You should have taught us the things of God

Fifteen years ago when we moved to Scotland we encountered a community full of non- evangelised unreached youth. Contrastingly, as we got to know our community more we saw an older generation of ‘believers’ who were well dressed and generally legalistic.  This group locked the church door on a Sunday evening so the youth would not come in and disrupt service.  We had the privilege of giving our faith to these unwanted raggamuffins.  We saw many young people come to faith and often they would say: “my granny goes to church.”  However, their grannies never share their faith with them or their parents.  So we had two lost generations roaming around spiritually lost.

It never occurred to us that parent’s or grandparents wouldn’t share their faith with their own family.  How is it even possible?  Recently I found some statistics from YoutScape.

“Christian parents were only slightly keener than non-religious parents to pass on their beliefs (36% vs. 31%), unlike parents of other faiths (eg. Muslims of which 86% wanted to pass on their faith) Christian parents were worried about imposing their beliefs”  https://www.youthscape.co.uk/research/publications

Neutral parenting results in us not loving our kids as God has asked us to.

“You should have taught us the things of God, and you did not; you should have restrained us from sin and corrected us, and you did not; you were the means of our original corruption and guiltiness, and yet you never showed any competent care that we might be delivered from it…woe unto us that we had such careless parents. ”     New England Puritan

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