize as they left childhood, it made me reconsider our churches’ frenetic verbal focus on evangelism. What trust — and financing — was it realistic to place in “evangelization” efforts run by people who are clearly unable to retain current members? Why doesn’t evangelization start at home?

In fact, I think it [evangelisation] does start at home. Before running out and attempting to “gain more souls for Christ” (itself theologically suspect, as scripture — at least as Protestants understand it — clearly teaches it is Christ who does all the work to save souls), what about attentiveness to the “feed my sheep” charge Christ gave the Apostle Peter in another mic-drop gospel ending, in John 21?

Shepherds — the antecedent of our word “pastor” — don’t go around rustling sheep. Shepherds tend an existing flock that grows almost exclusively organically, from within the herd. Shepherds cultivate those they are given; they don’t go around trying to convert goats or leaving their flocks to search for others. From where this Christian sits, our Western churches and most of their leaders have done a perfectly horrific job of tending to the lambs Christ has given into their care.

Too many men commissioned as shepherds are off wandering the mountains, leaving their sheep unfed and unprotected while wolves make off with the babies. The answer is not to focus more on wandering around in alleged search of random sheep, nor to steal sheep from other people’s flocks. It is to sacrifice anything necessary to beat off the wolves and protect the lambs.

She makes some excellent points. On the whole, Christianity in the West has been bleeding members. The tap pouring new members into the faith might be going full bore, but the hole in the bottom of our bucket is such that we are losing water at a faster rate. What’s going on? Often church growth is by transfers from other churches. We have Christians moving around from church to church finding the right fit. Some churches become the place where ‘the cool kids’ go. Then local churches can be stripped of their members as people head to the new hip church. There are of course churches that do have relative success in evangelism, and this can be measured in the short term, but what we don’t think about too much is what’s happening in the long term, and the long term trajectory is not looking good.

The evangelical church, as its name suggests, has a real strength in evangelism Our pastors and church leaders are extremely concerned with encouraging members to ensure they are taking opportunities for personal evangelism and as we have mentioned in earlier posts, church sermons are often targetted at ‘level 1’ or entry-level to the Christian faith. Our services are designed to be “seeker-sensitive”. But there are potential disadvantages to this strategy. More mature members can be seen as means to the end of gaining more contacts and therfore converts. These sheep can be left to figure out how to feed themselves.

But there is an even darker side to this. Pullman notes another interesting implication of this approach which she illustrates with Mrs Jellyby from Dickens’ Bleak House. Mrs Jellyby was an evangelical Christian whose every thought and effort was spent in ensuring Africans are evangelised and given opportunities to access wealth from trade while her own family lives in squalor and neglect. She writes of evangelical organisations that “spend so much time, money, and effort on what they claim is evangelization while the majority of children who attend their churches grow up and leave the faith.” She cites Mary Eberstadt’s research on the impact of family disintegration and its connection to church decline.

If that is the case, then Christians need to be doing things like countering the cultural insistence that people wait until they are financially comfortable before starting a family and stay artificially infertile indefinitely to help that happen; making theologically robust Christian K-12 schools the top priority of evangelization efforts; and making it more institutionally possible for young people to get started in life without college loans.

It’s not clear how much American Christianity’s decline stems from unthinkingly accepting our culture’s antagonism to sexual fertility and our refusal to prioritize evangelism in the home, but it’s clear there’s a relationship between these that bears deep introspection.

If we gain 10 converts a year for 20 years, but lose 70% of our children to the faith once they hit adulthood, we might need to rethink our strategy. Imagine if we kept 70% of our children growing up in Christian families, and they kept 70% of their children. Then imagine if we took God’s command to be fruitful and multiply more seriously and still had that rate of success.

Pastors are geared to look at the short term. A pastor, with God’s blessing, may be in a church for 20 years. It’s easy for him to think success looks like unbelievers coming into the church or the church growing in numbers whether by transfers or conversions. He knows he has a short time to ‘prove’ himself. Unfortunately, short term thinking can always get more people in, but long term effects are by their very nature…long term, and therefore harder to judge immediately. Twenty years is the length of time it takes for an infant to be trained for adulthood. It’s a long time to wait to see if families and churches have been successful. We want KPIs for each year – we don’t want to wait for the tree to be fully grown and fruiting. That takes time. But while the short term indicators might look good, if we take the twenty or forty-year view, when the majority of our children have left the faith, things look bleaker.

So what does this mean for churches and our leaders? Churches need to focus on the health of families and training Dads and Mums to raise a godly family. We should stop seeing these families as simply means to the end of reaching new people. These are people in our flocks. They need feeding and shepherding. To that end we need our church leaders to think far more strategically about how they will aid parents in the discipling of children from Christian families. Churches need to start Christian schools that focus on developing Christian worldview and culture or support people who are doing that. Our leaders may retort, “That’s not the business of the church!”. We need to show them that it is, and the reason we are failing on so many levels is precisely because we have not made the education of the next generation our business. How has the evangelical strategy of saving individual souls been working for the church? Not so well. Church leaders need to signal that Christianity is not just a personal faith which we worry about on Sundays, but it is a faith that takes all of life and brings it under Christ’s authority. It’s a faith that develops Christian culture. Getting people to level one is not enough.