This post is from a friend of this blog, and he wants to have an open discussion about a topic of interest to many \u2014 here goes:<\/p>\n
I\u2019m a middle-aged dad, married to my wife of many years, with two teen-aged kids, one a Freshman and the other a Senior in High School.\u00a0 We\u2019re currently experiencing a dilemma about church attendance.\u00a0 My kids have grown up in a typical community evangelical church, with high energy praise music and a high octane youth group.\u00a0 I used to appreciate some of this stuff (in fact I used to play guitar in the praise band!), but I really don\u2019t anymore.\u00a0 My tastes and my theology have moved towards a more liturgical, Eucharist-centered view of the Sunday worship service.\u00a0 My understanding of the mission of the Church, the nature of baptism, liturgy,\u00a0and corporate prayer, and so-on,\u00a0doesn\u2019t fit with the \u201cseeker sensitive,\u201d individualistic model of the community evangelical church.\u00a0 My study of theology and church history have moved me way behond the\u00a0\u2014 IMHO \u2014\u00a0shallow (at best) or neo-fundamentalist (at worst)\u00a0thinking in many such seeker churches.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I suppose a theologically moderate Anglican congregation might be more my thing these days, or maybe a mainline congregation with some post-liberal \/ evangelical emphasis, or maybe something\u00a0heavily influenced by the new monasticism, or maybe even\u00a0Catholicism or Orthodoxy.\u00a0 All this comes through lots of serious study, prayer and reflection.\u00a0 I simply cannot deal with the evangelical seeker-style church anymore \u2014 I\u2019m mentally and emotionally\u00a0and spiritually done with it.<\/p>\n
As a father and husband, I feel I have some obligation to \u201clead,\u201d whatever that might mean in today\u2019s culture. \u00a0 This is a big deal for me as a third-generation Christian famly man:\u00a0 nothing is more important to me than passing along a joyful, stable faith to my kids.\u00a0\u00a0Yet simply for the sake of my own spiritual health \u2014 which impacts my role as a father and husband \u2014 a change for me is clearly necessary.\u00a0 In fact, I\u00a0think my kids are getting robbed of a richer heritage in the faith by the go-go youth group culture, though I\u2019m glad they want to go to church at all.<\/p>\n
But my kids like the evangelical community church we attend.\u00a0 They\u00a0find other churches I\u2019ve taken them to visit lame and boring.\u00a0 My child who is a high school Senior has a drivers\u2019 license and has said she would go with my son to the community evangelical church if\u00a0I want to go somehwere different.\u00a0 They are both dead-set against change, and they\u2019re not really equipped to understand all the changes I\u2019ve undergone.\u00a0In truth, my kids rarely go to the church service itself; Sunday School is contemporaneous with the worship service, so effectively the youth Sunday School is their \u201cchurch.\u201d\u00a0 Yet they like their youth pastors and have some friends there.\u00a0 My wife suggests I should be willing to suffer for my kids\u2019 sake.\u00a0 She also likes the seeker-type church, and she has little interest in liturgy or theology.\u00a0 But the truth is that, for me, this isn\u2019t just about tolerating a few annoying things here and there \u2014 it\u2019s a deep change (I would say a spiritual growth) that has been a long time in the making.\u00a0 I just can\u2019t come home from church with a stomach ache every week anymore.<\/p>\n
My question for the JC community is this:\u00a0 particularly those of you who are parents, have you ever experienced periods where the teen-aged \/ young adult kids and the parents (or one parent) attended different churches on Sunday mornings?\u00a0 How about churches in very different denominations?\u00a0 Has anyone found a way to make this sort of thing work?\u00a0 Is it a more common thing today than I think it might be?\u00a0 Can it actually be a healthy thing to let teen-aged \/ young adult children start to make their own choices about where to attend church (my oldest, after all, is going on 18 years old\u2026)?\u00a0 Or, does the husband in particular have an obligation to \u201ckeep the family together\u201d in the same local congregation every Sunday morning?\u00a0 And if so, does that imply taking the kids along kicking and screaming to a setting the husband thinks best, or does it mean enduring what the kids prefer at least until they\u2019re out of the house?\u00a0 Or something else??<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This post is from a friend of this blog, and he wants to have an open discussion about a topic of interest to many \u2014 here goes: I\u2019m a middle-aged dad, married to my wife of many years, with two teen-aged kids, one a Freshman and the other a Senior in High School.\u00a0 We\u2019re currently […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n