Walking Away from the Faith, Part 1: The Perfection of God

How can the church prevent its young people from leaving the faith?

I don’t know, exactly. But perhaps the current exodus from the church is at least partially our fault.

Recently I encountered  a now-adult atheist who grew up in the church but became disillusioned with God in his teen years because God didn’t perform as advertised. God didn’t answer prayer in the way he’d come to expect.

I’m afraid young people have gotten the impression that God is “perfect” by some worldly definition of perfection, perhaps along these lines:

For the faithful and righteous believer, God answers prayers, provides health and prosperity, chases away sadness and despair — and above all, shows up when needed. Every single time.

There is no ambiguity, no mess, no suffering, no losing your mother to cancer. Everything about gender and sexuality is crystal clear.

Do your devotions, repent of your sin, show up to youth group. You’ll feel the presence of God walking with you every step of the way, performing miracles and clearing a path in front of you.

And don’t forget: God has the perfect “one” (spouse) in store for you, if you remain faithful.

* * *

But kids feel they’ve been duped — that you and I sold them a load of wishful thinking. Thus my contention is that the root of much apostasy in the church can be summed up in a single word: disappointment. 

We should have told our kids about the God of the OT who made his servant Abram wait twenty-five years to fulfill a promise, and who required the people of Israel to slaughter the Canaanite nations.

Our kids should know that the “perfect” God we worship formed the messianic lineage through incestual relations, a prostitute, and foreign (non-Jewish) women. That the symbols of Jesus are manger, donkey and cross, and that Jesus used the parables not only to reveal truth but to conceal it.

A perfect God, of course, would never do all these things. It seems to me we should reconstruct our definition of perfection, then — and thereby realign our expectations — from the inside out, by examining the peculiar God of Scripture and only then declaring: now that’s perfection.

The untamed, radical God of both Testaments and the humble, revolutionary “anti-hero” Jesus Christ of the NT will connect intellectually and viscerally to young people. Dare try it out.

 

 

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