Tough Talk (part 1)

In the last two weeks we have been addressing youth relationships in Sunday school. It is proving to be an eye opening process. We are not playing into the who should you date and what you should do on a date angle. Instead we are ditching the cultural dating of America for the historical and biblical model of courtship. This is likely going to be rejected, but they will be aware of the right way and why they ought to do it. The truth is that both the idea of “dating” and the idea of “adolescence” stem from evolutionary foundations and do not occur in any culture aside from the past 200 or so years. These two ideas have generated so much destruction in our culture in that time period and can be attributed with the some of the reason behind the horrid stats of divorce, abuse, teen pregnancy, and more in this country.

Simply put, adolescence was supposed to be the time in between childhood and adulthood where a child was allowed to partake in adult activities on a limited basis to learn adult things. But if a child does not need to accept the responsibility in order to gain access to adult things why mature? You can see as well as I that in our society the age range of adolescence has expanded as generations have been considered adult by their ages and not their maturity; they are able to act, but to not act as adults should.

This leads into the dating scene in America which is truly godless and selfish. In today’s dating world we teach that one should test the waters, gaining experience, and learn by trial and error. This has created a love’em and leave’em mentality and plenty of broken families or broken hearts.

The biblical models for these things are different and it pains me that the church has forgotten. The right way is not to think a child is ready before they are. You would not give your child a stick of dynamite and tell them to learn by doing, but you give your child the ability to enter into relationships without understanding and then encourage them to light the fuse? Where is the love in that methodology?

This brings me to a long lost topic below...