Pastor's Puddle

The work of Smith and Cressy-Dean is important, and I recommend them.  The troubling piece of this for me as a pastor is that they both conclude the church and parents are dropping the ball.  I fear we have abandoned our teaching office to the individualistic relativism of the day.  New Perspectives speaker Linda Mercadante made the case well here at College Mennonite last month, using some of Smith's research.  Her comment that, ethically, our society is "living off the fumes of organized religion" has stuck with me.  In other words, people still by and large, make ethical decisions consistent with religious teaching.  We are not yet relativists, in other words, even if we think we are.  We still believe in right and wrong, and our beliefs, whether we know it or not, are rooted in the religious perspectives that shaped us.  But if Smith and Cressy-Dean are right, the further we get from the religious systems that gave birth to our values, the further we will get from our values.  That greed is wrong, for example, is not self evident.  The same might be said for many other things.  Unless particular values are rooted in a system of values, they will no longer have a home.

What does this call forth from those of us responsible for nurturing subsequent generations (that's all of us!)?  One is clear teaching about right and wrong.  But perhaps more important, is the whys of right and wrong.  Are we able to articulate a system of beliefs that is coherent, and will hold our children in good stead as they face the extraordinary forces in our culture opposed to a Mennonite Christian way of life?

This is where our biblicism has not always been helpful to us (again, Christian Smith).  Certainly the Bible is important, but I wonder if we have lost the ability to put it together in a way that makes sense to us, let alone to our children.  Here is where we have much work to do.  But it is work well worth doing.