Will our children have faith?

Back after the crazy season.

If you're my age, you might remember that book from the early 80s by Christian education guru John Westerhoff III, Will Our Children Have Faith? I don't remember the book being all that useful, but the question has stuck with me. I guess what's brought it on is having just returned from a week long visit with my 14 month old grandson. His daddy is in seminary, studying for the ministry -- and I really wonder about the future of the church that they will be a part of.


A few other bits of grist for this mill. A while back, I read a short article by Nancy Ammerman in the Canadian version of Touchstone magazine, in which she wondered if Christians (especially the Protestant variety) have not pretty much given up on passing on their story to their children. The Sunday morning worship service with concurrent Sunday School is the norm and that's pretty much all the contact kids have with the church. Jews, Muslims, and other faith communities expect that children will be instructed in their religion outside the main gathering time of the week.

Robert Louis Wilken wrote in the last issue of First Things a perceptive comparison of Christianity and Islam. Islam has always understood itself to be a public religion in the sense that Islamic practice is lived out visibly. In the ideal of the Islamic state, religious practice becomes the cultural and legal norm. Christianity has evolved in a much different way, but, according to Wilken, it now finds itself at a disadvantage in terms of the future because in Europe and North America (excluding parts of the US) it has pretty much disappeared from the public square. Wilken has a particular Roman Catholic slant on things, but he's a wise guy, very learned, and I think he's got a point.

I alternate between days of optimism and days of discouragement and today I'm sliding towards the discouragement end of the scale. Faith is not just assent to a list of beliefs, but the deep imbibing of a narrative, a story, which becomes one's own story only after long exposure. The vast majority of Canadian children have been completely cut off from the Christian story to the point where even the traditional icons of Christmas have little or no meaning to them. And in our churches, we have capitulated to such an extent to aggressively proselytizing Sunday sports and other voracious activities, and have dumbed down our Christian education to accomodate teachers and parents who will make only the briefest commitment of time and effort, and we have abandoned age-old practices like family devotions -- so I really wonder what's going to become of the story in which faith has always taken root and grown.

Anybody out there want to try to cheer me up -- or just commiserate?