Firm in the faith

I am tutoring the wife in a family of immigrants who recently arrived from Asia. Today she had me proofread one of her ninth-grade son's social studies assignments, in which I noticed he said some very appreciative things about a new religion he's been introduced to at the local high school: Taoism. I'm sure that the mom's language skills are good enough to get the gist of her son's paper, but I can see that she is not fazed. She just wants red marks on the spelling and syntax.

I wouldn't normally be alarmed myself except that I'm having déjà vu: Christian family moves to America, the kiddos go off to school, and three things happen: (1) The youngsters leave their parents in the dust in language acquisition; (2) a whopping generation/culture gap develops; (3) the kids remain Christian in name but all their values are worldly oriented.

Last year I had a summer job evaluating daily essays of Asian kids in an SAT preparation school. I know that almost all of these kids go to church with their parents at the PCA congregation across the street, but there was nothing of that reflected in the worldviews I sampled on paper. If I remember anything from Francis Schaeffer, it's that Christianity is not lost in the generation that goes golfing on Sunday mornings but in the generation previous---where a form of religion hung on.

But the main conclusion I come away with is that the run-of-the-mill Christianity that many of us have will never do if we're to have any chance of keeping the wolves of materialism, secularism, and false religion from devouring little Johnny or Choon. It will take a faith made of sterner stuff (Isaiah 7:9b).

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.