Falling prayer

The Barna Group has released a new survey of "faith practices" among American Christian teenagers, which is to say it covers the things that many people think are important for young Christians to do. It's comforting to find prayer on the list, though disquieting to learn it's in a 15-year slump, according to Barna. Twenty-nine percent of self-identified Christian teenagers are under the impression, it seems, that one can have a relationship with Christ that does not include praying to Him. Other practices are down as well: Sunday school attendance, tithing, evangelizing, even the all-important small-group membership. At least church attendance is holding steady, though Barna's president David Kinnaman suggests that one impetus for many teens to attend church is their desire to maintain friendships.

I'll be honest; that's the primary reason I've gone to church for most of the last decade, because many of my friends are there. This may be because I have the mentality of a teenager, or because I'm not a very good Christian, or because I'm just not someone who meets God by virtue of a 40-minute lecture. Quite possibly all three are true. The problem when it comes to teenagers, Kinnaman points out, is that new social networking technology allows them to stay connected without needing to be involved in the practices of their churches. "Talking to God," he says, "may be losing out to Facebook."

I can't help but wonder if we aren't driving them away. The human heart cries out for communion with God. Too often it finds poisons and distractions instead. The responsibility of the parent, and the church, is to steer the hearts of these little ones to the Lord. What are we doing wrong that so many of them, after spending years and years with us in our churches, turn away? What are all those hours in the pew for, if not to tune the child's heart to its one true calling?

It's proper, I think, to criticize the modern school for taking a naturally inquisitive child---which is to say nearly every child---and transmogrifying him into a dullard who has no interest in learning. I think the same criticism can be leveled at too many churches. When fewer and fewer of our children pray, we have to step back and ask whether we haven't gotten the whole enterprise wrong.

This is not a brief for inserting more of those wretched, me-focused Christian ditties into our hymnography, or converting the Sunday lecture to a PowerPoint presentation, or for the preacher to wear jeans and have all the kids call him by his first name. This only further trivializes church and Christ, and if it's trivial they're after, our kids can always have more fun with cable TV than anything we can show them on a Sunday morning.

In fact, I'll suggest the opposite: We have destroyed too much of the mystery and power of Christ. There's no way to speak about that in specific detail without offending nearly every Christian I know. I'll simply suggest that we all work to understand what right worship looks like, and right Christian practice. I used to think I knew exactly how prayer should be, and worship, and communion, and now I'm realizing that I didn't know nearly as much as I thought I did.

When our children do not pray, their souls are imperiled. My Reformed friends may disagree, but I suspect they concur at least on the point that prayer is essential to the Christian walk. If our children leave our churches inspired less and less toward prayer, we need to rethink what our churches are doing.