Flying buttresses

"If you are not firm in your faith, you will not be firm at all" (Isaiah 7:9).

We see it all the time: kids of the church go off to college, and the next thing you hear, they have abandoned the faith. It seems that as long as their faith is buttressed by the externals of parental oversight, a physical church building, and regular phone calls from the youth group leader announcing the next outing, they are good. (Have you ever seen the literal buttresses of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris? They keep the back end of it from falling down under the stress fractures in the thin walls.)

Buttresses are good when they are good buttresses. We are to "bear one another's burdens" (Galatians 6:2). We are to "exhort one another every day" so that no one will be "hardened by the deceitfulness of sin" (Hebrews 3:13). Those are good buttresses that will help long after the teenager in the church moves out from under them. Not so good buttresses are mere props. These are the outer accoutrements of church life that, once removed, reveal that the person who was being supported by them was not learning to be established on his own.

My granddaughter has had training wheels on her bike way too long. I fear she is relying on them and is under the illusion that she knows how to ride, an illusion that she will be disabused of when the little wheel buttresses come off. What we need to do, of course, is remove them and to let her try (with coaching) to do learn this vehicle's physics.

A better example of the buttresses we need than those propping up Notre Dame's nave and choir might be the stakes you see on either side of young trees that keep them from falling over till they grow long roots. The roots are the thing. You don't see a giant oak flanked with diagonal nylon stocking supports. You can never remove the French cathedral's buttresses because the church didn't grow roots. Trees and kids need to grow roots.

All of which is to say that a deep faith must be taught-and caught!-or we will keep hearing the same sad reports of lapsed church kids. It must be a workaday faith that does not depend on circumstances but has the depth of oak tree roots. Or, as Isaiah put it, if we are not firm in our faith, we will not be firm at all.