Shema Initiative: Practical suggestions

Friends are current church staff driven model is not working. A recent survey of several hundred committed church going teenagers showed that up to 50% percent of them either put their faith on the shelf or walked away from it completely during their college years. Prior research has yielded similar results.


Consider this: the average youth might have the opportunity to attend 52 worship services and roughly 40 Sunday school classes and youth group nights. With 80% participation that comes out to roughly 2 hours a week for the year. Two hours…if a family spends 15-30 minutes a day praying and doing devotions they have just matched that amount of time, not taking into account the many hours of possible informal faith sharing parents can have with their children. The Vision of our Christian Education ministries is to nurture and grow Disciples of Christ through lifelong discover of the bible. I am telling you now, if it's just up to your church staff, we will fall short of this vision…


Chad are you saying it's entirely up to me to make sure my child becomes a follower of Christ? Are you saying I have to be the resident pastor, biblical scholar, and theologian?

I most certainly am not saying that. I am saying that the faith formation of children and youth is like a puzzle, and parents you are the pieces in the middle. Study after study shows that parents are consistently the most influential presence in young people's lives, not friends, not the media, and not the pastor and church staff.

I know that can be a scary thought parents, and that often times we don't feel qualified, but consider this…If you decided that your family needed to be healthier you wouldn't wait until you have trained for and completed a marathon before doing things as a family to be healthier right? In the same way you don't need to wait until you feel that you have become a spiritual giant (which will never happen…) to begin sharing the Christian faith with your child…


Consistently pray and have devotional time with your children. Don't beat yourself up if it doesn't work to do it every day but commit to do it when it does work…find a pattern.

Show your children how your faith is a part of your everyday life (even if it's in small ways). Let them catch you reading the bible, share with them about how you experienced God during the day and ask them to do the same.

Finally, this idea about children's and youth discipleship does not diminish the role that that church staff plays, it makes it more effective. We are additional pieces of the puzzle and we are faithfully, diligently and prayerfully trying to fill that role as God intends us to, now more than ever. So…Whenever it's feasibly possible BRING YOUR CHILD TO CHURCH ACTIVITIES!!! My lovely wife was forced to go to youth group when she was in high school (yes you can make you high school student do things…try threatening to take away their cell phone), and now she is grateful they did. I am not saying that your child can't be involved in activities that conflict with Wednesday night activities, I'm saying that the various church activities have to be a priority, and your children have to know it's a priority.

Shut up and Pray: On Christians and unchristian Political Propaganda

To be upfront, this is going to be a brief and angry post… This is directed to both conservative (Republican) and liberal (Democratic) friends and acquaintances of mine…sorry, both sides have been guilty of this.


I am so sick of this idea that our country is going to instantly fall apart if our governments leaders don't share the same political views as us. Our country survived both Clinton and Bush, it will survive Obama and it will survive the next president. I am sick of hearing how bad either Obama or the GOP stink..."You'll never find a savior on capitol hill."


In addition, I am seeing red over the constant unchristian social network site posts in the name of Christ. Challenge issued: The next time you get the urge to smear a government official on facebook, pray for them instead! I don't have a problem with you having a political position, feeling strongly about or sharing it with others. Just make a constructive argument in support of your beliefs instead of posting an insulting cartoon on your page.


Finally, in a instance of surprisingly big perspective, the Jews rightly recognized God's hand in directing the Persian Empire in the restoration of their homeland (see Psalms 126). In the books Ezra and Nehemiah we see Persian Emperors allowing and providing for the return of Jewish exiles as well as the rebuilding of the temple and city walls. If God can use a pagan and foreign emperor to do his will I am sure he can use a most-likely "professing" Christian politician for His purposes. So maybe, just maybe, we should use the time we were going to spend hunting down the next political cartoon to post to pray that God would do just that with the leaders of our country, whoever they are.

Ode to Cheap Grace

I have often struggled with the idea that grace is free, and yet grace is costly. Bonhoeffer reminds us in his Cost of discipleship that if God's free grace is seen as cheap grace, than the church has some major problems: "Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church…Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything, they say, and so everything can remain as it was before." Today we might add that cheap grace is Therapeutic Moralistic Deism. It is God as life guard or guidance counselor. Cheap grace is church as weekly pick me up, or a nice break from the kids (you already know how I feel about that one).

While I have no problem rejecting the results of cheap grace I still can't get my head around this idea that God's grace freely given is a costly grace. Once again I can do no better than to quote the words of Bonhoeffer: "Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift that must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock."

I think maybe God's grace can be both free and costly because, though it is freely given, we are unable to freely receive it. It costs us nothing for God to extend His grace, but it costs us everything to receive it. God's grace is not cheap because we cannot truly except it and be unchanged. If we allow ourselves to truly receive God's grace than we our fundamentally different. This is why Augustine could say "Love God, than do as you please." God's grace is waiting there for us to freely have, but accepting that free gift will cost us everything.

We need to count the cost, are we really willing to give up our old way of life, are we willing to give up this world. We are encouraged to count the cost, to consider the price. We are also encouraged to consider the prize and if we truly understand we are like the man who gives up all he has to gain the plot of land with the buried treasure. It's a no brainer all we have is nothing in comparison to the "buried treasure."

We don't have to work to earn God's grace, but we must work diligently to receive it. One thing I know for sure, it's worth the effort.