Listening to Our Children, that They Might Believe

The people next door got a dog last year and he hasn’t quit barking since. Their cute, yipping puppy has matured into a rangy, howling hound; his voice has deepened and it takes a heavier chain now to hold him, but otherwise the racket remains the same.

It is not they they haven’t tried to train the dog. In fact, his training has been most effective. After he barks for an hour or so, the girl comes out of the house ordering, “Sit! Stay! Come!” and lectures him on why he shouldn’t make so much noise. Then she throws a ball for the ecstatic animal to chase and goes back inside.

The dog is no dummy. He has learned what he’s been taught; if he barks long enough, someone will eventually come out and play ball with him.

One recent Sunday, I sympathized with my dog neighbor when I read still another anticult advertisement—and they are numerous. If you use the material offered (the ads promise), you will save your students from the false teachings of pseudo-Christian groups; these books or pamphlets will reveal the whole grim story. Usually the ads include an urgent testimonial: we’ve got to teach our kids what these cults believe.

The admonition is correct, of course; Christians should help people know truth. The assumption is what scares me: that being told what cults believe is sufficient to insure against believing them. In other words, the young person who is taught enough about a false cult will reject it.

On that same recent morning, I tangled with a junior high Sunday school class raised in the “tell them what’s right” teaching method. We are new to each other, and as we study the Bible I have been asking my students for their interpretations. The kids are rebelling. All their previous Sunday school teachers just gave them the facts, they complain. It is my job to teach them what the Bible says; how can they know what’s true unless somebody tells them? And I shake to think of my Sunday school kids encountering the cults in exactly that frame of mind: how can they know what’s true unless somebody tells them? The cults will be glad to oblige.

You know the universal shocked response when a church-raised youth joins an unbiblical group: he must have been kidnaped! He was taught the truth; he said he believed it. He would never of his own free will abandon his church for a cult.

But, in fact, he did of his own free will abandon his church for a cult. And it is likely his church prepared him well to do it—by suppressing his doubts, downplaying his questions, and encouraging blind belief.

During years of street witnessing, my husband, Dale, and I constantly talked with members of the “cults.” (I use the word to mean “unbiblical religious groups.”) I remember three marks of all those people. First (except for Scientologists and Krishna Consciousness), they lacked the glazed-eyed, hypnotized look expected of cult devotees. Second, they could explain why they decided to join—almost always because of the group’s overwhelming welcome and total commitment. And third, the cult members always knew what their cult believed. While they may not have known everything going on in the leadership (just as you may not know everything going on in the headquarters of your own denomination), they obviously knew what the cult preached: they were on the street preaching it.

The point is this: factual cult information is not enough to warn anybody away from false teaching. When the informed young person meets the cult, he still has to decide between his church’s prior warnings and the cult’s strong, persuasive evidence. They will insist “The Bible says …” They will blanket him with love. They will try to prevent his independent thoughts. They will pressure him to choose immediately. If he has no biblical basis for deciding then (on his own) what is true and false, he will decide for or against the group on some other basis—how much they love and accept him, for instance, or how committed they appear to be. He will not suddenly leap; he will make his choice—using the same standard he uses for his other choices.

The ads are right; of course we have to teach our kids what the cults believe. Beginning there, however, is beginning late—halfway through the process. Before we teach our kids what the cults believe, we have to teach ourselves what our kids believe. By that I do not mean “the answers that they know.” I mean what they believe: the everyday, assumed truths on which they function week after week.

Typical christian education is a rewarder of those who know the right facts. And the right facts are easily learned. When Sunday school teachers pose questions to check students’ “grasp of the material,” correct answers are praised. What is taught by this process, however, may be something quite different from curriculum aims. Young people catch on (and why not?) that what counts is to offer accepted answers: if you bark correctly and often enough, somebody will play ball.

But is there real communication between leader and learner? Do they even know whether they misunderstand each other?

When parents, pastors, and teachers intensely desire that young people know truth (and so turn out right), their goal can be elevated until the feelings and values of the real young person are irrelevant. His proper verbal responses soothe away doubts even when he bears little evidence of Christian commitment. Correct words are comforting. His behavior shows flashes of rebellion and his thoughts are a mystery, but he says the right things. We’re okay; he believes after all.

Yes, he believes. But what?

There is a third alternative besides glossing over the teen’s lack of interest or putting him with the unfaithful: find out what he thinks. Stir up a lively curiosity about the assumptions he does live on. He may not buy church doctrines, but he does buy something. Until you know what that something is you cannot really talk to him.

Churches often do not give a serious ear to teens’ thoughts. When Dale and I tell people we teach a junior high Sunday school class, their reaction is consistent—and unnerving. They laugh. Then they comment: “You’ve got a handful,” or “Good luck,” or “What a wild bunch.”

Junior high students are not a bunch; neither are high school people. Nobody is a bunch. Individuals have beliefs, and what they believe determines what they do. Assumptions have no minimum age.

Here is a firsthand example: I remember, during junior high, singing a hymn of repentance in church and wondering, “Why don’t we ever sing hymns about man’s goodness?” I had been through membership class. I had passed the tests and delivered the right answers. I also believed that man is half-good and half-bad, and I was vaguely curious why my church failed to acknowledge the good side once in a while.

If, as a young leader or teacher, you neglect to discover what students already believe, you are tossing potent Bible truths into an unexamined overhead hopper—and you may cause explosions: you do not know what is already in there. What cherished values are you asking them to give up? What will it cost them to believe what you say?

Young people who cannot air contrary assumptions may never see Scripture stand up to opposition. When will they find out how well the Bible handles questions? Is biblical truth so unconvincing that we must guard it from encountering any other view—even in the safe environment of a church classroom? The teacher who ignores young people’s real presuppositions robs them (and himself) of knocking ideas together and talking things through to find out what is most believable.

But, someone might object, if you let them say just anything in Sunday school, they might come to the wrong conclusions. Yes, that’s possible. But at least in Sunday school you have a fighting chance for your view of Scripture.

Besides, unless you are hypnotizing your kids (as the cults are accused of doing), they are already reaching their own conclusions anyway, no matter how much Bible they know. They decide whether to live by their friends’ opinions; they make up their minds whether and when to cheat in school; they determine which of their parents’ rules they will obey; they choose their own sexual behavior. If they have no opportunity to solve such matters biblically, then they solve them by other standards in which they are already well grounded.

When adults downplay the teen-ager’s doubts, he learns that church is not where you speak the truth, but where you say what is expected. Meanwhile, he continues to develop his own opinions: Who is God? Who is Jesus Christ? Does my life have meaning? He inhabits his own suprachurch existence—the real world for which church is a weekly interruption to be played along with. And if he has been raised carefully in church, he is very good at looking like he really believes it all.

With his presuppositions so well buried, how does the young person respond to a lesson on the dangers of false cults? He responds the same way he does to everything else in church: with external agreement. He adds the fact to his warehouse—not the fact that the cult is wrong, but the fact that his church believes the cult is wrong. He and his church differ in other areas and coexist comfortably; what is different about cults?

The split between church and life will grow until there is total separation, at least emotionally and mentally, and probably physically. A country/pop singer interviewed on radio had grown up singing in choirs, but he abandoned his church’s theology, he said, when he found out about the size of the universe and the speed of light. I know his denomination, and nothing in their theology denies those or any other natural phenomena. No matter; he grew up thinking they taught a tiny universe. When he discovered astronomy, it sounded more trustworthy than Sunday school. One or the other world view had to give, and naturally his own beliefs won.

But what about the young person who is committed to Christ and believes what he has been taught from the Bible? Won’t knowing the errors of the cults prevent him from joining one of them? It may. But unless he has been trained to discern truth for himself, his knowledge of existing cults won’t help when he meets a new one he has never been told about. In fact, the person raised to have faith and believe what he is told is particularly vulnerable to the pseudo-Christian cults. (Dale and I watched one make gains on a Christian college campus.) The Jesus-preaching cults have the upper hand: they use the right words and they appear to be doing what many churches only discuss.

Remember, the young person still has to make a choice when he meets the cult head-on. Right biblical language and right actions will be there (the final tests as he has been taught them). He will see in the group tangible expressions of what he has heard for years is supposed to be true: total commitment, enthusiasm, togetherness, forsaking the world, witness, love. The cult will play on familiar religious feelings of warm fellowship, the longing to be in God’s will, repentance of worldliness, guilt at the thought of leaving. He will remember his church’s warnings, but the cult will succeed in convincing him his church was mistaken.

The church youth’s handicap at this point is that no one equipped him to examine conflicting religious views and make real decisions. He never saw Christianity as a rational, thinking faith, never learned to love God with his mind. After all, how can he know what is true unless somebody tells him? The cult will instruct him to believe and not question; and if his church has first taught him to believe and not question, the cult’s demand will present no dilemma at all.

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