2010 National Conference on Christian Apologetics
Conference session discusses
challenges to students’ faith
By Paula R. Kincaid, The Layman, October 20, 2010
CHARLOTTE, N.C. – John Stonestreet led a discussion on “Why are students walking away from their faith,” at the 17th annual National Conference on Christian Apologetics.
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Stonestreet is the executive director of Summit Ministries and is a fellow at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview.
He spoke of a survey of American teenagers, which was later complied into the book Soul Searching by Christian Smith and Melina Lundquist Denton. Stonestreet said the survey found that when teenagers were asked “What is Christianity?,” their reply was not an orthodox answer.
“When the teenagers said Christianity, they meant a moralistic, therapeutic deism,” he said.
- “Moralistic – God wants me to be good,
- “Therapeutic – God wants me to happy,
- “Deism – God is there for me when I need him but doesn’t really require anything.
“This is not the Gospel,” Stonestreet said.
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Video and audio from the National Conference on Christian Apologetics, including this presentation, are available. Visit the Conference on Christian Apologetics Web site for pricing and availability.
Stonestreet’s session was part of the “Defending the Faith and Family” conference, sponsored by Southern Evangelical Seminary along with North Carolina Baptists, Breakpoint, Summit Ministries, the American Family Association and World Magazine, held Oct. 15-16 at Northside Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C.
He discussed four challenges to students’ faith.
- They don’t know who to trust. “The age of information becomes the age of ideas; and the age of ideas becomes the age of competing authorities. Who do I trust?,” asked Stonestreet.Answering the question what do teenagers need to survive in the age of information, Stonestreet said, “Give them the truth …but we also need to understand that true information dumped into the sea of information gets lost. They need discernment. They need to know what is trustworthy and who they can believe.”
- They don’t know how to think. “We are a generation of people who don’t know how to think,” he said. Stonestreet said that if you ask a person on the street who their congressman is, and they probably don’t know, but they will know who got voted off American Idol the night before. He made the point that if students do not know how to think, and Christians teach their children discernment, then “we can become leaders. … If you raise the bar, they will get up there.
- They don’t know who they are. “We are made in the image of God,” Stonestreet said. “We look at ourselves. We look at God, so if you get rid of God, you get rid of humanity. “Our culture is so confused that they don’t know what gender they are … We don’t know what the human being is,” he said. “Students must understand what it means to be made in the image of God and redeemed by Christ.”
- They don’t get Christianity. Stonestreet said Christian students need a worldview that is big enough for the world. He defined worldview as “the framework of basic beliefs we have that shapes our view of and for the world.”
He said that “what we believe about God shapes what we believe about everything else. God is a controlling belief, not an add-on belief. … The Bible is as big as the world itself. A Christian worldview is as big as the world itself. … Faith has to give us a road map as well as a defense mechanism.”