Equipping Christian Youth To Defend Their Faith

Brett Kunkle: [00:00:08] All right, let's do a little survey here. How many of you in here are 18 and under, 18 years and under? Raise your hand if you're in high school or middle school. Okay, good crowd in here. How many of you are parents of someone who's 18 and under? Raise your hand if you're a parent. Oh, wow, that's a lot of you. How many of you are grandparents of someone who's 18 or any great-grandparents of someone under 18? Okay, some great-grandparents here. Who's a youth worker? Are there any youth workers in here? You work in youth ministry. Okay, got some youth workers. How about children's workers? Any children's workers? You volunteer. Okay. Any educators who are educators? A lot of educators. Any aunts and uncles, any aunts and uncles here? All right. How many of you, is there anybody who hasn't raised their hand by now? All right. How many of you are aware that there are these kinds of smaller people walking around the church? Who's aware of that? All right. Okay, good, so we got everyone here. I want to make sure that you know that this morning's message is not just a message for parents.

Brett Kunkle: [00:01:27] We live in 21st-century American culture that is overly individualistic. Where I just think about me and my immediate family, and that's about it. That is not the biblical picture that's painted for us in the New Testament. In fact, when you think about the two primary ways in which the church is described, the analogy that's used for the church, there are two primary ones. One is the body, right? The body is constantly being appealed to as an analogy for how the church is supposed to function, and you need all the parts. And then secondly, the family is the second analogy. Right? And what we see in the New Testament is that it's not just about me and mine, in the New Testament we have a corporate responsibility for raising up the next generation, that includes all of us. In fact, I'm going to argue here that more and more, we need strong churches and families together to equip the next generation to walk into this challenging culture. So this is a message for all of us because all of us have a stake in the next generation and a responsibility for the next generation.

Brett Kunkle: [00:02:55] Now, I grew up in the church. How many of you, like me, grew up in the church? Okay, look, the majority of us. I grew up in the church for the first 18 years of my life. When I was a high school student, I got really involved in my youth ministry and I became a student leader. In fact, I was one of those kids who made youth ministry a priority over my sports, over other activities. I decided in my junior year in high school to go into full-time ministry. Like, I was that Christian kid. And so I go into college my freshman year, I'm at a local community college in Southern California, where I grew up and where I live. In my second semester, I take this class Philosophy 101; I take it with this guy, Doctor David Lane, PhD, smart guy. And of course, it's philosophy 101, right, so we're talking about all the big issues of life. We're talking about God's existence. We're talking about meaning and purpose in life. We're talking about what does it mean to be human? And are we just a body, or do we have a soul? And all of those big issues, we talked about morality. And Professor Lane, the way he liked to conduct his classes, we would either have reading or an assignment or a lecture on a certain issue, but then he reserved a lot of the class time for discussion. And so as I began to give my input in class, it became clear that I was a Christian. And maybe, as far as I could tell, the only Christian who was speaking up. And so Professor Lane then would begin to single me out in class. I remember one time we were talking about morality, and different moral, and ethical systems, and so he talked about the Christian view of morality, right, that you have these universal moral laws that come from God that we are all obligated to live by. And then he brought in a Bible, and he opened to the book of Leviticus. And he started reading through these ceremonial laws in the Old Testament and said, now it's interesting because this seems to be inconsistent. Christians say God's laws are universal, and yet here we have laws that aren't universal because you Christians aren't living by this today. And then he looked at me and he said, now, Brett, you're a Christian, we'll give you the first shot at this. How would you answer this? And he wasn't mean, he wasn't being a jerk, but he was being very direct in his challenge. And he said so, Brett, how would you answer this? And fortunately, I was smart enough to know that I did not know enough to be able to engage with the PhD. And so in class, I'd say, well, I don't have an answer for that. You know, I tried to decline, right? But I could just feel my face all flush and he would not let me off the hook. I can picture him right now; he would then walk closer to my desk and he would put his hands like this. And I remember him going, come on, Brett, come on right there in front of all my peers. Come on, Brett, you're a Christian, how would you? I mean, this is a problem, isn't it? You see, I was not ready for Doctor David Lane. So I chased him down after class to his office to try to debate him in the privacy of his office, and he would just rip me apart. And again, he wasn't a jerk about it, he's very charismatic, and he was very nice, but he would rip me apart intellectually, and that sent me into a serious season of doubt. A serious season of doubting my faith. Who is waiting for our kids? Doctor David Lane is.

Brett Kunkle: [00:06:35] This is a student that we've done work with at our old church. McKenzie, just a couple of years ago, she had gone to a university, and she sent me this text message. And it's a picture of her laptop and what she had to watch, Age of Reason by Richard Dawkins; Richard Dawkins introducing the God Delusion. How many of you know who Richard Dawkins is? Richard Dawkins is maybe, you know, the most famous atheist in the world. And here she says homework, quote-unquote, homework for my communication theory class, just in case I thought it was safe going to a private Methodist university. Right? And she's actually talking about a private Methodist university that's pretty close to here. So Richard Dawkins, who doesn't even teach there, was waiting for her, online. And so you have these direct challenges to the Christian faith, like Doctor David Lane or like Richard Dawkins, the atheist. But also, I think nowadays what you have is a very secular culture. Now, and for those of you who are older, this is one of the key differences between how you grew up and how the next generation is growing up. You had a surrounding culture that was friendly at least, if not very positive, toward a Judeo-Christian view of things, a Judeo-Christian worldview. But now you have a secular culture, and they're saying that there's all these voices now surrounding not just us, but our kids, you know, and they're offering an alternative view of things. So it's not necessarily a direct attack on Christianity. Instead, it's, hey, here's a vision of sexuality. What does it mean, you know, to have a sexual identity, LGBTQ plus, gender identity? And they're giving us a different picture of these things. And then when we come to church, and at church, we're getting the biblical view, these things don't match up. And yet we're in the culture all of this time. And so what happens for a lot of our kids is they grow up now for the first 18 years of their life, and they're hearing voice after voice after voice after voice, giving them a different picture that doesn't fit with this church stuff, with my Christian faith. But given enough time and enough voices, it just slowly chips away and chips away and chips away at their Christian faith until they walk away.

Brett Kunkle: [00:09:20] I mean, so I collected some headlines, this is just a few headlines from the last couple of months. What kind of world are our kids growing up in? Well, here's headline number one, Anxiety and depression is spiking among young people as an epidemic of mental illness has exploded since the pandemic. So they're in a world where mental health is not going well for young people. Headline number two, Major universities host special celebrations for multicultural and LGBTQ-identifying graduates. In addition, headline three, Ivy League schools hold racially segregated graduation ceremonies. And we see that those two headlines speak to the critical theory and mood that's in our culture right now. Parents discover that their son's fifth-grade class was reading the book, My Shadow is Pink. Look that book up, it's about gender identity, a boy struggling with his gender identity. And then those students, in turn, have to read the book to their kindergarten buddy class. A high school student is denied a diploma at his graduation ceremony for praising Jesus in his off-script graduation speech. A lifeguard has to sue his county of employment for forcing him to raise a progress pride flag. States attempt to pass legislation that would ban schools from telling parents if their child is identifying as the opposite sex; that's my state, California. Biological males compete in female high school and college athletics. And on and on and on, that's just a sample of just the last couple of months. I just want to give us a flavor for the kind of world our young people are growing up in, and the kind of world and culture that we have to raise them in. All right.

Brett Kunkle: [00:11:11] And this is why I used to say in this talk, I used to say, hey, who's waiting for your kid out there in college? Right, when they leave the safety of our homes and our churches, who's waiting at college? It's no longer just who's waiting at college, it's, hey, when they walk out your door, who's waiting for your kids? But now it's even shifted, it's no longer when they walk out the door, it's in our homes. Who's waiting for our kids behind the screen that is in every single one of our houses, right? The challenge is even greater because it's reaching them more and more at younger ages, because when we start putting iPads and iPhones in front of our kids when they're two, three, or four years old, we have to be aware that we are possibly giving the secular world and culture a doorway right into our kid's souls. Are our kids ready for these kinds of challenges? Just thinking through those headlines, are our kids ready to navigate all those kinds of headlines? Are they ready to handle a direct assault on their faith from the college professor? Here's what we discover, you can look at all kinds of data on this, but I would say it's safe to think that most Christians who grow up in the church are not ready. You can look at the work of Christian Smith in his book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, a very comprehensive study. This was actually done a number of years ago, but there's nothing that I've seen that indicates anything has changed. And actually, I think things may have just gotten worse. But here's what he found, and this was across the board, any religious US teenager he found to be incredibly inarticulate about their faith. In fact, he includes interviews, these in-depth interviews they did with students and these students, Christian students, who could barely explain anything about what they believe. Then he asked students, students who had grown up in a religious home, who had walked away from their faith by the time that the researchers got to them, they asked them, why did you walk away from the faith? Here's the number one reason that students gave by far. It was because of intellectual skepticism and doubt. Students said things like this, it didn't make any sense anymore, or there's some stuff that's too far-fetched for me to believe, I think scientifically, and there's no real proof, or there are too many questions that can't be answered. Because they didn't know anything about their faith. So then when the challenges came, they couldn't answer any of the challenges, and then what's the result? When you take uninformed, inarticulate Christian students who don't know what they believe or why they believe it and you put them in an aggressive, secular, hostile culture, how do you think that turns out for us? Kids walk away in droves, and you have different studies that say, look, it's anywhere between 50 and probably 75% of young people who grow up in the church will eventually walk away.

Brett Kunkle: [00:14:25] Now, there were some studies that showed that they may eventually come back, but now studies show that less and less of them come back. Right. So let's just take the youth group. Imagine you go to youth group here at 121, and you go and you see this, however many students you have in your youth ministry, and if you were to sit there and to really just picture, okay, in a few years, if this is the average Christian youth group in the US, then in a few years, at least half of these kids are gone. We're going to lose half of them. Would we be satisfied with that? Would we say, oh yeah, okay, well, let's keep doing things as normal? Or should we be thinking, gosh, we better reverse course? Because what we see is the increasing secularism of the culture, if you look at Gen Z studies, I mean, it's more than double the amount of Gen Zers, the younger generation who identify as atheists, agnostics, and who don't think the church is important. You can look at George Barna's work on this, on Gen Z. I mean, very, very, very influenced by the secular culture. Okay? Now, you might be thinking, oh, gosh, boy, I'm glad they brought this guy in to cheer us up.

Brett Kunkle: [00:16:03] Look what I want to do with this first part of this morning's talk is that I'm not here to cheer you up, I'm here to sober you up because I think the church in the US has got to sober up on this, we have got to wake up. I mean, we could just go around for the rest of the morning, and we could share, maybe all of us know students who have grown up in the church who have walked away. For some of us, it's our kids. I mean, this is the kind of the end of 16 days of on the road speaking at different events for Aaron and I. And we've been at a number of events, and at every event now, every event that we've been at over the last couple of weeks, we've had parents who said, yeah, my kids in college, they've walked away, or my kids at adult, they're married, they have their own children, and they've walked away, right, and so we have got to take this seriously of course.

Brett Kunkle: [00:17:00] So that's the bad news, right? The good news is that we don't lose hope. Given the truth of what we believe, we never lose hope, we don't despair. So if you're feeling kind of despairing, hey, that's not the proper response. For those of us who follow Jesus, we know that none of these cultural challenges will ever put Jesus back in the grave. Okay? So we are people who always hope, but we have work to do. Thankfully, Scripture gives us guidance. In Deuteronomy chapter 6, verses 5 through 9, we have this very important passage of Scripture where God lays out the greatest commandment for us, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength." Right, the greatest commandment. "These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts." And then what's the very next step? "Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates." Notice the all-encompassing, comprehensive, holistic approach to raising up the next generation to do what? To love God. What is the greatest commandment? It's to love God.

Brett Kunkle: [00:18:39] In fact, in Matthew 22, Jesus gives us the first and the second greatest commandments, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ c 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself." Those are the two great commandments from God Himself to us. And so actually, the two great commandments should frame our lives and should frame how we're raising the next generation. What is our goal with the next generation? What's our primary goal? Is it to raise them so that they do well academically and can graduate from high school with good grades and go off to a good college so that they can go get a job, and then get a good job that pays them enough so they can accumulate wealth and homes and things like that, and have all the comforts of life, is that our goal? Because frankly, that may be how most of us are living. Now, are those bad things? Of course not, those are good things. And yet, at the same time, that's not the goal of life that we should be communicating to our children and kids. The goal of life, no matter what you do, is to love God and love neighbor. And if our education doesn't get us to that, then it's failed us. And so that is the view that we should have, Love God. And then what does Deuteronomy say? You impress that on them everywhere you go. That's not just a Sunday morning thing or a Wednesday night youth group thing, that's when you sit down and lie down and stand up, and when you're walking. It's all of life that we are to be passing on a love of God.

Brett Kunkle: [00:20:23] But then we have to define what we mean by love for God. Because in an American context, in a Western culture kind of context, what we've done is we've taken love, and we've largely defined love in terms of emotional feelings. Love is really emotional response, so if you love God, it feels a certain way. It means that you're, you know, you close your eyes and raise your hands in worship and you're passionate. And of course, again, those things are good, but that's not all there is to love. In fact, Jesus says, what love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. The biblical picture of the heart, we think about the heart, and we think emotions, but that's not the biblical picture. You look at the study of the Hebrew word for heart and the Greek word for heart and the picture of the heart in the Old and New Testament is not just the emotions, that's part of it, but it's the holistic picture of the heart being the center of life, the executive center of life. So it includes your emotions, but it also includes your will or your volition, and it also includes your mind. Our love for God should include our intellect. In fact, if we don't include it, I think we are going to short-circuit our discipleship because an important part of loving God is loving him with your mind. In fact, if we don't understand the nature of the challenge and the culture, then guess what? We will not be able to equip not just our young people, but even ourselves with the right kind of tools to engage that culture.

Brett Kunkle: [00:22:06] So when we start looking through the New Testament, we find that the nature of this engagement is, I think, pretty clearly outlined. Think about a passage like Second Corinthians, chapter 10, verses 3 through 5, Paul tells us that we are in a war, "For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does." Now let me just pause, sometimes Christians get a little uncomfortable with the warfare kind of language and motif. But number one, it's biblical. It's biblical, we are in a war. And I think number two, it helps us to realize that we are in a serious struggle right now. And the problem is, we live in 21st-century America, where there's so much affluence and so much life is aimed at pleasure that it's easy to fall asleep. We're in a war and there are casualties, and our young people, I mean, the casualties amongst our young people in terms of their faith, is high. It speaks to how seriously we need to take this.

Brett Kunkle: [00:23:11] So we're in a war. Then the next verse, "The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world." It's not, you know, bombs and tanks and guns, "On the contrary, our weapons have divine power to demolish strongholds." Okay, what is Paul talking about? What strongholds is he talking about? He defines it in the very next sentence, "We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." You see, this is a primary passage about spiritual warfare in the New Testament. And spiritual warfare doesn't mean, oh, you got demons hiding around every corner. Certainly, the demonic realm is real, but one of the major aspects of spiritual warfare in any culture is the battle over ideas. Think about all those headlines I just read. Right? What do those headlines have to do with ideas that people have come to take as true, and then live that out? So the nature of our engagement primarily with the world is one where we have got to engage on an idea level. This is why love for God includes the intellect. And if we leave that out, then we will not be equipped. And here's what we found over the last about 100 years of American evangelical Christianity, it has become so anti-intellectual. It's so anti-intellectual that when I give a message like this, people like, look at me strangely. Like, wow, that sounds really intellectual. Well, maybe it's because we've been conditioned by an American Christianity that's so anti-intellectual.

Brett Kunkle: [00:25:04] And here's one of the results, think about the major institutions of our culture. Okay, so let's take the universities or public education. Do you see a whole lot of very influential Christians in that realm, who are the decision-makers who are having a big impact on public education? Or take the media, where's the Christian influence there? Or take politics, or take law, or take economics, or take big tech, or big business, are we seeing a lot of just impact from Christian thinkers and leaders? No. Largely a lot of our institutions have been captured by a secular view because we have retreated.

Brett Kunkle: [00:26:00] Now you think about something like what Paul says in Romans 12:2. Romans 12:2 is an important passage on spiritual transformation, "Do not conform to the pattern of this world", but be what? Be transformed by developing close emotional feelings for Jesus. Oh, wait, no, he doesn't say that. What does Paul elevate in this important chapter in Romans? He says, "Be transformed by the renewing of your mind." What does Paul elevate in our spiritual transformation, the renewing of our minds? He could have chosen anything, he could have said, well, by, you know, really spending a lot of time in passionate worship. And now certainly that's important, but he elevates the mind in our spiritual transformation. And sometimes I look around the church or my own life and I wonder, why do we not see more transformation? I mean our people who claim to be indwelt by the Spirit of the living God. Why don't we see more transformation? I wonder if we've short-circuited our transformation because we've left this part out. We haven't renewed the mind, so we aren't going to see the corresponding transformation. So we have got to understand the nature of our engagement, and the nature of the problem, and the mind plays a central role.

Brett Kunkle: [00:27:29] Okay, now, there's always an objection at this point. People are thinking, well, Brett, okay, yeah, that does sound very intellectual, and it really isn't our relationship with God? It's not about how much you know. It's not about all the knowledge and facts you can spit out. A relationship with God has to do with, you know, your experience of him. It's not knowing about God, it's knowing God, that's the response. And let me say, if that's your view, let me suggest that that is a false, that's what we call a false dichotomy, that's a false split, and that's not a split that the New Testament knows anything about. The Bible doesn't say, hey, here's the mind, and here are the facts, and here's knowledge, and here's truth, but over here's this is experience. We pull those things apart, but that's not the picture in Scripture. The Scriptures put those things together. In fact, if you look at what Paul says in First Corinthians 15, he says, if the resurrection is not true, he says, your faith is what? Your faith is futile, your faith is worthless. If these facts, if there's not knowledge and facts and truth, then gosh, faith is meaningless.

Brett Kunkle: [00:28:57] And so look, here, let me give you an illustration. If you said to me, hey, Brett, tell me about your wife. And I said, oh, let me tell you about my wife Erin. Oh, she's five foot six, and she's got, you know, brown hair, she's got two eyeballs, yeah, that's my wife. Yeah, you would laugh, and you would say, no, no, no, Brett, tell me, no, really, tell me about your wife. And if I said to you, that's about all I got for you, that's all I can tell you, that's what I know about her. Would you not draw conclusions about the nature of our relationship and the nature of our experience of each other? Absolutely, because knowledge cannot be separated from our experience. If that's all I knew about my wife, you know, we wouldn't have a very deep relationship with one another. In the same way, if we don't know much about God, we can't have that deep of a relationship with him. And so the biblical picture helps us to elevate the mind and knowledge, and I think this is absolutely key in equipping the next generation.

Brett Kunkle: [00:30:04] Okay. So here's what I want to do for my remaining time, which is not much. Alright, so I want to lay out just a very practical three-step process in this that will give us at least something practical to start building on. I wrote about this in a book that a friend of mine edited called A New Kind of Apologist, and I wrote a chapter in there on the discipleship of the Next Generation. In fact, look, I can only cover so much in 40 minutes on a Sunday morning. So I'm going to give you some resources, for the rest of this time I'm going to help give you some resources that will help build on this, okay? And I'll give you a chance to actually get that chapter for free, so you can read more about what I'm talking about.

Brett Kunkle: [00:30:45] But here are the three steps, and to really kind of divided into kind of age groups. You've got kind of birth through fourth grade, and that's a general category. For some kids, it might be earlier, and for some, it's later. But the first step for all of our kids is to teach the what. Teach the what. And the second step, and this is really when they get into middle school, their minds begin to shift and grow and they can start to think abstractly, and so what you add is the second step, teach the why. You don't stop teaching the what, you just add now the why. And then by the time they get into high school, we need to add a third step, and that's teach the how to. This is not only relevant for our kids, it's also actually relevant for us because this structure is something that many of us adults may have missed out on. And what I found is that a lot of maybe adults have been taught the what. But you know what? A lot of churches never put in that second step of teaching the why. And so a lot of us as adults, even our faith is stunted because we haven't gotten the full picture; we haven't been equipped the way we need to be equipped.

Brett Kunkle: [00:32:00] All right, so teach the what, teach the why, and teach the how to. Let me give you a couple of examples of this to kind of explain what I mean, and I'll give you some steps. All right, number one, when we say teach the what, what are we talking about? The what is theology. That is the primary what that we want to teach our kids. Think about it. In fact, think about what your reaction is to the word theology. Do you have positive, a positive sense of theology? Does that kind of sound distant, or maybe too intellectual? But what is theology? What's the definition of theology? It's the study of God, right. It's just the study of God. It's the study of God. So tell me this, is there a more important area of study for our kids or for us than the study of God? Is there a more important area of study? Now we know what's the correct church answer. Yes. Well, yeah, yeah, right? Well, how many of us put as much study into theology as we do in any other area? How many of us, as parents are more concerned about our kid's knowledge of God, or just as concerned about our kid's knowledge of God as we are about their knowledge of biology and the test, they are going to take on Friday, and the grades are going to get for that, right?

Brett Kunkle: [00:33:24] Here, test your kids and maybe test yourself. What I do when I speak to high school and middle schoolers, I'll say, hey, get out a piece of paper, get out a pen or a pencil, and here's what I want you to do. From memory, I want you to write out the attributes of God. What are the attributes of God that you can share from memory? And so they'll write them down. Usually, the typical kid growing up in the church can get about 6 to 8 attributes down on that paper that are accurate. And then I'll put up this list, this is a list that comes from a book called Systematic Theology, which is just a standard Christian theology textbook written by a guy named Wayne Grudem, who's a Christian theologian, and he lists 25 different attributes. Right? And most of our students don't even know the names of some of these attributes. And then if you ask them to define, they won't even know what it means. Some of us look at that and go, hmm, I'm not quite sure what that means. And just like if I say, hey, my wife is, you know, you know, she's five six and has brown hair and has two eyeballs. A lot of Christian kids, that's all the knowledge they have about who God is. And so this will just help us to see where they are at in their knowledge of God and who he is. Theology is so central.

Brett Kunkle: [00:34:55] In fact, the great, Charles Spurgeon, the pastor from outside of this century. Right? This is how he describes theology. He says, "He who often thinks of God, will have a larger mind than the man who simply plods around this narrow globe...The most excellent study for expanding the soul, is the science of Christ, and him crucified, and the knowledge of the Godhead in the glorious Trinity. Nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man, as a devout, earnest, continued investigation of the great subject of the Deity." Oh, do we talk about theology that way in our families and in our churches? There is no area of study that's more important than theology. In fact, when you look at kind of Christian church history, this view that theology was primary actually gave rise to the university, the university is a Christian idea, it's the idea that the knowledge of God will unite and bring unity and diversity. University, it will bring unity and diversity. because this is God's world, and every area of study is studying God's world. And so the knowledge of God will bring unity to all those areas.

Brett Kunkle: [00:34:55] Okay. So practically, how do we teach theology from the earliest of ages? We've got to read, read, read, read, a very practical step. Now why do we need to read? Because how has God primarily revealed himself to us? In a book, in the Bible, in the Holy Scriptures. This is why when you look at the history of Christianity, wherever Christianity is gone, it has raised the literacy rates of those societies. Why? Because we are people of the book, and so we've got to be readers. But now go home and ask your middle schooler or high schooler what their view of reading is. Ask them, hey, do you guys do you love reading? And they'll tell you, oh, I hate reading. And I don't blame them, I blame us. What is it about our educational system that by the time a typical kid graduates from high school, they hate reading? That's not good for us, that's not good news for the church. We have got to develop readers who love to read because God has primarily revealed himself in the written word. And so we've got to read to our kids and of course, read the scriptures to them. But there are all kinds of good books that we should be reading to them.

Brett Kunkle: [00:37:35] Then we've got to sing, we can sing our theology, and we can teach the 'what' by singing. That's why not only are our pastors’ primary theologians in the church, but our worship leaders need to be primary theologians because as they lead us in worship, it informs how we view God, they are helping us to sing our theology. And so this is why hymns are so amazing, because there's always this rich theology in our hymns.

Brett Kunkle: [00:38:02] We should memorize, we should be memorizing scripture. We should be memorizing the creeds, the Apostles Creed, and the Nicene Creed. We should be having our kids memorize important passages of Scripture, like the Ten Commandments or the Lord's Prayer, or learning the attributes of God, the books of the Bible, all of this stuff. And at those early stages, read, sing, and memorize our key ways to just pour truth into them. And of course, that doesn't stop, we keep doing it even as adults, and continue to go deeper and deeper and deeper into the what?

Brett Kunkle: [00:38:37] Now, if you stop there, it's not going to be enough. We've got to add the why. We've got to teach the why. How do we do this? Let me give you a couple of real practical steps on this. Number one, you should be asking your kids questions, especially when they start getting into the upper elementary and middle school years. You want to ask them questions and you want to ask them in particular the why questions. You want to ask them the what questions, but you also want to ask them the why questions. So, for instance, when my daughter Ella, who's now 17, she's about ten years old, I remember we were driving in the car alone, her and I, and we were leaving church. And I think my wife was taking the other kids somewhere else, so it was just one-on-one, me and Ella. And so I'm asking Ella, hey, what did you learn in church? What did you learn in Sunday school? And so she's telling me and she's saying, oh yeah, we learned this about God, and we learn this about God. And I was like, oh, this is a good opportunity, I want to provoke her, and so I said, okay, wait a second. All right, you learn these things about God. I said, Ella, I go, why do you even believe in God? Right. And so she kind of rolled her eyes. Oh, Dad, come on, you taught me, you know, that's why I believe in God. And so I said to her, I said, well, I go, Ella, do you think dad could be wrong about things? And she said, no, you're never wrong, Dad. No, actually, she didn't say that. I wish she would have said that. But no, she said, yeah, oh yeah, you could be wrong. I go, okay, well that's a liability then, if that's the only reason you believe in God. If the only reason you believe in God is because Dad told you I could be wrong about this thing, you better have some other reasons. And see, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to provoke her. I want her to ask the 'why'. Because I don't want her to graduate from my home and my church and to leave, and when someone says, why do you believe in God? Her primary reason is, well, because I grew up in a Christian home, or my mom and dad told me. Guess what, that will not stand up to Doctor David Lane and his PhD. Right?

Brett Kunkle: [00:40:36] And then here's the second thing that you got to do. You have to let them ask all of their questions. Do not shut down our young people's questions. Do not shut down students when they express their doubts, no matter how nervous it makes you. Because when you shut down their questions, they don't stop asking questions, they just stop asking you questions, and they will go look for answers from someone else. They'll jump on YouTube, they'll Google it, and they'll find plenty of people online who will want to answer their questions with false ideas. And so you let them ask their questions, and when they ask you a question you can't answer, you say three things, I don't know, I don't know, that's a really good question. You know what? Let's do some work, let's study, let's go talk to a pastor, let's get on it, and let's find the resources. Because First Peter 3:15 tells us that we are to "Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason, for the hope that is in you." When Peter uses the word defense, he's using the Greek word there apologia, and this is where we get the word apologetics. And we are to always make an apologetic, a defense, for the faith. We need to be able to give our young people reasons why we put our hope in the Christian faith. And so apologetics is a necessary part of our discipleship. Okay?

Brett Kunkle: [00:42:08] Let me give you a couple of resources on this. Here's Maven, one of the things that we want to do is help equip young people with reasons for their faith, so here's one good resource very practical. In a month we have our Maven conference, we've been doing it in Southern California for five years, and we last year started expanding into other parts of the country. We did our first year in Texas up in Frisco last year on September 7th. Our Maven conference is happening and it's for students and adults to come and find out why we believe what we believe. This year's theme is on the Bible, right? What's our claim about the Bible? We believe the Bible is the Word of God. Well, guess what an intelligent young person is ultimately going to ask you, okay, not just what you believe, they're going to ask you why you believe that. Why do you think this book is the Word of God? Because guess what, my Mormon friend says that the Book of Mormon is the Word of God, and my Muslim friend says that the Quran is the Word of God. So why do we think the Bible is the Word of God? Do you have any good reason for that? I'd encourage you, if not, to come bring your students and come to the Maven conference on September 7th, it's right here in Frisco. In fact, to help encourage you, we put a 20% discount for 121. Just use that code 121 get 20% off and come and spend a day finding out the reasons why we think the Bible is the inerrant, inspired Word of God, and gain confidence for your young people.

Brett Kunkle: [00:43:44] Here's the second thing you can do. Go to YouTube, take your young person to YouTube, that's an easy task, right? And then do a search for four words, reasonable faith animated videos. And what you'll find is that reasonable faith is this really great apologetics ministry, and they have taken and put in some of the evidence, the most powerful evidence for Christianity into these videos, these animated videos that are anywhere from 4 to 6 minutes. And they are not cheesy Christian videos, right, you know what I mean? These are really well done, and they intelligently lay out the powerful evidence for why we think Christianity is true, and so you've got videos on the evidence for God's existence. There are videos on the historical evidence for the bodily resurrection of Jesus. There are videos on dealing with the problem of, you know, if God is good and loving, why is there so much pain and evil in the world, and on and on and on. And have them watch, there are about 20 videos in that series. Watch those videos, and they will discover, it's just a great bite-size way to give them some of the evidence and answer, why do we believe this stuff? Okay?

Brett Kunkle: [00:44:57] All right, step number three, I'll cover this quickly. Teach the how-to. At some point when our young people are around high school age, we have got to get this stuff out of the classroom, we've got to get it out from behind the four walls of the church and into real life. They have got to see the Christian truth played out in real life. And so one of the ways, I've seen the power of this when we can do this step, man, I've seen the power in young people's lives. So our organization, Maven, we have these trips for young people called Immersive Experiences. And so we will partner with a Christian school or a youth group to do a really a worldview mission trip, and we have three of them. One, we have a biblical trip, and this is where we take students, we do training with them, and then we take them to Salt Lake City, Utah, and we put them in situations where they have to talk to Mormons. And here's what they find, Mormons know more about theology than they do. And look, if you want to motivate a kid, some of you are thinking, how am I ever going to motivate my kid to learn theology? Like, I can't give them a systematic theology book and say, read this. I'll tell you a way to motivate them, put them in front of a Mormon and let them get beat up by a Mormon theologically, and then those students come back to you, and they say, help me. He said this, he pointed to this scripture, and it seemed to support Mormon theology, that works are a necessary part of salvation. How do I deal with that? And through that, we teach kids good theology. And then we do an apologetic trip where we take them to, you know, a college town, and we bring out atheists to challenge them on different things about what they believe, and then we go on to the college campus and we talk to skeptical, non-Christian students. And then we have a worldview trip. And here's what we found, these trips get the students out of the classroom, and now they're in real life dealing with this stuff and seeing how Christian truth plays out, and seeing how Christianity can stand up to its toughest critics, and we have good reason to think that what we believe is actually true. And because it's true, the Gospel must be proclaimed because the world is lost. And these, I'm telling you, it's amazing to watch students come to life.

Brett Kunkle: [00:47:28] In fact, we just did our open enrollment trip where families could send their students from all around the country, and we did a trip to Utah two weeks ago. So we had students from all different states come for this trip. And my daughter was on that trip, and so they all became good friends, this group of strangers, you know, and they had a week in Utah talking to Mormons, and they're now on this text thread. And what's happened in the weeks after this trip is that students have been texting each other saying, oh, I started sharing Christ with my Mormon friend at school. Oh, I saw missionaries, I invited them over and they came over to my house and they're sharing the Gospel back at home, and it's incredible to see. There are all kinds of ways you can do this, but the idea is to get it out of the classroom and get it into real life.

Brett Kunkle: [00:48:20] Okay, let me give you a resource and I'll wrap this up. Look, we've had 40 minutes to kind of cover this, I want to encourage you, that Maven exists to help equip families and churches. We want to come alongside you and help you, and this is our passion and it's a huge need. So I would encourage you to go to our website and scroll to the bottom, there's a box where you can put your name and email address in. And this is what I'll do, I've got a bunch of notes here that I haven't even been able to cover, and so I will put together, if you sign up for our email newsletter today, where we just will give you resources for free all the time, I will put together an email with my notes and we'll send that to you so you can have all my notes, and I'll also figure I'll give you a link to the chapter in the book that lays out this in much more detail, okay, to help spur you on on this. If you're a parent or a grandparent, check out our podcast where we try to help you think carefully through all these challenges and equip the next generation.

Brett Kunkle: [00:49:23] And I was going to say one other resource is a book I co-wrote with my good friend John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to Culture and A Student's Guide to Culture. We were going to have those in the lobby for you to purchase, however, that suitcase is landing in Dallas in about an hour, no, a couple hours, it's stuck in Houston right now, so unfortunately…But you can find it on Amazon. Here's the point, there are so many resources to equip us. So I hope you see this morning as a starting point, this is the beginning, and I hope this sparks us. Because when we do this well, it's exciting to watch.

Brett Kunkle: [00:50:01] In fact, here's a text message I got from a youth pastor. He took his students on one of our trips, he got his kids out of the classroom and into real life. He took them on one of the apologetics trips and they learned how to defend their faith, they learned apologetics. That night he flew home, his youth group was from New York, and they flew back to New York. He sent me this text, it says, thanks again for a great trip, Brett. I thought you might like to know that, Brandon, now, Brandon was a sophomore in his youth group. He said, I thought, you might like to know that Brandon had an hour-and-a-half-long conversation on the plane with a philosophy professor who's an atheist. Uh oh. Brandon shared with him the cosmological argument, and by the end, the professor said that Brandon had given him something to think about. Okay, do you think that lit Brandon up, that he could stand toe to toe intellectually with an atheist college professor because he had been taught the evidence, and he had been taught why he believes what he believes? Absolutely. And when we get our young people off of the sidelines and into the game, and they actually get to live out the Christian faith, they grow exponentially in their passion. If you want to help wake up apathetic church kids, get them out to start living this out. And because it's true, it will change the world, and it has for 2000 years, and it can change our communities.

Brett Kunkle: [00:51:31] Let's ask God to help us in that task. Let's pray. Lord, thank you, thank you for this church, thank you for a church that cares about these things, that cares about loving you with all that we are, that cares about the next generation, that cares about truth. And Father, I pray that your Holy Spirit would spark us this morning. I pray that your Spirit would let us not leave here feeling comfortable about things. Lord, we pray that you would give us a renewed passion for your truth. We pray that your Spirit would transform us with your truth and help us, Lord, to pass that truth on to the next generation. Lord, help us with that task. We need your Spirit's help. And we pray these things in the true name of Jesus. Amen.



Recorded in Grapevine, Texas.