Christianity Today

Wising Up

As a 75-year-old Christian, I was very interested in "When Are We Going to Grow Up?" [June]. But the term "adults" didn't seem to encompass the wide, wide gulf between us senior Christians and the juvenilized services we are asked to "put up with."

Our needs and our abilities are virtually ignored by the church. The Word-based sermons and the hymns that spiritually fed us are gone or jazzed up almost beyond recognition, certainly beyond any worshipful satisfaction. I grieve for the middle-aged adults who are knee-deep in a world gone mad, with scarce biblical knowledge to sustain them.

My husband and I have left our noisy Baptist church for a small, struggling Anglican church consisting of mostly older folks. The deeply Word-based sermons and the reverence that surrounds us feed our souls and fill us with joy as we anticipate the finale of this earthly life and prepare to enter the glories of heaven. I wonder if our youth have ever heard a sermon on heaven. Or even—shhh—hell?

While we appreciate the heart behind the June cover story, we respectfully disagree with the portrayal of Young Life. Young Life founder Jim Rayburn never said, "It's a sin to bore a kid." His exact words were, "We believe it is sinful to bore kids with the gospel. Christ is the strongest, grandest, most attractive personality to ever grace the earth. But a careless messenger with the wrong method can reduce all this magnificence to the level of boredom …. It is a crime to bore anyone with the gospel."

It is curious that ministries like Young Life and Youth for Christ are targeted as major contributors to the juvenilization of the church. For more than 70 years, the efforts of both organizations have helped produce countless ...

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