Today’s guest post is by my friend, Daniel Darling. He’s a pastor and a great writer. His new book, Real-Owning Your Christian Faith is coming out this summer. I encourage you to pick up a copy.
Ever since my father slipped out of Sunday evening choir practice to take my mother to the hospital for my birth, I’ve been part of a church. As a kid, we were at church whenever the doors were opened and a whole bunch of times when the doors were not. I’ve served on church staffs my whole life and am now a senior pastor.
I love the Church. I love churches. I love being around God’s people. But if you’ve been raised in the faith as I have, you know this life has it’s own unique set of challenges.
Here are the top three, as I see it:
- Unrealistic Expectations. For some reason, we have this expectation that if you grow up in the church, in just the right system, you will end up mastering sin and loving God always. Well, nobody says it quite that way, but that’s the underlying assumption. We tend to treat church kids like products rolled of an assembly line. We put the perfectly formed babies in at one end and expect that by age eighteen, they will roll of the line with just the right measure of spirituality, giftedness, and grace. We expect them to set the world on fire. I can’t tell you how often I was told growing up, “You are going to set the world on fire. With your heritage, there is no limit.” These people meant to encourage, but unwittingly they saddled me with unrealistic, otherworldly expectations. The truth is that even church kids, raised in good homes with good parents, who have been taught all the right doctrines—these kids still have a sin nature. We will have struggles and weaknesses. We have besetting sins no system can iron out. We are not Christian machines.
- Prone to Wander. When my parents came to faith, they were adults who had seen the impact of selfish living and worldly pursuits. They didn’t need to be told the dangers of life lived apart from God. They already experienced that. But me? I heard rumors of the bad stuff “out there” but how did I know it was really that bad? Maybe my parents were exaggerating a bit. Every human heart is “prone to wander” but for the child of the church, who has only known faith, I think this impulse is a bit stronger. Sometimes this is manifested in legalistic self-righteousness and other times its displayed in all out rejection and rebellion against the church. We often want to blame rebellion on bad parenting or bad systems or bad churches—but these are just environmental factors. The truth is that the natural human heart is set against God. I think 2ndGeneration Christians must acknowledge and guard against this tendency.
- Stagnant Faith. For a child of the church, faith can quickly, easily grow stagnant and routine. And it’s not simply the fault of the church paradigm in which we grew up. It’s because having known Jesus all of our lives, He becomes too familiar. This is why its important for us to wrestle with our faith as if it is new, to plum the depths of doctrine and mine the Scripture as if we’ve just discovered them. Every generation of believers must have their own awakening, their own radical experience with God that makes the faith of their parents their own.
What other challenges do you see?
