How many mainline churches no longer have children and youth in attendance?
Is that because the adults have nothing to offer? No spiritual maturity to share? No gospel to preach?
We tend to blame economics and demographics for their absence to be sure, yet there is no want of young people who have been abandoned. In comfortable middle class settings there is a want of older Christians who seem able to escape the “Grandparent Syndrome” that sees youth as entertainment to be sent home when they become a challenge.
In other communities there are too many grandparents raising grandchildren because their own children have abdicated responsibility.
In so many instances children and youth are left alone.
Paradise08.com is an attempt to reach out to this abandoned generation. It will only succeed if a then-awakened generation is then embraced and mentored by those who today remain all too inactive in the warfare for the future that is won or lost by our actions towards those who follow us.
The following is reprinted with permission from ParadiseThoughts.com
Plans For An Abandoned Generation
- By the will of the Father and the power of the Spirit, the first love of the church today is to be focused on the Son. That first love is not to be some weak sentiment but a consuming love that propels the believer to make Christ supreme in all things.
- For the past half century, the American church progressively has abandoned this consuming love. Increasingly, the Son has been approached as a mascot of the church rather than its Monarch.
- The church now speaks of Christ only when looking back on His days on earth or His future return. Sermons, lessons, or even hallway conversations about the present majesty and enthroned glory of the Son of God almost have completely disappeared.
- Adult believers have replaced passion for the supreme majesty of Christ with passion for their own personal happiness, peace of mind, and possessions. Adopting these lesser gods predictably has led to personal chaos, broken relationships, and lives often marked by quiet desperation.
- Because adults are focused on their lesser gods and the personal chaos that follows, they have had limited warmth, intimacy, instruction, and structure to offer their children.
- Some adults have been mean and even abusive; many have physically abandoned their children; and most have emotionally abandoned their children.
- Almost no parents of the church have taught their own children about the supreme majesty of the Son of God or introduced them to His reign over all things. In fact, they have abdicated to the church almost all of the spiritual instruction of their children.
- Teenagers and collegians today are the most abandoned and empty of any generation in the past half century. They respond to their deep pain by harming themselves, harming others, medicating themselves, or searching for warmth in destructive relationships.
- By His grace God seems to be orchestrating events at the present moment to call the American church back to a consuming love for His Son.
- At the launch of His public ministry on earth, Jesus drew around Himself twelve young believers through whom He would establish the church. Some researchers believe most may have been the ages of youth and collegians today.
- Christ seems to be using a similar strategy in our day—gathering around Him students whom He is awakening to all He truly is. From skinny skateboarders to collegiate athletes, from inner-city street kids to preppy suburbanites, He seems to be assembling a generation that will adore Him as supreme.
- Christ delights in doing the unexpected. He seems to be taking the most empty and abandoned generation in recent history with plans to use them to reintroduce the American church back to Him.
- If students awake to more of the supreme majesty of the King and kings, and if they begin to adore Him for who He is, then they will arise to join Him in His kingdom activity. The new vibrancy of their first love, the joy of their adoration, and the boldness of their kingdom activity may ripple through their homes and churches.
- After fifty years of prayer and waiting, the American church finally may wake up to Jesus Christ, may begin to adore Him privately and corporately, and may arise in a new burst of kingdom activity orchestrated by their King Regent. Believers consumed with the love of Christ may move out to introduce Him to all peoples near and far so that all the nations will glorify God.
- Even so, come Lord Jesus!
How will we respond to this abandoned generation that desperately needs Jesus Christ?
