The challenge of discipling our young people against the backdrop of an aggressively secular culture
‘You send your kids to youth group. What? An hour a week if we’re lucky? Meanwhile twenty-five percent of all kids in this country under the age of twenty-one are spending eight hours on social media a day. And fifty-seven percent are spending more than four hours or more a day. They’re being catechized…There is a catechism out there. There’s the identity narrative. And that is “You’ve got to be true to yourself”. There’s the freedom narrative, which is “Anyone should be free to live the way he or she wants to as long as the don’t hurt anyone else. There’s the happiness narrative and that goes like this: “In the end you’ve gotta do what makes you happy. You’ve just gotta do what makes you happy”. Then there’s the morality narrative. And the morality narrative is “Hey, no-one has the right to define what is right or wrong for you. You have to define what is right and wrong for yourself.”
That eight hours on social media – that’s a catechism.’ Tim Keller [1]
A few years ago, I was on a long car journey. I decided to stop on the way for coffee, planning to listen to a podcast before I began the journey again. I can’t remember the title of the podcast and can’t find it anywhere on the net. Fortunately, I made notes! It featured Tim Keller giving his opinion on what were the most crucial issues for his denomination as it looked forward.
Keller listed four areas of concern. The first was to do with character and spirituality. Helping church members regain confidence in evangelism was a second. A third was to do with handling controversy in a digital age.
The final one was the one that grabbed my attention most. Keller was concerned that culture, specifically Western culture, was catechizing our children and young people and the church’s best efforts were woefully inadequate.
Some, perhaps the majority, of readers of this post will not be from a church tradition in which the terms catechism or catechising were common currency. They tend to be associated with the more historic denominations and communions of the Christian Church.
Catechising is instructing young people or new converts in the basics of the Christian faith. In that respect a catechism is a bit like a discipleship course.
Keller’s argument goes something like this:
At the time of the reformation, the various reformed parties – Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, etc., produced catechisms. In those catechisms, various aspects of Christian truth received precious little coverage, for example, the doctrine of God and the person of Christ.
However, justification by faith and communion received huge coverage. Keller asks the question why that was, and provides an answer: the objective of the catechisms was to prevent those catechised from becoming Catholics.
Keller goes on to argue that the contemporary church, in as much as it still catechises young people, is doing it against the backdrop of the concerns of the reformation rather than against the backdrop of the challenges of contemporary culture.
Catechisms that really work are counter-catechisms, in other words they don’t just present Christian belief, they deconstruct the other narratives in the culture. Keller maintains that this is what Jesus was doing in the sermon on the mount. “You have heard it said…but I say unto you”, is Jesus’s way of not only presenting truth but undoing the narratives of the authorities of the day.
Narratives of identity, freedom, happiness and morality are out there in the culture. That’s what we need to interact with if we are going to shape people in the ways of Christ.
Those narratives are promoted by the culture incessantly. To underline his point, Keller cites statistics about the length of time people under the age of twenty-one spend on social media, compared to the time we have with them in church. The church is, in his view, failing in its task.
Keller has been making this point for a few years now. It is hard to say if the message has landed on good soil. In a recent discussion with Carey Nieuwhof, he appears to feel that his ideas have fallen on stony ground.[2]
Keller, of course is speaking in an American context and in the context of a presbyterian tradition and ecclesiology.
There are issues of church tradition and culture and geographical context that should be factored into any assessment of Keller’s concerns. It would, however, be too easy to diminish the challenge that we all face, irrespective of denomination or geography.
The U.K. is a different country to the U.S.. That much is obvious. It’s some of those differences that should concern us.
For example, we are much more secular than the U.S.. U.K. schools, on the whole, aggressively promote a secular agenda at both primary and secondary levels of education. I can’t make a comparison with America as I am not familiar enough with the school system there.
Engagement online is not always easily measured. One study in the U.K. claimed that children between 5-16 had an average of 6.3 hours screen time per day.[3] So there is a broad similarity with Keller’s stats on social media engagement.
Whether the church in the U.K. is any more effective in the spiritual formation of children and young people than the church in the U.S., is hard to say. The hour per week in the youth group that Keller cited, is probably similar in a U.K. context.
The challenge is both to catechise (substitute “disciple” or “mentor” or “spiritually form”, if you like) and counter catechize children and young people who in their waking hours are almost continually exposed to the influence of an aggressive but subtle secularizing culture.
I say subtle because a secular humanistic worldview is so embedded in just about everything in the public square – media, arts, politics, entertainment – that sometimes we don’t even recognize its presence.
What can we do?
Recognising the challenge we face would be a great start. Sometimes it feels as though we either don’t recognize the problem or we do but we want to pretend it’s not as big a problem as it really is.
A review of what we are doing and trying to achieve in our discipleship teaching would be another positive move.
No doubt there is much more that could be said. But this is a massive challenge and it would be too easy to dispense easy answers to a complex challenge.
Keller has been a compelling – and positive – voice for the gospel for the last couple of decades. It would be remiss of the church to turn a deaf ear to his concerns for the upcoming generations. And it would be reckless to allow the culture to do a better job at discipling our children and young people than the church.
[1] Deconstructing Our Culture’s Catechism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3SOlYnQh_k&ab_channel=RedeemerCitytoCity
[2] Tim Keller on How Culture is Changing and the Future of the Church: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ekh6e5SIg&ab_channel=CareyNieuwhof
[3] Screen Time: NHS Greater Glasgow and Strathclyde: https://www.nhsggc.org.uk/about-us/professional-support-sites/screen-time/#
James Glass 