College prep requires more than academics

What would cause a young adult who was raised in the church and professed Christ as Savior walk away from his faith? Increasingly, polling indicates young adults, at the least, are compartmentalizing life to such a degree that faith and day-to-day life do not intersect.

Collegiate ministers and others studied in the realities of spiritual life at home and on the university campus lay the responsibility squarely at the feet of the parents and, by extension, the church.

“I get asked this question all the time,” responded Vicki Courtney of Austin, a best-selling author and speaker whose ministry reaches preteen and teenage girls and their mothers across the country. What she has come to find in her conversations with moms is a profound lack of scriptural instruction in the home and efforts to put God’s directives into terms a teenager can assimilate.

Lance Crowell, SBTC church ministries associate, said that lack of spiritual guidance in the home is evident. “Students are not prepared for the next step,” he said.

Parents of teenagers and young adults, he added, have been parenting their children in spiritual matters much in the same way as their parents and their parents before them. He said for the past few generations’ parents often abdicated their role as spiritual leaders in their homes and left that task to “the experts”?the Sunday School teachers and youth pastors.

A generation or two ago, he said, that still produced teens and young adults who were grounded in biblical morality and good citizenship but not necessarily regenerate faith. Sixty years ago and earlier, American society was largely homogeneous?most people went to church, professed a belief in God, and held to a common moral code within society.

Essentially, Crowell said, what was taught in the church was upheld in society. If the neighbors, teachers and other authority figures could be counted on to keep little Johnny in line, there was no sense of urgency in the home to undergird the teachings of the church and Bible; it was Sunday School’s task to do the latter.

But Crowell and his peers in youth and collegiate ministry say such attitudes have created a profound spiritual lethargy and, in some instances, antipathy toward religion and, specifically, Christianity in young adults. As the role of spiritual training has remained practically unchanged in American homes, American society has been convulsing with fundamental social and spiritual shifts that have left a generation of young people with no firm ground on which to stand.

A college freshman may (or may not) be able to recite the story of Jonah. But can he explain to a secular humanist or a relativist why the story matters?

WHERE RUBBER MEETS ROAD

University of Texas at Austin professor J. Budziszewski said most cannot. He said it is all well and good that young children be taught the stories of the Bible, but if they are never taught the deeper spiritual significance of those stories, then they enter adulthood and an ever-increasingly skeptical world armed with little more than the ability to spin a good yarn.

Budziszewski, professor of philosophy and government, has written extensively on the tradition of natural law (“Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law”) and books like “How to Stay Christian in College,” a primer Courtney and her husband have studied with two of their children before they left home for college. Their lone high school student, Hayden, will soon begin the study, Courtney said.

Budziszewski said the atmosphere on university campuses is profoundly anti-Christian but with the exception of a few outspoken professors, not confrontational.

“It is usually much, much more subtle.”

He said what new students will find on the college campus is practical atheism as opposed to theoretical atheism. The reasoning goes like this: Because the existence of God cannot be theoretically proved or disproved, God is irrelevant and has nothing to do with the day-to-day lives of people. Students and professors steeped in such thought are then free to compartmentalize their lives, developing a moral code that does not hold them accountable to anything or anyone beyond themselves.

Christians not grounded in their faith, connected with a church, and meeting regularly with fellow believers on campus can fall into the same trap.